Entry tags:
stuff
A miscellany of Things Happening, Things Not Happening, Things Getting Done, and Things Not Getting Done:
The cherry tree we planted in the front sublawn last fall has had green-tipped buds for a couple of weeks, but as of yesterday they looked as though they could eventually be leaves.
The quince trees we planted probably ten years ago in the front lawn came into leaf three or four weeks ago. I hung up a sticky trap, baited with allegedly Oriental-fruit-moth sex pheromones, about two weeks ago, and it has a bunch of black dots in it that look more like fruit flies than full-grown fruit moths, but I'll take what I can get. I have a bunch of tabs of eggs of OFM-parasitizing wasps in the fridge, and will hang up one of those as soon as I'm convinced we're getting OFM's in the sticky trap.
A couple of weeks ago we mail-ordered and installed a handheld bidet attachment to the toilet, to reduce demand for toilet paper. It was sort of a pain, because the toilet that came with the bathroom renovation a few years ago tries to hide all the hardware out of sight, so I had to attach everything without seeing it, reaching around into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall. But eventually I got things to work without leaking all over the floor. I imagine the effect could be "invigorating" in the dead of winter when the tap water is really cold. OTOH, I imagine it could be quite pleasant in the hot-and-sticky summer. And it does seem to be reducing our demand for toilet paper.
The first harp we bought, a Hobrough, is now a wall-hanger: it hasn't held tension in years. Our large Lewandowski Gothic harp is currently in a faculty office at Fordham University, to which I had lent it for this semester's Collegium Musicum before all that stuff was cancelled, and I haven't had a chance to get to Fordham to retrieve it since the Pestilence started. Our Lewandowski Romanesque harp is in good condition but has only 13 strings, which limits what you can play on it. Our Morillo Gothic harp is a little larger but several of its wooden tuning pegs have died over the years, so I've been whittling replacements for them. The last time I tried that, the smallest drill bit that fit in my Craftsman power drill was arguably too big, and the power drill is definitely too heavy and unwieldy for this kind of delicate work. We had a bunch of teeny tiny drill bits (#61-80, I think -- no idea when or why we acquired them), but they don't fit in the power drill, nor even in the Dremel. So last year I bought a set of different-sized Dremel collets (the doohickey into which bits have to fit), then discovered that my old Dremel no longer held a charge. So later last year I bought a new Dremel, then misplaced the teeny tiny drill bits. A week ago the new, mail-order teeny tiny drill bits arrived (#41-80, just to cover all the bases). (I promptly found the previous package of tiny drill bits, but most of the previous package had been lost or broken so it's OK.) Over the weekend, I finally managed to use all these things together to drill holes in some newly-whittled harp tuning pegs. I've been using maple, on the theory that it would be hard enough to withstand string tension, but they've been compressing significantly where the string goes around them, which hasn't happened to the pegs that came with the harp; I have no idea what kind of wood Morillo used, but does anybody know what kind of wood would be sturdy against both lateral (cross-grain) tension and compression? I should add some pictures.
Our third medieval-style pavilion is still a bunch of piles of fabric. Two roof-caps have been sewn together (Mac had suggested that this part is under the most stress, and so should probably be doubled), but one is an inch longer from peak to peak than the other, so I need to remedy that before putting them together or attaching them to the rest of the roof. Then we need to attach a valence on the outside of the shoulder, and probably a buttonhole strip on the inside of the shoulder, and we need to make walls, and we need center poles and a ridge pole, which I was thinking of commissioning from Mac (on the model of the lovely jointed center pole he made for Will McLean's pavilion).
Started a batch of bread dough yesterday, using the starter I got from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ilaine last fall. With both of us at home all day, we're using more bread than usual so I've been baking a loaf every four or five days rather than every week or two. Haven't had to worry about yeast, since the starter has been working well without commercial assistance, but flour has been scarce every time I've been to the grocery in the past few weeks. Pictures to follow.
Last night I dismantled an old fitted sheet that Thibaut (upon whom be the peace and the blessing) had put holes in, and finally made a couple of masks, using this pattern from the Washington Post. After making the first one, I understood the pattern instructions better, so the second one is neater (and has fewer cutting errors, and fitsshalmestere's smaller face pretty well). The first one basically works for me, but I may go back and make another one for myself now that I understand the pattern better. The directions call for four strips of "elastic ribbon", without specifying their length: I thought "If I'm using elastic anyway, why don't I just use two so I don't have to worry about tying them?" So I did that. It turns out I needed about 14" of elastic for the top band; 14" for the bottom band was too long on both of us, so I did 12" for the bottom band of shalmestere's mask and that seems to work. It's important that the elastic be pointing in (with the cut end almost at the edge of the fabric) when you sew it on. Pictures to follow.
We got a couple of used wooden shutters mail-order last week. Haven't attached them to the office windows yet, because the widths aren't exactly right and it'll take some customizing to get them to fit, but they're propped up in the windows now and they look cute. Pictures to follow.
Saturday we attended an early-notation class, led by Pat and Doug in Durham, with people joining from the San Francisco Bay Area, the DC area, Louisiana, British Columbia, etc. I don't think any of the Hawaii early-music posse were there. The notation itself wasn't difficult -- Petrucci, early 16th century, and very visually clear -- but the rhythm was sometimes tricky, and they picked some lovely pieces. On Zoom, there's enough propagation delay that people can't "play along" and hear one another in real time, so Pat and Doug picked a bunch of three-part pieces of which they played two parts so students could play the third and hear all three.shalmestere and I, however, were across the dining room table from one another, so we usually played two different parts, so one or the other of us was usually doubling Pat or Doug.
Today is Monday, which means I should actually get clean and dressed and "go to work" (either in the home office, on the living room sofa, or at the dining room table).
The cherry tree we planted in the front sublawn last fall has had green-tipped buds for a couple of weeks, but as of yesterday they looked as though they could eventually be leaves.
The quince trees we planted probably ten years ago in the front lawn came into leaf three or four weeks ago. I hung up a sticky trap, baited with allegedly Oriental-fruit-moth sex pheromones, about two weeks ago, and it has a bunch of black dots in it that look more like fruit flies than full-grown fruit moths, but I'll take what I can get. I have a bunch of tabs of eggs of OFM-parasitizing wasps in the fridge, and will hang up one of those as soon as I'm convinced we're getting OFM's in the sticky trap.
A couple of weeks ago we mail-ordered and installed a handheld bidet attachment to the toilet, to reduce demand for toilet paper. It was sort of a pain, because the toilet that came with the bathroom renovation a few years ago tries to hide all the hardware out of sight, so I had to attach everything without seeing it, reaching around into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall. But eventually I got things to work without leaking all over the floor. I imagine the effect could be "invigorating" in the dead of winter when the tap water is really cold. OTOH, I imagine it could be quite pleasant in the hot-and-sticky summer. And it does seem to be reducing our demand for toilet paper.
The first harp we bought, a Hobrough, is now a wall-hanger: it hasn't held tension in years. Our large Lewandowski Gothic harp is currently in a faculty office at Fordham University, to which I had lent it for this semester's Collegium Musicum before all that stuff was cancelled, and I haven't had a chance to get to Fordham to retrieve it since the Pestilence started. Our Lewandowski Romanesque harp is in good condition but has only 13 strings, which limits what you can play on it. Our Morillo Gothic harp is a little larger but several of its wooden tuning pegs have died over the years, so I've been whittling replacements for them. The last time I tried that, the smallest drill bit that fit in my Craftsman power drill was arguably too big, and the power drill is definitely too heavy and unwieldy for this kind of delicate work. We had a bunch of teeny tiny drill bits (#61-80, I think -- no idea when or why we acquired them), but they don't fit in the power drill, nor even in the Dremel. So last year I bought a set of different-sized Dremel collets (the doohickey into which bits have to fit), then discovered that my old Dremel no longer held a charge. So later last year I bought a new Dremel, then misplaced the teeny tiny drill bits. A week ago the new, mail-order teeny tiny drill bits arrived (#41-80, just to cover all the bases). (I promptly found the previous package of tiny drill bits, but most of the previous package had been lost or broken so it's OK.) Over the weekend, I finally managed to use all these things together to drill holes in some newly-whittled harp tuning pegs. I've been using maple, on the theory that it would be hard enough to withstand string tension, but they've been compressing significantly where the string goes around them, which hasn't happened to the pegs that came with the harp; I have no idea what kind of wood Morillo used, but does anybody know what kind of wood would be sturdy against both lateral (cross-grain) tension and compression? I should add some pictures.
Our third medieval-style pavilion is still a bunch of piles of fabric. Two roof-caps have been sewn together (Mac had suggested that this part is under the most stress, and so should probably be doubled), but one is an inch longer from peak to peak than the other, so I need to remedy that before putting them together or attaching them to the rest of the roof. Then we need to attach a valence on the outside of the shoulder, and probably a buttonhole strip on the inside of the shoulder, and we need to make walls, and we need center poles and a ridge pole, which I was thinking of commissioning from Mac (on the model of the lovely jointed center pole he made for Will McLean's pavilion).
Started a batch of bread dough yesterday, using the starter I got from
ilaine last fall. With both of us at home all day, we're using more bread than usual so I've been baking a loaf every four or five days rather than every week or two. Haven't had to worry about yeast, since the starter has been working well without commercial assistance, but flour has been scarce every time I've been to the grocery in the past few weeks. Pictures to follow.Last night I dismantled an old fitted sheet that Thibaut (upon whom be the peace and the blessing) had put holes in, and finally made a couple of masks, using this pattern from the Washington Post. After making the first one, I understood the pattern instructions better, so the second one is neater (and has fewer cutting errors, and fits
shalmestere's smaller face pretty well). The first one basically works for me, but I may go back and make another one for myself now that I understand the pattern better. The directions call for four strips of "elastic ribbon", without specifying their length: I thought "If I'm using elastic anyway, why don't I just use two so I don't have to worry about tying them?" So I did that. It turns out I needed about 14" of elastic for the top band; 14" for the bottom band was too long on both of us, so I did 12" for the bottom band of shalmestere's mask and that seems to work. It's important that the elastic be pointing in (with the cut end almost at the edge of the fabric) when you sew it on. Pictures to follow.We got a couple of used wooden shutters mail-order last week. Haven't attached them to the office windows yet, because the widths aren't exactly right and it'll take some customizing to get them to fit, but they're propped up in the windows now and they look cute. Pictures to follow.
Saturday we attended an early-notation class, led by Pat and Doug in Durham, with people joining from the San Francisco Bay Area, the DC area, Louisiana, British Columbia, etc. I don't think any of the Hawaii early-music posse were there. The notation itself wasn't difficult -- Petrucci, early 16th century, and very visually clear -- but the rhythm was sometimes tricky, and they picked some lovely pieces. On Zoom, there's enough propagation delay that people can't "play along" and hear one another in real time, so Pat and Doug picked a bunch of three-part pieces of which they played two parts so students could play the third and hear all three.
shalmestere and I, however, were across the dining room table from one another, so we usually played two different parts, so one or the other of us was usually doubling Pat or Doug.Today is Monday, which means I should actually get clean and dressed and "go to work" (either in the home office, on the living room sofa, or at the dining room table).
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I've got plenty of oak in the basement and the garage, but it tends to be a pain to work. Then again, I don't think I've ever worked ebony, rosewood, etc. so it may be no worse than they.
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You might ask Mac if he's got any little bits of that type that he can mail you; he once gave Mr. Fixer a beautiful little length of pearwood for making combs. (And if you do contact him, do please give them our love.) Music stores sometimes sell lengths of rosewood or ebony for fixing fingerboards. Padauk and boxwood are usually boutique wood store items, but you can probably get any of these mail order.
There's a perfect place two miles away from us, but by the time they re-open you'll probably have solved the problem.