I had a hankering for a big plate of tater tots after work, and the one place that serves the very best tater tots in town is the Vintage brewery, where they also happen to sell their very own house-made beer. We were lucky enough to drop in when they were serving the most delicious barrel-aged imperial stout we’ve had the pleasure to drink in quite a while, a concoction they call Rye BA Max Stout. So good!
Guess who I was behind this morning?
After a long Friday banging away at the keyboard to (nearly) finish up the projects that have taken us all week to get through, it was finally time to clock out and start to enjoy the weekend a little bit.
We went back to the Muskellounge and Sporting Club for a couple of beers and some snacks. Probably should’ve stuck to the beers, because the lunchbox with cheese and sausage really wasn’t worth the money we paid. On the other hand, the hot pretzel was delicious and I would not hesitate to share one with My Darling B again.
I wish I had a “before” photo so you’d have some idea what kind of a mess I was facing when I started cleaning up the garage Sunday morning.
After working in the garage on and off all winter, and more often in the last few months, there were scraps of wood piled up on every flat surface, leaning against everything that stood still, and scattered on the floor. You couldn’t even *see* that set of shelves next to the window. And there was sawdust *everywhere*.
But after spending most of Sunday cleaning up, and a couple hours after work on Monday, I finally got it to look like this. And though I know it looks like kind of a mess, it’s a lot easier to move around in there now and I know where everything is, so it’s a huge improvement in my book.
Not shown: the work bench is behind me in this photo. That’s a mess for another long, rainy weekend.
The little maple tree out back was not so little so we had to cut it town.
It started out as a helicopter that sprouted in what looked like a pretty good spot for a tree, so I put a cage around it to keep the bunnies away and remind me not to mow over it.
It might have been a good spot for a tree if the tree had grown straight up. Instead, our little maple split into four trunks that spread out and began to overhang the electric service. On very windy days, this made me very nervous.
So an arborist came by on Sunday and cut it down, and now there’s nothing left but a stump and a pile of brush by the curb. So long, little maple, and thanks for the shade you gave us.
“Pleasant Valley Sunday,” sung by Carole King, who co-wrote the song with her husband, the lyricist Gerry Goffin. Until today, I only knew this song as a top ten hit by The Monkees. What a treat to find this recording.
I really thought this little guy was a goner. He was all shriveled up, most of his leaves had gone limp, some had even blackened, and I had no clue what was wrong. I usually kill houseplants by forgetting to water them, but I’d been watering this guy about every ten days, which ought to be enough for a succulent.
In desperation, I bought a bag of potting soil and repotted him in fresh soil. That was about three weeks ago. Before the first week was over he was no longer dying. He didn’t look great, but he wasn’t dying. By the end of the second week he was looking a little better. Still not great, but better. And this week he virtually sprung back to life. His stems and leaves are plump and green and he’s standing up proudly, reaching for the sunlight. I trimmed off all his dead leaves and he looks almost like he was never on the verge of death. There are a few iffy patches on a couple of his leaves but if you didn’t know he’d been almost dead you wouldn’t know what the patches were from.
Every day I try to do at least one thing to make continual progress getting The Camping Thing ready for the season. Some days it doesn’t seem like much, but on a day like today when I can see what the end product is going to look like, the feeling of satisfaction is pretty great.
Today I hung the overhead storage lockers — I’m not sure what else to call them. They’re the open-faced wooden boxes on either side of the van near the ceiling. I stuff clothes and towels and a few books in them, and they’re handy for keeping odds & ends like flashlights handy when I need them for something I’m working on.
They used to stand on poles that were attached to the bed but that’s not practical now, so after lots of head-scratching I figured out how to hang them from the grab handles built into the van. I’m not sure how much weight the grab handles will bear but I’m not all that worried. All I ever put in them is clothing and towels, so they don’t have to bear much weight.
I still have to connect the wiring that you can see dangling from the bottoms for the lights and charging ports but that should be fairly easy. And someday soon I want to add doors. The open front doesn’t work for me as well as I thought it would.
Yesterday I brushed a coat of poly on the plywood sheets that will bridge the gap between the boxes up front, and the day before that I installed two gooseneck lamps up front — you can see them just inside the archway — and wired them. If the gooseneck lamps seem like overkill, that’s what I thought, too. I wasn’t going to install any lights at all. I figured I could use flashlights for the few times I might need a light in the van at night, but I added the two gooseneck lamps at the rear because I was copying a design I saw on YouTube and it turned out that was the best feature I could’ve copied. I use those lamps all the time: not just when I’m reading after dark, but when I’m rummaging around in the fridge or searching in the storage boxes for a knife.
Two or three days ago, I’m not sure which now, I installed the battery and wired up the circuitry that connects the battery to the charging box and to the bus bar that distributes power to the various accessories in the van. Moment of panic, there, when I connected the battery and got a warning light on the charger. I don’t know what that was from, because it went away after I started the van to see if it charged the battery. Everything worked fine, and the error light went away. Anxiety averted.
I also made the electrical connection to the arch, so all the lights up there work, and today I connected the circuit to the fridge, so in theory I could jump in the van today and drive away for a weekend, but I won’t be doing that this weekend. In reality, there are still quite a few things I want to do to finish getting the van ready, so I won’t be going anywhere for a few weeks yet.
For as long as I’ll live, I’ll never understand why Americans are so ga-ga over British royalty. I know people who set their alarms to wake up early so they could watch the coronation of King Charles today. I suppose it’s the same as being all wrapped up in celebrities like the Kardashians, but frankly I don’t understand that obsession, either.
Some people would point out that it’s the same as the way I’m obsessed with astronauts, to which I would rebut, uh, no, it isn’t, because astronauts actually do something. You may not be interested in what they do, you may actively dislike what they do, but they’re not getting paid just to be famous, which the royals certainly are.
Ah, April in Wisconsin, where every weekday is sunny and warm, and every weekend is rainy and cold.
Makes me kind of miss February a little bit. It sucked, but it never teased you with false promises of warm weather.
This Is Drivel 