November 2008

Argh, argh and ARGH!

Submitted by Jonathan on Sat, 11/22/2008 - 23:15

Argh #1: Two of my old woodworking clamps gave up the ghost today. They weren't great clamps. I've been slowly trying to replace some of my oldest clamps with good clamps. My oldest clamps are some cheapy bar clamps from Home Depot that I bought back in 2000. They aren't all that strong, and the workmanship is pretty poor. I didn't know all of that at the time, though--they looked like fine clamps to me. One of them now has a permanent bend in its bar, which affects how far apart I can set the clamp heads.

A 100% Homemade Dinner and A Happy Boat

Submitted by Jonathan on Sun, 11/09/2008 - 21:31

We had a 100% homemade dinner tonight. We still had some meatballs and sauce left-over from the party last weekend. I decided that we'd buy some pasta today so that we could try to finish that up before it went bad. Well, after we got home from a little afternoon drive, I remembered that we had five eggs left from last weekend, too, and we had plenty of flour. A small plan was hatching in my brain. I first started a loaf of bread in the bread maker (the big oven is down for the count right now--it needs a serious cleaning after an issue with a pan that tipped badly last weekend).

Some small blog changes

Submitted by Jonathan on Sat, 11/08/2008 - 21:47

Some readers might notice a few changes here. They are pretty minor, but probably warrant some quick notes. The biggest change is that posts on the main page are now in "summary" format. To read the whole post, click on the "Read More" gadget at the bottom of the post. This change was made so that the posts on the front page are somewhat more concise, and readers who are interested in only certain items can read only those items in depth, instead of scrolling all over the page. The other update of consequence is that the user login block was moved to the right sidebar.

Middle Bedroom Has Started

Submitted by Jonathan on Sat, 11/08/2008 - 21:42

Well, we've finally done it--we started work today in the middle bedroom. After I bought the house, I had originally planned on that to be the first room that I restored. At the time, it was filled with junk from the previous owner's son, whom she had kicked out of the house a while before I bought it. I first got rid of all of that, then started to clean it out. The first thing to go was the disgusting carpet. Conveniently, I was able to just toss it out the second-story window in the room, then drag it to the trash outside, without having to carry it through the house.