A week of Saturdays.

In the self-employed construction world, we often say its feast or famine.  When its feast, you could work 14 hours per day every day, just wanting a day off.  When its famine, its hard to know what to do with yourself after week after week of nothing.

Rarely, you might get an unexpected reprieve in the middle of the feast.  This week, a management and weather delay of an out of state job presents me with what amounts to a week of Saturdays.  Days that are not entirely free from work, but are open for the taking.

Here in the country, we often say that there is ALWAYS something to do.  So here are a few things we do if we have a week of Saturdays in the middle of the busy times:

-Burn the Econoline-Van-Sized brush pile on a rainy day/night.  (check)
-Fix the generator that's been broken for a year (check)
-Clean up the:
                   -shop
                   -house (check)
                   -van
                   -office
                   -shed

-Coffee and:
                 -pancakes (check)
                 -eggs (check)
                 -bacons (check)
                 -toast (check)
                 -pastries (check)
                 -cream (check)
                 -biscotti (check)

-Study for Massachusetts Construction Supervisors License Exam
-Design a timber frame shed
-Design a timber frame Sugar Shack
-Sleep(more)
-27 more things that I'll think of.

Back to the regular days of the week on Monday.

News from the Country Estate

Hihowahya,

Since the post in the summer time, we have moved again (in November), to another small apartment on the same road as our land on which we intend to build our house. Since the summer, many things have changed and many have stayed the same.

We're still trying to scratch a living from the coast of Maine like nearly everyone else around here. I am still trying to make money by putting pieces of wood together with nails and glue, but around here you do whatever you can to make it through the winter. I have recently considered getting a 'real' job, and I have even sent out a few resumes, but there still aren't a lot of jobs out there for folks without specific training (i.e. nurses, machinists etc.)

Last month, I spent a couple days splitting wood (with a hydraulic woodsplitter a Split-Fire 2260, which I highly recommend for its dual-action), and I sold one of our cars (the 96 Honda Civic with 250k miles). It sold in about an hour after I put it on the Craigslist. Somehow we found a way to pay off the Benz-omatic Wagon and now we're debt-free except for our student loans. (Don't even get me started on the American travesty of saddling the next generation with mountains of student loans getting useless degrees.....).

The Astro work van I bought in the fall is performing admirably, getting almost exactly 17.6 mpg on every tank, which is a spectacular improvement over the 10-12 I was getting with my Dodge Ram pickup. I may yet build a center console out of birch plywood, but for now, I like it the way it is. My only complaint is that the back doors leak a bit when it rains and I can't find anything wrong with the weatherstripping.... Maybe it will be a dry summer.

We've been doing a few things on our land. We finally cleaned up some of the debris from the trees that I brought down before Hurricane Irene and piled it into a big pile. I'm still deciding whether to burn the pile or rent a big chipper for a day. Thoughts?

The next step over there is to scrape enough cash together to put in a nice gravel driveway. I'm getting an estimate on it on Wednesday.

Since we got rid of one car payment, we thought it would be a good idea to take on another one, in the form of a shop/storage space down back here at the estate. Soon I'll be setting up my first shop. I am pretty excited actually to have a space to set up all the bigger tools all at once. And have a work bench......the possibilities are endless, as are the ways to spend time and money on them.

Once the shed is empty of tools and other stuff, we'll be outfitting it as rustic guest house for the summer and fall, so we'll finally have guest accommodations. We'll have to figure something out for facilities over there, but I think it will be great.

So with all that news, I'll leave you to whatever dreary or fair March weather awaits you.

-w-

Does anyone even blog anymore?

Hello all. I stopped in at my own blog today and looked at "my blog list" and realized that, save one blog, no one had updated their blog in about a year. That prompted me to ask myself, "Does anyone even blog anymore?" I know that some folks do, but having left my own blog alone for more than six months leads me to ask a deeper question, "Why do I (or does anyone else) blog?"

For the last six year or so, I must admit blogging has been a largely self-aggrandizing activity. Look at me! Look at the cool stuff I am doing. Look my great life. Isn't it so interesting? I have not written here with much intent other than that. There is some vague notion in my mind that I have written to keep family and friends updated with our (mine and KT's) life as we are many miles from most of you, but even that has been largely a one-way-street (apart from a few comments...which I always appreciate). Even that role of this blog has been largely taken over by the Facebook, leaving those luddite or suspicious 'non-facebookers' out of the loop.

The only type of post that I have really enjoyed are my periodic 'News from the Country Estate' updates that include Maine country living news, family tidbits, vehicles, weather and overall musings of the urban-born turned rural dweller trying to scratch out a living in a down economy.

So for now, I think I will continue with posts along that vein, and maybe someday, start an entirely new blog on that topic.

And, I will clean up my blog list to include blogs that are actually updated and that I actually read.