How do I blog offline?

This is a bit of a test. I would like to be able to write blog posts when I’m on holidays even if I don’t have an internet connection. Today I think I have figured out how to do it. I already have a bluetooth keyboard for my phone. I’m planning to use my phone as my back-up camera anyway so I’ll have it with me.

I’m writing this offline in Google docs and, in theory, it should sync when I next connect to the internet. At the moment I seem to be having difficulty with fiddly fingers. Because the shift key is comparatively small and the up arrow lives right beside it, I keep hitting the up arrow which causes me to get all sorts of words within words until I notice and go back to fix it.  I imagine I can get used to that with practice.

Version 2 bendy wire to replace elastic and clip

I need some way to make the phone stand up while I’m working. I tried several things, one of those bendy wires covered with plastic but the one I had at hand wasn’t big or heavy enough and the phone overbalanced. I thought about the hard case I have for my sunglasses but, it too, overbalanced. I could make something but weight is a concern on the trip we are planning to take this summer and my camera gear makes my carry-on quite heavy.

At the moment I have a flexible ruler wrapped around the phone, its two ends joined with an elastic band and a sewing clip. It is behaving quite well although the ends of the ruler do obscure the bottom line of typing a bit. I bought a batch of these rulers at some point so I don’t mind sacrificing one or two if I find that cutting a notch into one makes for a better stand. On the other hand, I can just get used to moving my head a bit when I want to read the bottom line of what I’m typing.What I like about this solution is that I don’t have to make anything,  it weighs very little, and I can use the elastic, ruler and the clip for other things. 

Version 1 elastic band and clip

I’m working on my lap on a lap table and my touch on the keyboard is not particularly light. The phone and its holder have slid down so they are now in contact with the top of the keyboard and they are no longer moving. I can live with that.

As I’m looking at this set-up I’m wondering if I can permanently attach the elastic to both ends of the ruler at the same time. Then I realize that if I do that I will lose the ability to flatten the whole thing out so it's probably not worth it.

Since I’m using my phone as a screen for typing, I can’t take a photo of the setup. I think I still have an old iPod around somewhere which could act as a photo model, or I could steal R’s phone for the purpose. 

I think I’ve blathered on long enough to give the system a reasonable test. I’ll go and get a stand-in for my phone and take a couple of photos. If you’re reading this, the test has been a success. I may do another couple of blogs in the near future using this system just to get used to it. 

A few hours later

Cherry phone stand

Well many of you could probably predict that I wouldn’t leave the phone stand alone. I wondered if I could make one quickly from some of the scrap wood I have. After some time with my trusty hand saw and a couple of chisels, I have another phone stand. It is sturdy and I can see the whole screen. It’s only useful for one thing but it does that one thing well. I will probably end up taking this chunk of cherry instead of the flexible ruler. It would be elegant if I could figure out how to make it into a box to also hold the charging cable. I’ll have to think about that. I’m not sure I want to put that much work into it.

No finish yet

This will, however, be a good piece for an experiment with finish. I have a new finish that I want to use on ukuleles. The stand is small so it won’t use much.  We also have a polishing system for the lathe that I haven’t yet tried and I plan to give that a go at the same time. It might end up being one classy looking piece of wood. I’ll keep you posted.

The hearing aid brigade

Yes, I’ve joined the hearing aid brigade. I have the kind of hearing loss that is expected for someone of my age. Imagine that! I figured if I was going to get hearing aids I might as well get all the whistles and bells available so when I came home from the appointment I informed Richard that he had just bought me a ‘Cadillac.’

So far, I’m quite thrilled with the technology. As many of you know, I'm an avid audio book consumer. I now have 600 titles in my library, most of which I’ve listened to. It actually feels odd to read a print book. I still read magazines and the newspaper the conventional way though. The hearing aids are bluetooth capable and we have set them up so that they pair automatically with my phone. I can now wander around the house talking to thin air. I’m a bit more hesitant to do that in public. People tend to avoid someone who is having a conversation with the ether at normal speaking levels. On second thought, I imagine that could come in handy in some situations. I’ll file that away for further reference

The best part about the hearing aids, other than hearing better, is that it is now so easy for me to listen to my audiobooks anywhere. I don’t have to remember to bring earphones. There is a way to pause the book by tapping my ear but I haven’t quite mastered that one yet so when I want to pause I still tend to pull out the phone and use the pause button on that. One step at a time.

This whole technology is a wee bit big-brotherish. When I went in for my first check the audiologist downloaded all the data from the hearing aids. He was able to tell me that I have spent quite a bit of time streaming. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. He also told me that I have averaged wearing the hearing aids 11 hours a day and that I had mostly been in quiet environments. I imagine I could get the same information from the app on my phone. Apparently I can vary the settings to focus the sound more precisely when I’m in a situation such as a noisy restaurant. I have yet to experiment with that.

head phones and hearing aid charger

When I started off he set the hearing aids at 90% of the prescription. He said if people have severe hearing loss and you boost the signal too much the change is overwhelming. I never thought of that. He was surprised that I didn’t comment on how different my speaking voice sounded to me. I didn’t comment because it didn’t sound all that different. What I did notice was that my s’s seemed much more pronounced and sounds like the microwave beep have overtones that I’ve been unaware of. I thought the ticking of the clock in my study would drive me nuts but I’ve grown used to it. The other thing that’s a bit disconcerting is that wind noise now sounds like I’m hearing it through a microphone that needs a dead cat. I think that’s what the furry mic covers are called. Since there are three microphones in each hearing aid, I guess that’s pretty accurate. I don’t think that, other than wearing a toque or ear muffs, I can do much about the wind noise though.

What I didn’t expect was how incredibly itchy my ears were at first. They have calmed down considerably. Wearing a mask, which I still do when out in public, is a bit more of a challenge but I’m getting the hang of that as well. I can also pair the hearing aids with my computer so I have the choice of listening through headphones, which I usually do, or listening through the hearing aids. I’m getting the hang of disconnecting from one device and reconnecting to another one. I have a battery pack that I can charge that will last me a few days if I’m camping and away from the grid. About the only downside I can see is that I now have one more device that requires a battery. When I travel I have a phone, and its charger, a camera, and its charger, a fitbit and its charger, and now hearing aids and their charger. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for not having to work as hard to figure out what's being said around me and, of course, there are the audiobooks.

Doing nothing

It’s 4 pm and I’ve done nothing today. Well, that’s not literally true. So what do I mean by doing nothing? I guess it comes down to not making any progress on the bigger projects, either ones that I’ve already started or the ones that are waiting in the wings. I haven’t been in the shop to work on the ukulele or on some of the things I’ve promised friends I would do. I haven’t figured out a stand for Odie’s small cage so it will be easier to move him when he comes out of his large cage so we can clean it. Every day I feed him and think to myself, I must make a rolling stand because dragging this thing across the floor and keeping my hands beyond lunging distance is driving me crazy. I guess it will drive me crazy again today.

I started the day by doing my 30 minutes of what I call ‘upright and locked’ after I took the osteoporosis meds. I could have walked on the treadmill or gone for a walk outside. I sat in my pj’s and watched a crazy guy from Yorkshire walk on a knife edge in a rain storm and then set up his tent at the top of a mountain in the Lake District. In the intro to the video he said that the helicopter and the mountain rescue folks he saw and captured on his camera were actually evacuating someone who died, presumably from slipping off the ridge this guy was climbing. The video was 50 minutes, not 30. That’s 50 minutes of watching a guy and his dog walk in the rain, set up a tent in a gale, make a meal on a camp stove, and lie in the flapping tent while he tries to talk over the noise of the wind. After I watched that one I watched another of his videos. I have no idea why I spend so much time watching stuff like this when I could be out walking in the sunshine or riding my bike. I really enjoy both of those activities once I actually pry myself out of my chair.

Then it was time for a cup of tea. Last night as I was rummaging through the cups on my tea shelf, I came across a mason jar without a lid. It looked like it would hold quite a bit. I like my tea in big mugs that are also microwave and dishwasher safe. I made a cup of tea and drank it out of the mason jar. (No comment from you Wallberg!) I put milk in it so it wasn’t too hot on my hand but then I remembered that I once had a fleece sleeve for a tea tumbler and went in search of that. I didn’t find it and it probably would have been too small anyway, but I have quite a collection of yarn leftover from various crochet projects so I decided to make a sleeve for the mason jar to keep the tea a bit hotter and the hand cooler. When I want to wash the jar, just slip off the sleeve, and, if I spill tea on it I can throw it in the wash.

I started it once, thinking I would make it the length I needed to go around the jar. By the time I had one row beyond the foundation chain done I could see that it was not big enough so I pulled it out and decided to make it the width I wanted for my hand instead. That worked much better and I finished it in probably half an hour. Of course, I had to make a cup of tea to try it out and lunch was on the agenda.

Wasn’t I going to have a shower sometime today? Before that I picked up my ukulele and, instead of playing my usual stuff, I started just messing around until I had a melody of sorts. Richard heard me and asked if I had made that up. When I said I had, he told me to record it and he would write it out for me. I did and he did. Cool! That’s the first time that I remember playing something that didn’t exist before.

All right. Shower. Although the upstairs shower has been working for quite a while now we tend to use the downstairs one out of habit. I wanted to test out the bath mat that I finished crocheting a couple of days ago so I used the upstairs shower. I ended up washing my hair in soap because the little tube of shampoo that I put in that shower was all but empty. The bath mat was most satisfactory and it’s hard to make it skid even though I haven’t yet tacked on bits of anti-slip material. Add that to the project list. Next time I use the upstairs shower I want to have shampoo so I found a bottle with very little in it and got some of the shampoo from downstairs put into the bottle and brought it upstairs. Note to self: do not buy a litre of shampoo at Costco ever again! I have short hair and Richard, well, let’s just say that neither of us needs much shampoo to take care of our flowing locks. I think that bottle has been hanging around since at least 2013.

And now, it’s time to feed Odie. There are many days when I berate myself for not accomplishing anything but today I decided to notice what I was doing by not accomplishing anything. Turns out it was a day of following my whims. That’s not a bad thing but it’s all too easy to have a whole run of those days and I do want to get the big projects done.

I have great plans before I go to bed to get up earlier in the morning and get a whole bunch of things accomplished. When I wake up it’s too easy to turn over and go back to sleep and then putter away over tea and watch the birds and the squirrels outside the front window.

This phase of life is so much different than I thought it would be when I was working. I remember thinking that retirement would be so cool because we could take extra time to go to the start of long cycling trips and take our time coming home. I never dreamed that I wouldn’t be doing long cycling trips or running half marathons. I probably still could do both if I wanted to put the work into getting into good enough shape. There’s the trick: I can’t seem to be bothered and that, in itself, is bothersome. I know there will be a time when I will be limited by my physical abilities and not my lack of motivation and I don’t want to look back and kick myself that I should have done things when I could have.

I’m not sure where the balance is in all of this. I enjoy myself when I make the effort to tackle the big projects and I haven’t found the right carrot to get me out of whimsy mode and into get-busy-and-do-it mode. Sometimes I have spurts of motivation and get a whole bunch of stuff done in a day or even a week. I would like to find a way to summon that up at will. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know but now it’s time to feed the bird, and that is not negotiable.

The silly tree

The silly tree

I’ve always had stuffed animals. When I was a kid I had a lot of them but I gave away all except my favourite ones. Now I seem to have acquired quite the collection again. Some of them I bought; some came from friends, and others I inherited. Each one has a story but that’s for another day. Today I decided to use them to turn an old lamp into a silly tree. When I look over at them I can imagine each of them saying something.  No, I haven't been drinking and, yes, I know my head is a very strange place to be.

Teddy: Look Ma I'm a firefighter!
Cat: I know I can get to those birds

Teddy: Look Ma, no hands!
Cat: I'm a cat. Of course I'm going to push him off.

Panda: Why is there a hedgehog on my head and a cat paw in my face?
Hedgehog: I don't think I like it here. It's too far off the ground

Ostrich: Why me?
Cat: What white bear? I didn't push him off.
Brown Bear: Just a little bit higher...

Stork: Do you come here often?
Duck: No. Do you know who owns those ugly orange feet? 

Yellow-headed parrot: Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Can I help?
Blue-headed parrot: How come I have to sit behind him?

Cardinal: Don't look now but I think there's a bear below us.
Googly-eyed bird: Maybe if I try really hard I can fly down to the desk.

Success!

practice saw

I’m way behind in my goal of two posts a month. I have had a few ideas but mostly they were heading towards rants so I decided to keep them to myself. Today I’m feeling quite smug. That is in direct contrast to some of the time I’ve spent on the ukulele build lately. There are so many things to watch for all at the same time and in three dimensions. Suffice it to say, that it has brought the concept accuracy to a whole new level and I’m not there yet. So today I decided to try something entirely new in a situation where making a mess of it on the first try wouldn’t matter.

I’ve shied away from sharpening my own handsaws because I thought it was going to be too easy to screw up a perfectly good saw. I was prompted to give it a go the other day when I seemed to be struggling through a cut with my favourite dovetail saw. I picked up a different dovetail saw and made the cut smoothly and quickly. Wait, aren't you supposed to be able to go several years before you have to sharpen a good handsaw? Then I thought back and realized that several years was probably closer to 16 years. I’ve been using the saw extensively since I got it and not only in good quality hardwood. I’ve used it in softwood which sometimes has resin in it and even (shhhh) in plywood. That is anathema to some of my woodworking friends.

So the light went on: I have a dull saw. A couple of years ago I picked up a handsaw for nothing. It was sitting out near the sidewalk with a ‘free’ sign on it so I took it. I had it earmarked to practice on thinking that it would probably take quite a beating in the process of my learning to sharpen. It had a couple of kinks in it and, although I’ve tried to straighten it out, it will never be a first class saw again, so I wasn’t worried about ruining it. I was just dreading the time I thought it would take me to get it right.

Three of my favourite YouTube woodworkers have assured me that sharpening a handsaw isn’t hard. I’ve heard that one before about cutting dovetails and that skill eluded me for years. The first thing I needed in order to try sharpening the saw was a way to hold it while I worked. The simplest way to do that is to put a stick on each side of the blade with a small margin between the top of the stick and the top of the teeth. Then you clamp saw and sticks in the vise. Okay, I got that part. In accordance with one suggestion I stuck a popsicle stick on the end of the file so I could more easily tell when I was tilting the file. I also went over the teeth with a sharpie so I could see when I had taken material away from the teeth.

I thought it would be prudent to see how the saw was cutting before I started to sharpen it. The answer was ‘not well. Not much to ruin then, I told myself. I clamped the saw between the two sticks in the vise, put a strong light on it and donned my magnifying visor. I oriented the file to the saw plate and made the first cut. There was the rather satisfying sound and feel of metal coming off. Being careful not to change the angle of the file I moved onto the next tooth, and the next. Pretty soon I was in a rhythm.

setting up to sharpen

When I finished I touched the tips of the teeth. One person described that feeling as the points on ‘cat’s teeth.’ The saw felt a lot more like a cat's teeth than when I started. I ran my hand very gently down the tips and some still felt like they could use a bit more attention. I decided to go over the saw once more.

This time the teeth were nice and sharp so I took the saw out of the vise and went back to the piece of 1” ash on which I had previously tried the saw. This time the saw went through the wood quickly and easily, and it didn’t pull to one side. Sometimes if you don’t get your angles right you can end up with one side of the saw cutting more aggressively than the other.

Okay, time for the dovetail saw. The advantage of my dovetail saw was that I knew it had been sharpened well when I bought it. I figured if I followed the angles already on the teeth I should be okay. More sharpie, a couple of thinner sticks to account for the brass back on the saw and into the vise it went. After giving each tooth two strokes with the file, I checked with my fingers to see if it felt sharper. It did. When I tried it in the piece of ash, it cut twice as quickly as it had before I sharpened it.

When I’m learning something new I never expect to get it on the first try. When it happens I have my own little party. Before, when my saws became dull, I took them into a place that sharpens blades for power saws and they sent the handsaws to a guy in Edmonton to have them sharpened. The saws came back nice and sharp in about two weeks.

sharp dovetail saw

I know not every saw-sharpening will go smoothly and the two that I sharpened today were both rip saws, meant to cut with the grain of the wood. Crosscut saws, meant to cut across the grain of the wood, are more difficult to sharpen because they have a different tooth geometry. I’ll tackle a crosscut saw eventually, but for now, I think maybe I can keep the rip saws in my collection sharp and that’s good enough.

Lilred makes her debut

On Tuesday January 11, I finished my third ukulele. This is the one made from Manitoba maple and a cedar fence board I bought at Lowe’s. It was a bit of a pain to make. The Manitoba maple is punky beyond belief and there is quite a bit of superglue holding the wood together. Still, I’m very happy with the instrument. This little instrument is full of surprises. It’s a soprano, one size smaller than the other two ukuleles I’ve made. I thought it would be difficult to get my fingers squished onto the proper frets but it isn’t. I can stretch from the first to the seventh fret without difficulty and I don’t have trouble fitting my fingers onto the small frets near the sound hole. I thought it might have a quiet, subtle, voice but it’s a loud little sucker for its size. It’s easy and fun to play. There are a couple of ‘faces’ on the back of the instrument. It seems to be saying, ‘Hello, I may be small but don’t underestimate me. There’s more than enough spunk in this little package.’ Neither of my other instruments has a name but this one got the name Lilred early on in the process, mostly because of the rich red areas of the wood. Lilred continues to surprise me.

When I realized that the Calgary Retired Teachers’ Art Show was going to take place this year, I decided, just for a laugh, to list my first ukulele for sale. I didn’t expect that anyone would actually buy it and no one did. I also brought Lilred with me to show it to some friends who have been following the progress of the build on Facebook. When I walked in, on the day of the show, carrying a ukulele case, one of the organizers asked me if I would be willing to play a bit. I mumbled that I had just brought it to show friends. Then when a second person asked me I conceded that I might play if I didn’t disturb people and if I could do it in the background. I can play for hours on my own and the minute I know someone is listening I get fumble-fingered. Those years of teaching, those years of drama training, those years of singing? They have no transfer!

I found a corner close to my display table and started plunking away. The first person who spoke to me said that he had heard a sound and kept trying to answer his cell phone. He didn’t seem upset about it and I was glad of that. I played “Side by Side” while he wandered among the paintings. He came back and told me that song reminded him of looking out from his balcony in Victoria when he was in his teens. He said it brought back memories of the sea.

A while later I was part way through Stan Rogers’ ‘Northwest Passage’ when another person approached. She waited until I was finished and then told me of a book she had just finished. I think the title was Erebus. In the book there were references to Rogers’ song and it was in her head for the duration of the book. She said she went between thinking the book was wonderful and wondering how she could possibly keep reading it. In the end it was worth it. We chatted a bit before she thanked me and continued to move among the easels.

One of my favourites to play is ‘The Log Driver’s Waltz’ and I tend to settle into it when I can’t think of anything else to play. I was playing it when I noticed a woman coming down the row of paintings towards me. She was dancing to the music. Her eyes smiled over her mask. I smiled back as she danced down the next row of paintings.

Things were pretty slow when, around noon, I took my turn at the wrapping table. I took a moment to fetch Lilred and began to play. The guy who had first asked me to play was working on the cash. I played a song and gave him the ukulele to examine. He was amazed at the rich reds of the Manitoba maple and after I played a couple of other songs, he commented on how lovely the little instrument sounded.

One of the women working in the same area told me that her mother had a ukulele that would now have been over 100 years old. She said the only thing she wanted from the her mother’s estate was that ukulele but she didn’t know what happened to it. She said growing up she dismissed the little instrument as not being cool and hadn’t paid much attention to it. Then she realized how much she associated the instrument with her mother.

After my stint at the wrapping table, I returned to my corner and played a bit more. Many people smiled as they passed and some of them stopped to say thank you. Some said they appreciated the atmosphere the music created and that they found it calming. My playing is not sophisticated and I made lots of mistakes but music has the ability to reach through imperfect performances to spark memories and to elicit smiles. What a wonderful thing that is.

Distractions please

I looked at the calendar today and thought, ‘Gee I should do a blog post. It’s past the middle of March and I haven’t done one since February.’ Then I looked at the blog and discovered that I haven’t done one since January. I started a couple and decided not to go any farther with them. Part of the reason is that I’ve spent a lot of time thoroughly annoyed at the stupidity of our species, some members of which act like each one of them is the only one on the planet who matters and there is no such thing as responsibility to or for others. I see evidence of this all the way from protestors who have forgotten what they are protesting to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. As humans we keep thinking there has to be a better way and then we return to bashing each other over the head. If we are smart we do a less than stellar job in demonstrating smarts where they count. And that’s enough of that. I’m not going to help solve anything by ranting about it so I’ll take some of my own advice and choose to look up rather than looking down at my feet.

Friends gave us a bird-seed cake for Christmas and we hung it up in the tree outside the living room window. I had a blast watching the birds that came to get the seeds and watching the squirrels try to get it before the birds did. The squirrels were pretty clever and I’m not sure how much they got and how much the birds got. When there was nothing left, I decided to go and buy a bird feeder. Of course there are lots of disadvantages to feeding the birds, poop on the brand new deck, a build up of seed hulls that seems gargantuan compared to the critters who dumped them on the lawn, and the possibility of encouraging mice which we’ve tried so hard to eradicate. I have nothing against mice as long as they stay out of my house.

Despite these drawbacks I’m delighted with the feeder. We’ve seen redpoles, many, many, house finches, downy woodpeckers, mountain chickadees, and nuthatches. I thought house sparrows were the only small birds that hung around here during the winter. I have a pair of binoculars and my camera sitting by the front window and have gotten some more practice with the camera and the telephoto lens. This will come in handy when (if) we get to go on the Arctic cruise that we booked in 2019.

The birds manage to empty the feeder about once a week. We went through the first bag of seed and had to return to buy an even bigger one. We also bought a packet of seeds of native perennial wildflowers meant to attract birds. I still like the idea of planting zucchini in one of the planter boxes at the front and the wildflowers can have the second box. Some of the seeds need to lie dormant over a winter before they will sprout so we won’t know the true variety of the flowers until next summer.

We’ve been trying to get out for walks and today we saw a bluejay in the bush just as we were returning to the house. I often hear them but I don’t often see them. There were a couple of other sightings of note today. We found a tree with pussywillows on it and when I looked out the window earlier in the evening, there was a hare eating grass. The hares are around all winter but this guy was sprouting the beginning of his summer coat. His face was predominantly brown and there was a distinct brown cast to his hindquarters and his shoulders. It’s those little details that delight me and haul me out of my general grumpiness at the state of the world. So here are some photos of birds, hares, and pussywillows that may provide a small diversion for you as well. These days we need all the diversions we can get.