Category: Commentary

  • They plough the fields and scatter

    We feed sunflower seeds to the bids year-round. You may have noticed that we have the most-photographed bird feeder in the history of bird feeders. We also have five planters that we place around the garden, four in the back where the feeder is and one around front, nowhere near the feeder. Each spring, we […]

  • Falling into Winter

    Frankly, I prefer to ease into winter bit by bit – a heavier coat one day, adding gloves, changing from a summer Tilley to the old battered winter hat, and on to the whole boots, heavy gloves thick scarf and heaviest coat. This process ideally takes a couple of months, but not this year. It […]

  • Routing out some unused tools

    In my workshop I’m building a router table, which involves seating a circular plate (attached to the router) in a flat surface so that the plate and the surface are exactly level. On the weekend I spent one day hammering and trimming 4″x4″ hunks of cedar beams to shore up the eaten or rotted shed […]

  • Shedding some wood

    I’ve been attacking what I thought was rotten cladding on the garden shed. Further examination revealed a missing 2×4 behind the cladding. Carpentry isn’t my forte on a good day on a nice workbench. When you’re trying to replace wood underneath a shed with an 8″ access opening, it gets interesting. When it’s also the […]

  • Volleyball takes its toll

    After six or seven ho-hum games of volleyball last night, in the final game something clicked and all of a sudden I was kicking ass and taking names. The young guy next to me really dialed-in his set exactly where I liked it and I had a great time. Life was good – until I […]

  • Keeping up

    There’s only one thing I hate worse than a slow computer, and that’s upgrading to a new computer. This time I held out for about 4 years, and finally bit the bullet. It’s been about a week and counting, and I’m still trying to get everything back up and running (at a minimum) and running […]