Ahoy!
Life hath been busy. Summer tends to do that to me. There's so much I simply have to do in addition to my regular duties - take walks, go to the park to sword fight, eat ice cream... even mow the lawn once in a while.
Be that as it may, I have finally managed to reach the 'new post' button. It was an amazing feat of endurance and valour. But I achieved it.
*applause*
Anyway.
I've got a couple of pictures today. There won't be much of a story, I'm afraid - if you really want the story, basically July was still full time at work and I was too wimpy to deal with the hordes of vampire bugs that haunt the hobbit house in the evenings. Fortunately, they're starting to dope up again, although they are getting more desperate - the result is kamikaze mosquitos who draw blood and then go shmuck. A lose-lose situation all around.
So now that I'm back from chuckleberry town (which was awesome!) and hours at work have finally dropped, I'll really be able to get down to work. I had the last three days off and put in about seven hours for the last two (the first one was mostly spent making a sword and a back shield for Belegarth. Behold! This is what I have accomplished:
As you can not quite see, the posts and beams are all finished. I started work on the roof today. Very annoying to have to work out all the angles and math and stuff - I've been using the pythagorean theorem and stuff too (which was one of the only things in math past grade 8 that I ever thought I would use. The other was basic slope formulae, which I've also been using in this.)
That big post thing in the middle is my leaning post. The idea is to lean the first rafter on this, and the second one on the first, etc., and slip the last one in under the first one. Then comes the moment of truth where you kick the leaning post out, and if you did it right, the whole roof creaks and sinks an inch or two and catches itself. If you didn't, you've got a big mess to clean up, or somebody else does if you were under it.
The roof will take a little longer than I thought (story of my hobbit house). I've discovered that the poles I was planning on using for rafters aren't quite strong enough - at 14 feet long they can't take my weight standing in the middle. That might seem a little harsh, seeing as none of them will be longer than about 10, but I figure that once I've got soil and straw bales and everything else on the roof, I won't be able to walk on it for fear of collapsing it.
So I've started harvesting some bigger trees - 5'' to 6'' in diameter as opposed to 4'', and I think they'll do the job. They feel good and strong. I guess we'll see.
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| My front door - not looking so good for the round style. |
This was another of my random ideas from a few days ago. I kind of regret it now - if I'd been thinking I could have come up with tons of reasons not to trash a perfectly good board. On the bright side, I've discovered that I'm fairly accurate with a throwing hatchet, although I haven't got the spin quite figured out. So if a bear comes after me, I'll probably hit him, but I have a 75% chance of just making him Really mad.
Speaking of which, I had my first visit from a bear today. He moves a lot quieter than the deer I usually see down there. I realized too late that the axe, the machete, and the sledgehammer were all closer to him that I was, but I needn't have worried. He just ducked his head like he'd just walked in on somebody in the washroom and turned around and left. It took me about a minute to really understand that I'd just seen a bear and another one to discover that I didn't actually feel scared or threatened. He was very polite - kind of like a totally ripped black lab.
