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two storage tables and a power outage
Friday, April 30 2021
It was extremely windy today as a cold mass of dry air approached from wherever such masses form at this time of year. At a little before 3:00pm, household power died, ending my workday prematurely. I took advantage of the lack of computer-based distraction to do some chores in the real world. While Gretchen mowed the front yard for the first time this year (using a battery-powered lawn mower), I repotted some seedlings that had experienced a 70% germination rate. Then I used battery-powered tools to make two different custom wooden tables as storage solutions for prism-shaped voids in the laboratory. The first of these was to replace the flimsy shelf I'd tried to support with threaded steel pegs. It had a table surface measuring 54 by 12 inches and was supported by nineteen inch legs. Normally when I make a table, I take pains to brace the legs with diagonals so it won't wobble. For this table, though, I thought a couple L-shaped pieces of metal (with the L-shape stamped out of a piece of unbent sheet metal instead of the kind made from a bent strip of steel) and a couple scraps of angled wood were enough to provide necessary stiffness for this application, where all it would be doing would be providing deep storage for vintage keyboards. Since the power was out, I had to do all my cuts with a Ryobi battery-powered circle saw. It wasn't as precise for making orthogonal cuts as my chop saw, but I love how relatively quiet and maneuverable it is. It makes me want to use it even in places where a plug-in Skil saw would be faster. Some things aren't much improved with battery power (I'm thinking particularly of mice and keyboards), but hand tools are improved much more than I could've predicted back before I had them. (I've had battery-powered drills and screwguns since moving to Hurley in 2002, but I've only had a battery-powered circle saw for a year or two.)
The other table I made had a top surface of 40 by 12 inches and four completely-unbraced legs measuring only 3.5 inches long. This was to create a swath of storage in the prism-shaped space behind the big 40 inch 4K teevee as I use as the main monitor on Woodchuck, my main workstation. I needed a table back there with short legs to prop this storage space up above the two cardboard boxes I am using as small drawers where I keep things like pens, pencils, some pharamaceuticals, and small microcontroller projects I am working on.
Meanwhile the wind continued to gust ominously around the house. Then I heard a tree fall against the utility pole closest to the greenhouse. That tree might've been the one responsible for the ongoing power outage, and what I was hearing was it falling into a new configuration. I went down there to see what was going on and saw that the steel cable carrying electricity up Dug Hill Road had snapped and was lying on the ground. A large pine limb had actually made it to within ten feet of the greenhouse itself.
I decided to get myself a beer and go for a walk down the Farm Road to experience the peak of springtime on a cool windy late afternoon. I took a few pictures of flowers and ferns.
Back at the house, Central Hudson was still trying to figure out how to proceed with the tree hung up on their utility pole. Eventually they managed to unbolt a part of the guard rail to get one of their bucket trucks close enough, and then they could start cutting the tree into pieces from the top. They had our power back on by 7:30pm.
Ramona today looking soulful.
A fiddlehead near the Farm Road late this afternoon.
A violet in the Farm Road.
A little four-petal flower I can never identify.
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