11.12.2009

Goodbye!

Today’s the last day of blog … goodbye!

It’s been a great year. My house is a lot more livable now than it was a year ago, and it’s still getting better (albeit slowly). I had a fantastic time having Wyatt up to visit for a good chunk of the year. I brewed my first ever batch of beer. Got a respectable amount of baking done considering how many months I lived without a kitchen. Tapped some syrup and planted a few fruit trees. Floated peacefully past a beautiful scene in the boundary waters gazing at a lone wolf on the shore until I broke the silence by shouting at Karl and Megan to look over at it, and scared it away 🙂 Had lots of adventures with plenty of excellent folks.

It’s been great fun having people reading and posting comments. Thank you all!! It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without you.

I will now add to my list of projects printing these things and binding them. I shall tentatively plan to do the same thing again in ten years.

Thanks again for reading, and Cheers!!

Josh.

11.11.2009

Simone at Sauce with the Blood Sugars.

Went out to a new place, “Sauce,” on Lake & Lyndale with Simone, Jess, & a few of Simone’s friends from NY. One of Simone’s friends from childhood is in a band called the Blood Sugars who played tonight. They weren’t the headliners but weren’t the openers either, and I didn’t stay long enough to see their set start.

Today was Simone’s anniversary of moving to Minneapolis. Three years? Can that be right? Seems like it should be more. She’s gotten around quite a bit in the state for a newcomer … several trips to Bovey under her belt, and all.

Sauce wasn’t a bad place. I’d go back.

11.10.2009

Sarah making dinner.

Sarah came over tonight to make risotto. She made a recipe she got from her mother. Delicious.

We drank the 2^nd bottle of the wine Pris sent up a while back – the white. It was good. I think the red was the better of that batch, although this one was a hair sweet, and I have a sweet-tooth, so I liked that. I made a couple of little brown-sugar-and-brandy sauced apple tartlets. The Wedge had good apples this past week. I was pleased with how they came out.

Tapping Holes

This afternoon I went to Bauer Brothers salvage yard to buy a door-knob for my bedroom. I sorted through the bins of miscellany there to find what I wanted and headed back to the loading dock to find someone to quote me a price.

Some of the folks at Bauer Brothers seem to over-value door-knobs for some reason, so I was prepared for a bit of haggling. I walked up to the floor manager and asked how much.

“A million dollars,” he jested.

I laughed, and he came down quite a bit.

“Ten bucks.”

I thought that even ten was unreasonable, so I pointed to a knob and said that the threads on the little screw-hole that secures the knob to the spindle were stripped.

“I’ll have to tap this hole,” I bargained, “Give it to me for five bucks.”

“Seven-fifty,” replied the floor guy. He was standing in a group of workers on the dock, shooting the shit. Apparently no one was doing any real work just then.

I pointed at the other knob.

“Both of these holes are stripped. I’m going to have to tap two holes!” I insisted. “That’s worth $2.50 a hole. Five bucks.”

At that juncture an older guy stepped from behind a big bit of HVAC equipment and smirked.

“If you’re going to be tapping holes, it’s you should be paying us!” he quipped.

Everyone on the loading dock erupted into laughter. Per my usual, it took me several beats to get the joke.

Oh, yeah. Tapping holes. I ought to pay them. After a long, confused stare, I caught onto the warehouse humor and made some remark that I didn’t know they were in that line of business, that I thought I’d have to venture a little farther west on Broadway for that sort of thing, etc. etc.

The floor manager took pity on me at that point and called up to the cash register to tell them to sell me the thing for five bucks.

When I got home I tapped 5/16″ threads in the two knobs, as promised, and found a bit of scrap brass shaft from an old bathroom fixture that happened to be the right size. I put some threads on the shaft and cut a couple of small lengths of screw off of it.

Now I don’t have to open my bedroom door with a screwdriver anymore. It’s been months since I’ve had a knob on there.¹ It’s great.

I wonder, if I had been quicker to catch the jest, whether that would have raised or lowered the price.

¹I had to re-arranged some doors back around May when Adam / Joey / Wyatt moved in. The re-arranging involved pirating my bedroom door-knob for one of the doors on the first floor, and I hadn’t replaced it since.

11.9.2009

Holiday Gas Station in Rogers, Minnesota.

Drove to Brainerd early this morning. This is my usual gas / Red Bull stop. (I’ve been drinking quite a bit less Red Bull lately, for whatever reason. Probably a good sign.)

It was a fairly short day in court – morning calendar only – so I drove back to the TC in the afternoon. Hung out with Andrew @ the Tea Garden for a while before an Omega board meeting.

11.8.2009

I am rich.

Grease be dammed! I shall make my fortune on returnable-bottle futures.

Cedar Summit Farms increased the deposit on their returnables from $1.50 to $2.00 sometime during the past year. I had a ton of their bottles from way back when they were cheap, but the Wedge cashier insisted on giving me $2.00 per bottle.

I think I has five bottles from a different creamery that still paid the meager $1.50. I got a whopping total of $41.50 in crisp, clean cash in exchange for my bottle stash. If I’m doing the math correctly, and if all my cedar summit bottles were purchased at a time when the deposit was $1.50, I made a tidy $8.50 in profit.

I don’t keep track, but I suspect our currency may have gone to hell in the time it took me to successfully speculate on the bottle-futures market. I’m not sure how that impacts my bottom line. Regardless, a $0.50 profit on every $1.50 of outlay over the course if a single year seems like a win to me.

Sarah and I spent the best Sunday ever. First, a nice late breakfast here. Now that my house is empty of Wyatt and Junior I’m digging out from under a mountain of canned food they left behind. Today’s breakfast included canned refried beans of unknown origin, but Sarah lavished praise on it all the same.

After that, Kopplin’s for coffee and snacks, and then a run around the Mississippi River Parkway / Lake Street / Ford Parkway Bridge loop.

Delightful.

11.7.2009

Coffee grinding!

Tom got a dumpster-load of peace-coffee a while back – apparently it was slightly over-roasted. Anyways, we’ve got lotsa, lotsa beans, but no decent grinders. People wanted coffee, so Rachel, Nick, and Sharon spent a while using the couple of hand grinders that were lying around to try and crack up some beans. It didn’t look easy.

The Pearsons, some neighbors and kids of neighbors, generally hunt up at the farm, and hunting season is coming up. This year we asked if they’d help us split some wood in exchange for hunting, which they did. They hauled over their power splitter and split around a cord of aspen for next year and a big maple log that should be dry enough to burn this winter.

I woke up from a nap just as the chimney-sweeping got underway. Being inside and upstairs I had an advantage and I clambered out the window to be the first one on the roof. Owing to my excellent timing, I got to be chimney-sweep. Fun.

In the evening I drove back from the farm and came home. Eoin and Sarah came over to play Scrabble and Bananagrams. I managed to eke out a win at Scrabble – the first game I’ve played with Sarah where she hasn’t kicked my ass. I was put back in my place when Sarah and Eoin clobbered me in Bananagrams.

11.6.2009

Nick and Rachel

Drove from Brainerd to the farm this evening to hang out for part of the weekend. Had fun with the gps in my phone on the way there. Took a route I’d never been on before & used it to tell me where to turn, etc.

Nick and Rachel got there a minute after I did. Nick brought a giant roasted beet and made some salad. We sat around the stove and chatted for a bit. Rachel has a plot in the Omega garden.

Sharon came a bit later on. Tomorrow we’ll putter around the farm, clean up the garden for the winter, etc. I slept downstairs and stoked the fire.