Slow ride, take it easy
Foghat
I have a new blogging strategy – to write in the mornings while my brain is fresh rather than at the end of the day when it is reluctant to do much of anything. Who know how well it will take, but it’s worth a try.
Yesterday after writing and enjoying my coffee I got to work on my workbench project. I’m happy to report that it is just about complete. Unfortunately, while ordering materials I screwed up the quantities of a couple things and forgot a couple important screws. While I’m here I generally do my best to not leave unless it becomes essential, and when I do have to leave to combine as many errands in to one trip as I can. As a result I’ll be heading to Durango this morning, mostly to pick up a few items from Home Depot.
I did get a bit nervous when I got to step 7 which read, in its entirety “assemble the table saw module”. This was a bit surprising since the instructions up to that point had been pretty detailed. I guess the author figured that I would either know what I was doing by now, or didn’t know what I was doing to the extent that I shouldn’t be allowed to have a table saw module for my own safety. I’m happy to say that the thing I produced looks substantially similar to the provided picture, so I think I did alright. Having reached the point where I was to attach the wheels to the table saw module and realizing that I’d only ordered one single wheel, I decided it was time to conclude that project for the day and have some lunch.
After lunch I took my first longish mountain bike ride. I decided just to ride in the neighborhood and thought making it from here back to the highway would be a pretty good accomplishment. It turned out that there are some very long, very steep hills between here and there that don’t make themselves apparent in a car. On a bike, however, they are all to obvious with every push. I took my time, drank lots of water, and eventually made it the 8.5 miles there and back while taking in the views all around. I think my next ride will be at Phil’s World with its relative flatness.
One happy accident in the construction of our house is that we didn’t have a good space to put our water heater and it ended up in the garage. Since we aren’t using any gas here it needed to be electric and an air-source geothermal heater is by far the most efficient electric option. This design heats water by pulling in heat from the room it is in, venting cold air in the process. The end result is that our garage is effectively air conditioned in the summer even when the A/C is turned off in the house. This lead to me spending an hour in the garage when I got home from my riding working on another project on the list.
I took the rest of the day to engage in some hobbies that I haven’t had much time with since arriving – playing ukulele and crochet. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want!
