Still waiting...

So everything is prepped, but I can't leave for Vermont until Monday.  I can't mow until Saturday. (I want to wait until right before the birthday party, and as late as possible, as I don't see the lawn getting mown in my absence.) I can't pack, because it's too hot to leave things in the truck for days before we leave.  

And I've done everything in MS that I want to for now.

I'm making up lists of things to do, just so I can check them off.  Today I harvested 13 rabbits, and Alexe sold most of them to BTC customers.  (That pays for 1/4 of the drive to Vermont!  A pleasant surprise.)

I sold the redundant mercedes wagon to a nice wheat farmer in Washington state.  

I went to the Dollar General across town today and perused all their merchandise.  Just because.  I found little boy underwear, which was on a list somewhere, so that was something.

The kids seem to be enjoying their time.

We set the deli up downstairs, and Caspian helped me paint up some chalkboards.  He became completely absorbed, and painted these things entirely by himself.  I stood back and watched him methodically cover the entire surface, and then go back to touch up and spotty sections.

He came to the town office to pay utility bills, and made himself right at home.

It hasn't been all sunshine and adorable smiles.  He and his sister have been on a stealing spree again. This stash was discovered in their play house at the BTC.

I think I mentioned I'm tapped out on the wood working here, waiting to get started on the Vermont cabin.  Here's the collection of the variations on the glass topped tables.

The last table I made, after finishing in urethane. It may be my favorite.

Memorial Day

Father daughter day.

I thought we'd try fishing again.  It was a beautiful day, at 9:30 it was already in the mid eighties, and I thought we'd get an hour of fishing in before running back inside.

Annaliese had different ideas.  She went swimming.

That color change in the water is where the silt ends, and it drops off maybe 3 feet.  I spent 2 (two) hours standing about 5 feet beyond that drop off, with her launching from the upper edge, dropping to the bottom, and getting scooped out.  It was the jumping game, with her role changing between turtle and dolphin.

I managed to catch a couple of very small fish, a nice touch to the day.

She was a very happy girl.  Two minutes later she was asleep.

On Saturday I was running the ductwork for my office, the last thing I haven't finished in the building, and something I'd like to wrap up this week so the folks holding the Fiddler's Loft events there over the summer will have decent air conditioning.  Alexe sent me a text message with a picture of the new family member, with a note, "I know you hate surprises, so guess what?"  


I went downstairs to my office and ordered the generator I've been lusting after.  Everyone wins. :)


We're calling him Louie, or Louis, (the Second,) after Alexe's childhood cat of the same coloring and gender.

Cats are fine creatures, interesting, attractive, and often friendly, however, I've never wanted to have one in our family before we had a barn for it to live in, for two reasons: 1) pooping in a box in the house, and 2) they live forever.


Seeing how quickly the little guy has fit into the family, how good the kids are with him, and what a suck up to me he is, I think Alexe made a good executive decision.  

Gearing up

We're Vermont bound.


In a week and a couple days.  


We're getting ready.  Packing and planning started weeks ago.  There are project lists, (water wheel, gravity fed water system at the cabin, screening in the porch, a plumbed kitchen sink, raised stone garden beds, outdoor shower, painting and installing trim, new shelving, etc.) and each project has a corresponding packing list of materials and tools. Then there's the bedding, clothing, kitchen utensils, kids' learning supplies, kids' playing supplies, pond supplies, laundry supplies, cleaning supplies, safety supplies, (kids are practicing with their personalized emergency whistles on the porch right now,) first aid supplies, electronic supplies, (learned how to turn the iphone into a mifi, it was easier than I thought,) and FOOD.


All around lots of fun planning, looking for the most interesting driving route, blah blah blah, I'm ready to go!


I've enjoyed these past two months of toodling, the woodworking, the finishing out the office into a kick-ass creative space, the home projects, the fishing and exploring of MS, the meeting new folks and chatting more with the ones I know and like, and the time with the kids.  


However, my mind has been entirely at our place in Vermont for weeks now.  I love our house, the store and the upstairs in the building, our town, I even have a tickle of an interest in finishing out the house we've got on Clay street.  But that's not something that I can or want to do now, especially considering the heat and the children, and Alexe's schedule.


Vermont is another story.  We've got a safe 60 acres, a little pond, no poisonous snakes or fire ants, no cars, no neighbors, and so many fun possibilities!


And I am going to take this self-granted vacation and max it out with what I like to do.  What's keeping me from diving into the next financial/professional leg of this journey is that I wanted to give my brain a rest, and as I may have shared previously, my brain rebelled.  The internal negotiations went something like this, "I know you want something to apply yourself to that's interesting and fiscally responsible, but take a damn vacation first, because you won't for a while after. Howsabout from now until Burning Man as a final blowout before buckling down?"


To which I agreed with myself.


And what I like to do is do.


And I have so many things I want to do, with endless raw materials, (I have a forest and a chainsaw, I can built ANYTHING,) and good company to slow me down and make me sleep.  (Something I don't do when left alone with engaging projects.)


I just have to wait until Caspian turns 3, his mama throws him a party and gushes over her little boy growing up, then we're off.  


Alexe will catch up in a couple weeks via airplane, as she's the least happy long distance driver in the family, and we'll have so much to show her when she arrives!


In the meantime, there's lots of little stuff to take care of here in preparation, no small amount related to the BTC. 


I put in the deli cooler last night:




Moving the dairy and drinks cooler across the store, shuffling the freezers down, and cutting a hole in the wall.  We wisely splurged on casters when we put in the new cooler and freezers last year.  The deli cooler was a different story, 550 lbs of slick corners, no where to get a hand hold, and stuck on its pallet.


I sprained my wrist getting it in place, a first in a long career of lifting overly heavy things.  Quite a pop.  I don't like going without my right hand, but it has a few days to heal, so I'm trying to let it rest.  

Chalk boards will go above the opening as soon as I get some chalkboard paint and hang them.

Meats and cheeses sliced on demand, prepared dishes (salads etc.) served to order.  All for a more interactive, fresh shopping experience!  Once again the BTC going above and beyond...

Keeping busy.

Me and my little girl. (Alexe feels I need a trim.  I have yet to get a good haircut in MS since Wade retired at 84, so I'm holding out.  I don't need to impress anyone for a while, though it was a hoot to have a job offer walk into my office on Friday.)  

My boy.

I managed to miss my little sister's 25th birthday.  Sure I was busy making some life changes, but it was a quarter century turn for her, so no excuse is really going to get me off the hook.

To atone, I went to the workshop with her bed height in mind, and made a matching pair of night tables.  

These are modelled after the prototype I made using the old glass spotlight lenses, heart pine boarder, heart pine tapered 2-piece legs, and lots of gluing, clamping, and sanding.

They're tall, so the legs look elegant, bordering on spindly, and I wasn't so sure about them surviving a hard knock to one of the legs.  

Pretty, but...

Designing on the fly, I put a cross piece 16" off the ground, joined in the middle with a complementing routed out groove, cut at 45 degrees at each end to fit into the 2-piece legs and bind well on two faces.  Glued and clamped.

And of course, after this stage, I thought of this cross piece being a handy spot to stack books, and how long would that glue really hold if 50 lbs of books is sitting on it? I went back and dowelled those cross pieces in place.  These are now done, waiting to trek up to Vermont, where Natalie I'm sure will come visit us pronto at the cabin and pick them up.  


I've also made 4 other tables of similar design including the prototype, none quite this tall, and that has used up my cool pieces of glass.  The repetition, along with the endless sanding, gluing, clamping, (amazing how a dozen clamps feels inadequate when you're doing many things at once,) and the low levels of scrap wood left in my scrap room are all making me want to move on to other things. Alexe said when she saw the last thing I put together (pictures in some other post,) do we need another table? It struck me that I've ridden this distraction long enough.


I have a mig welder I've never had time to use...

These are the best dill pickles in the world, recipe form "Man with a Pan", the book of essays and recipes Alexe gave me last year.  (The book was also an inspiration in style for Alexe's book.)  The trick is to ice the cucumbers for over two hours, then cut/stuff/top with brine and get in the boiling bath as quickly as possible.  Makes for an incredible natural crunch.  Good way to occupy an afternoon too.  I had some cold cucumbers left over after using up all the jars I bought and could find in various corners of the cupboard, so I'm trying a crock recipe as well.

For interlude.  We had to build two different forts to satisfy the feuding/competing kids, then build a tunnel, (push the couch out a bit,) to connect the two after they decided they were friends again.

Living room game of catch.

Another crack at MS fishing

These cattle pastures are on some of the most beautiful, rolling green, well maintained land I've seen in Mississippi.  South of Coffeeville on Route 7, before the turn to the Grenada dam, there are a series of dirt roads shooting off to the left.  They all wander through old sections of private land that were taken over by the government when the army corp started putting in the lakes.  If you follow them far enough they cross the army corp line, and eventually end in water.  I've found old cemeteries, abandoned roads that were once large paved avenues to something that is now gone, overgrown stone landscaping remnants, and all the cool swamp and water features created by the tail end of the lake. 

The army corp drains the surrounding lakes each winter, I believe to make room for the spring melt when they refill them, helping to lighten the burden, (or at least regulate to a human-preferred consistency,) on the Mississippi river.  In the winter I have come out to these clay banks to do some target practice; the water was still low enough to keep my spot above water, so Cliff and I took advantage.

Then into the boats for some fishing, Kagan-style, i.e. casting.

Cliff hooked this little Crappie in the first 5 minutes.  The size limit is 12"or larger, so it went back.  It wasn't the last fish we saw all day, but the last one we caught.

The cyprus stumps are a nice break in the otherwise flat, brown water.  All remnants of the forests and fields that were flooded to make these lakes.  There was a nice brisk wind all day, which made for healthy paddling upwind, and kept the mosquitoes down.  The bases of these cypress are usually a swarm of bugs when it's calm.

West towards the dam.

North towards the pasture land we drove by.


The fish were jumping all around us most of the day, they just wouldn't bite anything we put in the water.  At one point we were near a marshy section, where I could see great big alligator gar, taller than the marsh water they were swimming through, with their backs sticking out of the water, and I got out with a net to try to chase them down.  Turns out their slow thrashing through the grass is just an act of being stuck, the moment I got anywhere close they shot off like rockets.

A family of Osprey.

This manly outing was complete with a lunch of ciabatta, olive tapenade, roasted almonds, hoop cheese, and some ginger cookies the kids and I made right before Alexe declared she was dieting and glared at until I removed them from the house.

We went to the spillway below the damn, where there are no size or number limits, (Ha!) and we tried to catch something to show for the day.  No luck, even though the place was also filled with jumping fish.

I'm torn between really enjoying my time out with Cliff, and feeling guilty that I might rub off on him, and he won't be able to catch fish even when I'm not around.

That lure in Cliff's mouth is a great look.  

Catch Up

This is the kitchen counter for the Vermont cabin.  Hard to explain what I have in mind, just think mounted on the left to the wall, on the right by a cool stainless counter bracket, galvanized tub-sink mounted on the top, draining through a gray water system, with a tap coming through the cabin wall above.

Amos Henry turned 5 and his parents threw him a party.  A catch up time with friends.  Annaliese with her buddy Billy.  No, that pose doesn't worry me AT ALL!

A pinata.  (I don't know the accent short cuts on this mac, something to look into another time.)

Happy boy.

Visiting Alexe at the BTC.  Why did Annaliese have her sleeping bag? At some point she brought it downstairs from her princess castle in my office and stashed it in her playhouse in the store.

We turned one of Alexe's produce runs to the Amish into a family trip.

These folks run a tight operation.  Everything is done big, well, and fast.

One of the most colorful members of our circle is about to move north. The Space Law department at Ole Miss that he was teaching in has been cut, so he's headed to Rutgers to expand his area of expertise into a slightly larger field.  When he first moved here a few years ago, he bought one of the oldest properties in the county, and started the long up-hill slog to bring it into live-able condition.  This is a place that Alexe and I looked at when we first moved to MS, and I passed it up as too much work.  PJ both took it on, and lived in it for the last 3 years, half the time while it was open to the elements.  


Without going into details about what this decision has cost the poor fellow since then, he christened the place "Blount's Folly."  This is where it is as of yesterday.  Getting there.

The man knows how to throw a party. The May Day celebration, that's the ship that burned later in the evening.

What I don't have a picture of is PJ's ritual lighting of the fire,  a lighter-fluid-soaked roll of toilet paper  flaming on the end of a stick.

The party started at noon, I didn't swing by until 8-ish.  At that point the party had moved on from the pool, (seen here, the "no sex in the pool" sign still in place,) and the 80ft slip and slide just beyond.  I felt for the leaf springs on this pool...

I didn't know PJ got this painting from one of Yalo Studio's early shows.  For some reason I really liked this piggly-wiggly-homage, but Alexe threatened to stab me if I bought it.  I thought it would look great behind the BTC checkout. 

Great sign in PJ's front hallway.

Another table I whipped together.  This is made entirely from the ceiling boards from the BTC.  When the building was first retro-fit with electricity, two channels of the tongue and groove 6" ceiling boards were removed in parallel lines from the front to the back of the first floor, wires were run, and the boards were hatcheted, (literally,) to make them fit back in place.  When I rewired and replaced the light fixtures, I removed the butchered boards and replaced them with straight-edged pieces.  


Finding the original boards these years later, I trimmed both sides, planed their back-side, (the unpainted side,) joined and glued and tapered and routed, and voila.   

Went with urethane for this one.

As I was leaving my workshop yesterday evening, this is sunlight from the setting sun, coming through the apartment's front door and shining down the hallway.  

Annaliese doing her math work.