I spent a few minutes today making a list of all the projects I have to do, both short term and long-term, and all the little things I need to get done specifically this weekend.  I filled five sheets of paper on eight sides total.  I don’t think I wrote everything down.  Where does all of this work come from any way?  I’ll admit that one whole page of it is house projects and such, and one whole page is repair to weapons and armor which is pretty much a never-ending task, but much of it is new ideas, new projects, new things I have to write about.

I have about six anecdotes from my travels and such that need to be put in writing, but I also have to finish writing the first set of “Ten” chapters and work on catching up all the project pictures and posts.  Cian the Elder came by last weekend and helped my inch the basement closer to completion, but I wrote down the things I have left to do, just to finish the spa bath, and it fills a page and a half.  Sigh.  I’m going to a fighting demonstration (Cian and I are fighting) tomorrow, but I hope to get more work down in the afternoon.  Then, once things have settled down, and I can’t lift my arms anymore to swing a sword or a hammer, I’ll get back on here and try to catch up.  Why do I think that catching up will be a never-ending task as well?

I figure it would be pretty boring to you to hear the entire list of things I plan to do this weekend and in the near term, but I thought it might be interesting to list those things (taken verbatim off my list, really) that are likely not on your average honey-do list:

Call George and check on status of ten matching helms I ordered

Finish the neck facing in Cian the Younger’s new tunic.

Finish the joinery on the medieval chest and attach the iron hinges

Find quillons appropriate for a new Bastard

Cut out the see-thru section of the basement steps

Design the Old World Bar room and check on gas lines for torches

Check all installed firestopping and finish the remainder

Run wire for in-floor heaters

Buy a chipper.  Chip.  A lot.  Spread Chips.

Locate a lower trailer that will actually fit into the garage.  Sell old trailer

Cut out the next playset leaf panel and paint it

Cut out next set of roof leaves and paint

Cut branches for the Crooked Man tower

Carve golden spires for fairy tower rooves

Check tightness of chains on Fairy Bridge

Plan Pergola Waterfall

Price parts for a conservatory for the addition

Draw the Dog Skull Cartoon

Do something Normal.  Yeah right.

What fun we had! Cutting and lopping and panting and puffing.

First we started removing all the branches that we could with the loppers in order to reduce the overall weight of the trees and to make room to get the saw in. I have plans for the cedar so I only cut it into manageable lengths rather than into short logs. My son might argue that my definition of manageable and his are somewhat different, but he was a real trooper and stayed with me right to the end.

You might notice that the tree is somewhat…larger…than we are. But I figured, even without a chainsaw, we could do it in oh…a few days or so. I had no idea my son would work so diligently. If there were a merit badge for perseverance, he would definitely have earned it. After we removed many of the smaller branches with the lopper, we still had to take the inch and a half to two inch branches off with the bow saw. The wood was green (okay red) so it wasn’t the easiest cut but it did go pretty smoothly, and we had most of the branches removed in about an hour.

Here’s a pic of us removing many of the branches near the base of the four trees.

Admittedly, they weren’t huge trees, only about as big around as our legs near the base, but when you only have a 24 inch long bow saw…they were big enough.  I realized after the trees were down that the roots were dead, and that there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done to save them…but you come explain that…I dare not try.

And one after we have most of the small branches removed.

Getting the stump out of the ground, even though most of the roots were dead, was the hardest part of all.  Teamwork, shovels, the lopper and a whole lot of grunting, eventually removed it, though we had to wait until Sunday when friends were over so that five of us could lift it and carry it into the woods.

 All that remains is the gaping maw that once held the roots…a reminder that I still have to fill in the hole, which incidentally is another thing my wife would like me to do.  In truth, she carted most of the branches away while my son and I carried the logs.  She also filled in much of the hole, though I’ll have to find dirt from elsewhere in the yard to fill it up the rest of the way.   This is now officially registered as project number 136 on my “Honey Do” list, which I put at around….June.  

“Oh, look at that tree in the backyard honey, you better do something to it before it falls over,” my wife said Saturday morning.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Maybe you could cut some branches off of it or something, it’s leaning pretty far,” she added.

“Uh-huh,” I added, wisely.

Four hours later, after working in the basement, framing some more shower walls, working on the pocket door, (whoever invented that modern space saving miracle is a genius, but not a proponent of “easy to assemble”), and generally doing everything except look at the tree, I wandered outside. It would be easy to say that I went outside to look at the tree, but in fact, I had forgotten completely about the tree.

I had actually gone out to get the roto-tiller from the shed and to try and start it. Since it is technically still winter and the roto-tiller hasn’t had a tune up yet, starting it was likely impossible (a theory that was eventually proved), but I did manage to stretch my right arm to be somewhat longer than my left. This is of course, what several hundred increasingly frustrated yanks on the starter cord of a mid-winter resting roto-tiller will create. That, and an absolute obliviousness to everything in close proximity.

So my loving wife, and, I should insert here in case she reads this, very wise woman that she is comes outside and asks “did that tree fall down?” (I emphasize down here because she didn’t really ask if it fell down, but whether it fell down). Now I hadn’t even noticed the tree, even though it was twenty-five feet long and lying horizontal on the grass not ten feet from where I was yanking on the roto-tiller cord, but her emphasis on down confused me. Helpful husband that I am, and confused over her question, I laughed and replied, “no sweetheart…the wind blew it down.”

“Really?” she asked.

“NO not really!” I said, “of course it fell down, what do you think?”

“I thought maybe you cut it down,” she said. I looked down at the roto-tiller. She has been known to hand me the flat tip screwdriver when I ask for a phillips…but cutting down a tree with a roto-tiller? More confusion. I looked up at her.

“I can’t believe that tree fell down,” she said. I love this woman! I looked at her. I looked at the tree. It was lying in the yard roots akimbo, never to reach up towards the sky again and she couldn’t believe it had fallen down.

“Well sweetheart,” I said rather mockingly (though with a great deal of love), “there it is! Proof that it fell down.” I smiled at her. She laughed, then she gave me that coy wife smile that is usually reserved for the “I’m not going to say I told you so but I told you so discussion…”

“See what happens when you don’t listen to your wife?” She walked away, leaving me staring at the four eight to ten inch thick cedar trees that spouted from the same root at about two feet above the ground…er beside the root.

I went to get the chainsaw to begin the hard labor of rendering the tree movable, but since it is technically midwinter and the chainsaw….OH NO…I’m not falling for THAT twice. I didn’t even bother trying. Instead, I went and got the next next best thing to a chainsaw…my fifteen year old son and a bow saw…what fun we had.

Pictures and the rest of the story to follow.

It’s gone now Matieu, thrown in the trash. You’ll never get to see rain gutters on the gingerbread birdhouse…but just so you can remember it…

In my circle of friends there is an unspoken rule, “don’t mention any potential project out loud, no matter how wild or impossible it might seem at the time, unless you really want me to do it.” At work, I’m normally a big idea guy. I think the big thoughts, see the big picture, plan the grand scheme, and someone else gets to fill in all the little details like, oh, making the impossible possible. I get to manage, direct, decide, and execute (in the executive sense), but I seldom get to do anything.

At home, I like to get my hands dirty and actually see a project through from fertile idea to splendid though often exhausting completion. I have a high success rate, which means I am constantly crossing things off my ‘honey do’ list, but my honey also continues to add things, as do I, which means the list never seems to end. This is how we end up with a sixteen foot long bridge over our creek sturdy enough to drive a truck full of stone over (or fight upon in armor), a forest fairy play set with towers that have individually cut and hand painted tar paper leaves, and a deck the shape of a redbud leaf with a stem of stairs leading to the water. We have a faux stained glass window hanging in our foyer that is eight feet in diameter and weighs several hundred pounds, an English parterre with raised beds in the backyard, and any number of projects ongoing in the basement and garage.

Many of them started with words from the forbidden list, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” or “what if you could…” or “I’ll bet you might be able to…” — you get the idea. We’ve built eight foot tall castle walls out of paper mache’ rocks (enough to decorate the walls of an entire union hall), built a cake in the shape of a castle that was fourteen inches tall and four feet on a side (and required us to remove the door frame to get it out of the house), and have plans for a portable tudor style home that could be transported in a semi-trailer.

At one point in my life, when I spent time working in a specific medium for a period of time before moving on to another, my friends were very wary of allowing me to be exposed to ideas. I saw a medieval pavilion (tent) in a book and decided to make one. Then I made twelve more. I saw a picture of a wooden bed and decided I could easily build one. Or six. I made my friends some medieval armor. Then I made several other sets. It was a wonderful time of life. Have an idea, make it reality. See something I liked, make one myself.

One day some friends came over while I was lying on the floor watching TV with my head against the front of the sofa. I vaguely heard the door open, heard a strangled scream of “NOOOOOOOO!” and suddenly found myself being dragged out into the back yard and hosed down with water like a dog that had made a mess on the rug. “NO. NO. NO. NOOOOOO!” They had come in to find me watching a history show about Welsh stonemasons hand carving blocks of stone to rebuild a medieval fortress. Give me a break. I didn’t even own a stone chisel at the time. And I lived much farther from a stone quarry than I do now. Not to mention the climate where I lived then was not as appropriate as it is now. You have to know your limitations. You also have to know how to be patient.

So for now, I’m finishing my basement, putting final touches on the gardens, perfecting the playset, and planning my next small projects. I’m listening intently to the project ideas of my friends, like the one who suggested that I was a bit obsessive for putting an address and stamp on the 1/4 inch long letter made of chewing gum that went into the mailbox next to the sidewalk in front of this year’s gingerbread house, but I’m also recalling all the projects I’ve been patient about over the years. There are some wonderful open areas in the woods behind our house. Who knows what I could build there. History Channel anyone?

When we moved into our house in 2005, the mailbox was faded from its original black to a dull grey turning to white. The pole was a bit shabby, and the newspaper box (we don’t take a newspaper) was covered with something that can only be described as moldew, a greenish-black sheen covering the original letters on the box. The only good thing about it was, you couldn’t read the name of whatever paper it was that we weren’t getting.

You would think that we would have put a simple task like replacing the mailbox, an item that sits in front of the house (well, off to the side of the driveway really) and makes a first impression, one of the top priorities on my honey-do list. No. For whatever reason, we have been content to leave it in place in its decrepit functionality for over two years. I suppose it was because there were no other mailboxes nearby to compare it to, our driveway being several hundred feet from a driveway on either side of us. Then, late last year, the empty lot across the street from us became a construction site, portending new neighbors and most likely, a new mailbox.

Sure enough, the lot was cleared, a house was built, a lawn was rolled out, a double entrance circular driveway was put in, and I began to think about whether or not it was time to replace our aging, completely-out-of-place-in-our-neighborhood mailbox. Secretly I hoped that the new neighbors would put their mailbox on the driveway entrance that was NOT opposite mine, so that I would have more time, say a few years, to decide on a new box, but sadly, they planted a fine new mailbox directly, and I mean directly across the street from ours.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about the neighbors. In what can only be described as a “this world really is too small” episode, our new neighbors turned out to be a family we served in the Army with in Germany over a decade ago, who had no knowledge that we lived here and were surprised to find they already knew their new neighbors. They are nice people and great neighbors. It isn’t really about their mailbox, which is also very nice. No. This was all about our old sadsack mailbox. Moving up from project 147 to project 1 on the list, it HAD TO GO.

We went to several home improvement stores to find a new mailbox, looked online, browsed through some catalogs, and talked to friends and neighbors before we made this important decision. I point this out because in 2005, while living in Sri Lanka, we bought our house here in the States on on the internet, site unseen and with only the realtor’s photos and a hired house inspection to go by. So as our purchasing history would show, we did a whole lot more research to buy our mailbox than we did our house.

We finally bought a new mailbox in early November, though we agonized more over the mailbox price than we had over the house price, perhaps because they were similar. We bought a new pole, one that would look good with the mailbox of course, and brought both items home to sit in our garage. Christmas came and went, dozens of new toys and gadgets had to be assembled and trash hauled etc, and so the mailbox still sat, unopened, in the garage. Last weekend however, with the winter weather eerily mild (is it global warming or global melting?), we decided to rip out the old mailbox and go for it.

I assembled the tools required, opened the box, consulted the half page of instructions and tried to ascertain which screws were which (I hate instructions where there isn’t an actual size picture of the screw to help sort them) and began to build my new masterpiece. I took breaks from trying to put screws into the metal pole, by beginning to dig the hole. Let me say here, that when the instructions say “dig a hole 20 inches by 9 inches,” they really mean it. I thought…twenty inches deep okay, but do I really want it that big around? While my wife was driving to the nearest Home Improvement center to buy a bag of concrete (see that little picture on the box that indicates an 80 pound bag will be necessary?) I finished digging the hole and assembling the pole and mailbox.

As if on cue, she returned with the concrete mix, we quickly mixed it up in the wheelbarrow, I built supports to hold the pole level and shoveled in the concrete. This is when I found that one 80 pound bag of concrete will not fit in a 20 inch by oh-six-or-so inch hole. Fortunately, my wife did not give me one of those, “you didn’t follow the instructions” looks, happy as she was that after two and a half years we were finally getting a new mailbox, and what’s thirteen pounds of concrete more or less in a happy marriage?

So she stood back and looked at our work with satisfaction while I found someplace to use the extra concrete. Then we cleaned up and went inside to wait the “24 hours or more for concrete to cure” so that I could remove the forms. Then it began to rain. A lot. All night.

We’ve had drought conditions all summer and all fall, and on the one mild day of winter when I go out and dig the wrong size hole and pour not enough concrete into it so that my wife can have a new mailbox that doesn’t match the neighbor’s or overshadow the neighbor’s or look as tacky as our old one or break our budget (not that I have any issues with this project), it rains. Typical. I mean, really.

Today, two days after we installed the mailbox, I finally removed the forms and the concrete was solid, but damp. The new mailbox looks great. I think it should last about ten years, or at the rate I’d likely get to it, fifteen. Add to project list, replace mailbox, project number 1368.

So I’m finishing my basement.  That is to say, it was never really started until I got to it.  Bare concrete, a few studs in place, and the roughed-in plumbing.  We want to increase the size of our livable space by putting in a few things, like walls and electricity, and oh, plumbing.

I had almost completed all the walls myself (that is why they call it do it yourself) when I decided to get a professional in to look at the work so that the plumbing would be sure to do important things like connect to the sinks and toilets.  Sadly, I learned that one wall was three inches too close to the spot where the toilet would have to be.   Happily, I learned it before I wired it or put in ductwork.

With hammer in hand and a look of pure disgust on my face, I spent an hour taking down the wall that I had just recently put up.   In future I must remember thirteen inches from the center of the drainpipe to the back wall.  Who knew?