|
|
|
a somewhat ridiculous place for a vise
Sunday, August 26 2018
While Gretchen and Neville the Dog were off working at the bookstore in Woodstock, I did a few little tasks on the screened-in porch. I made a fussy last-minute edit to the way pieces of lumber come together at the southeast corner and then tackled a few difficult painting chores. I particularly wanted to complete the painting of the outside of the girder, which is just under the roof facing east. To get up high enough, I had to use a proper extension ladder. Unfortunately, this did not place me above the diffuse cloud of mosquitoes that seem to comprise the bulk of flying insects at this time of year. Interestingly, I find that the more exposure I get to mosquito bites, the less irritating they seem to be. They're still terribly unpleasant, but it's actually possible to get work done while being ruthlessly attacked.
Gretchen has been nagging me to do further cleanup and junk removal from the garage, a project that no longer excites me. But to humor her, today I thought I'd go through the motions and find some low-hanging "fruit" to throw away: the back seat from the Honda Civic hatchback that Gretchen wrecked in 2008, a large black plastic cube of that same Honda's ventillation system, and various pieces of styrofoam packing systems that I'd once thought I might be able to use to insulate something.
There was a also a very large vise I'd bought many years ago at a yard sale taking up room on the floor. It was missing its swivel base, so to mount it on anything I was going to have to contend with the odd shape of its underside. A large vise is useful in many scenarios, particularly when it's bolted to something solid. There weren't any conveniently solid surfaces available in the garage, where I already have a smaller vise set up (and there's also a small vise in the one plausible place in the laboratory). So I thought I'd attached it to one of the stout four by fours holding up the roof of the woodshed. At first I thought I could carve into the corner of that four by four in hopes of accommodating the bottom of the vise and having the attachment bolts go through a solid part of the lumber, but I quickly realized that unless those holes went through the center, it was likely that even mild use of the vise would result in the splitting of that four by four. I ended up using the table saw and bandsaw to mill myself a little base from a piece of two by six. It provided little voids for the weird structures on the underside of the vise to go, allowing me to then bolt it solidly to the four by four. The result is a little ridiculous, and I might not have much use for a vise in this location. But at least it is out of the damn garage!
Food-wise, today I lived entirely on leftover spaghetti and pizza from Di Bella. That pizza wasn't as good cold as I expected it to be; this was probably because of the vegan cheese, which seemed to be Daiya.
This evening as Gretchen and I watched another episode of Better Call Saul, Ramona aggressively licked my legs for something like fifteen minutes. She was enjoying all the little scabs and bits of oozing blood serum from the dozens of mosquito bites I'd accumulated over the past several days. Later I took a bath, which is always a good course of action when one has a minor, widespread skin condition.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180826 feedback
previous | next |
