Steve Zoma

I’ve mowed the sides of the road for years and when I saw a do not now sign I respected it.

I still had people complain but they have passed laws now that make impeding a minimal worker a major offense. Most times it was on their side of things as here the town owns 33 ft from the center of the roadway.

I do not recommend putting in steel bars because that would be considered a Fuo or Fixed unmovable Object. If the mower gets destroyed on town property YOU WILL BE PAYING for the repair.
Worse yet, if a car crashes and the occupant is impaled you are going to prison for negligence causing death.

Toothpicks work in screw holes.

I had a door latch where the screw hole had been wallowed out and would no longer hold a screw. I dipped some toothpicks in white glue and put several into the hole tapping them tight with a hammer. Then I cut off the toothpicks flush. The screw then gripped perfectly.

It works because the screw wedges the toothpicks against one another.

The toothpicks cost me $3 but having a functioning door handle on my front door is priceless

Steve Zoma wrote:I am building my wife a jewelry box out of flame birch. It was going well then I hit a few snags and so I put it aside for now but need to get back to building it again.

Here is a picture of that flame birch jewelry box

When I was logging there was hardwood for the paper mills and hardwood for firewood buyers. The firewood people were demanding but rightfully so. The trees had to be no bigger than a foot on the butt, clean and thus iterated through the mud. They had to be of the higher btu trees like yellow birch, beech or maple and not ash, basswood or popil. Tops had to be no smaller than 4 inches. And for this I got $20 more per cord.

The paper mills would take anything up to 20 inches. Anything over that was typically log anyway and went to a sawmill, but if it couldn’t it was left in the wood for it, just no market for it.

But struggling to put huge rounds of wood on a splitter is something few people do. Most people want to split their wood four ways or in half. Breaking your back to lift huge pieces of wood makes no sense, nor does whittling down a huge chunk to lots of smaller sizes.

But this is in the Northeast.

I am building my wife a jewelry box out of flame birch. It was going well then I hit a few snags and so I put it aside for now but need to get back to building it again.

Since our bodies are essentially batteries I have tried to maintain a better potassium/sodium balance since that is what generates our electrical pulses for our brain and heart.

I also hike daily 7 to 9 miles per day and whenever possible hike barefoot so I am grounded. But “whenever possible” is a pretty vague term because it was windy and raw out yesterday at 34 degrees (1 degree celcious) but while the trail was a boring, it was a mowed path so I hiked it barefoot. It was 2.86 miles.

I am okay on most forest paths, board walk paths without chicken wire, and smooth bedrock, but cannot hike on graveled paths due to sharp rocks. I typically hike at least a half mile per day barefoot so I am grounded, or stopping for lunch I might go barefoot so I am grounded while I pause for a lunch break. So I ground for 20-30 minutes per day typically.

I seem to sleep better and my joints are not so painful from it.

I am building a new kitchen myself and figured I would just get white plastic countertop material. But I live on an island and few places deliver here.

But you can mix white paint with epoxy or polyurethane and get the same thing so I am going with that.

But I have had cedar and pine butcher block, granite and concrete countertops, and plastic laminate. I would not recommend granite or concrete countertops.

Wow, that would be beautiful as a stained glass window as well!

Have you ever got into that form of art Raven? You would do well drawing your own window designs for sure!