One project started with the car. When Dad quit driving, he gave us his Infiniti (pretty classy, huh?). Except that Infiniti's are designed for people who take care of their cars--like have garages for them. As the car is now about 16 years old, some of the gaskets are getting old and when it rains, the car leaks (and we don't keep a cover on it because we tried that--with our humidity, the car got moldy inside). As the Southern saying goes, Infiniti is right proud of their product--meaning that they charge and arm and a leg to do repair work. We figured that for the price of getting the gaskets replaced we could have a carport put in. So that's on order.
Step one--clear the area where it's going. The Sanford and Son area. Meaning for the last upteen years the area where we've dumped all scrap metal because "we'll take it to the scrap metal place and sell it." Well, we did that one time--a couple of hours of loading (and then unloading) earned us enough to buy lunch on the way home. So we haven't been motivated. Especially because we had a couple of junker riding lawnmowers that for some reason Bob's father thought we would want. We tried to figure out how we could get them into the truck. Then we thought "this is dumb--we'll hire someone to haul them off." We checked on Craigslist, and found this add "will haul off non-working riding lawnmowers for free." Hot diggity damn! Made the call, and the next day the guy came and not only got those but everything else--10 years worth of junk in about 2 hours. SCORE!
Then we stared at a tree for awhile. It stood between the barn and where the carport is going to go. We realized that if that tree ever had a problem it would be almost impossible to take it down. So, sorry, tree--called the tree guy and had it removed. Or at least, cut down. There's that part of me that will pay the experts to cut down a tree safely but rebels at paying another 500-600 dollars to haul away good oak. On the other hand, splitting that much wood is a daunting task (we did three trees last year and it took a couple of hard weeks). Heck with that--we rented a log splitter.
That is one seriously sexy piece of equipment. We had to be careful not to knock ourselves out--it was so fast that we were pulling a John Henry trying to keep up with it. However, even with taking three water breaks and a lunch break, it was still less than 5 hours to split enough wood to later stack into this.
Power tools--they're a beautiful thing.
Meanwhile, when not splitting wood, I've been doing a lot of twitchy knitting. Twitchy, because I'm still stalled out on that beautiful big multicolored shawl. So instead I made a pair of socks. Yes--handspun with a dye experiment on the wool before spinning. Not sure I really like it--but they feel nice and I can always wear them with my ankle boots. Another pair is on the way with a better dye job.
And this scarf. I had about an ounce of that beautiful yak/silk multicolored fiber I used for the cowl for Margo earlier this year. I spun that up and grabbed some fine black yarn to eke it out and got this. Unfortunately the battery on my camera died and the phone doesn't have a flash so the colors don't show well enough--they're luscious.
And a new pair of slippers. I'm visiting Mike and Margo next month, and I've decided one of the reasons their cat Moonie didn't like me was because she doesn't like other cats and my slippers were probably at least 50% cat hair. So I made a new pair that will be kept away from the cats and not worn until I go there. Besides, this is the fun pattern I've written about before--you make them *way* too big, and then throw them in the washer until they shrink. (I didn't spin the yarn for these, but I did do the dyeing)
And in the words of game-show hosts "But wait--there's more." But this post is overlong so I think I'll do another one.
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