Tag Archives: home made Italian bread (vegan)

2014/09/02 (T) No More Painting

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After breakfast Linda worked on the financial and membership records for our GLCC RV chapter and I took care of a couple of e-mails.  Keith showed up to cut the grass, which he managed to do in spite of the wet conditions from yesterday’s heavy rains.  After chatting with Keith for a few minutes I started to resume work on “the project” but decided to look for the tub of grass seed and fertilizer we brought from the old house.  I found it rather quickly and we still had a partial bag of grass seed, so I spread it around the front yard by hand filling in the bare and thin spots, of which there were plenty.  Our flock of wild turkeys was back today.  I think they like the grass seed I put out for them.

Wild turkeys gather in and around the fire pit. No...we do plan to cook them.

Wild turkeys gather in and around the fire pit. No…we do not plan to cook them.

I sanded the drywall compound in the library and applied another thin layer.  I’ve been applying non-overlapping horizontal strips of mud, letting them dry, sanding them smooth while feathering the edges, then repeating the process for the areas in-between, or outside, the previous strips.  I will eventually turn this 90 degrees and apply the strips vertically.  The last set of steps will be to fill around the outside of the opening, feathering everything back to the existing wall surface and sanding it smooth with the central part of the patch.  We don’t want it to be obvious that there was ever a hole in the wall.  Once the drywall patching is done I have to prime the new compound and then paint the entire wall.

The paint on the east wall of the garage and the outside of the utility closet looked good and the paint on the inside of the utility closet looked good enough; it is, after all, the inside of a furnace closet.  I was done painting, at least for now, which should have felt like a big deal, but it just meant I could wrap up a couple of things and move on to the next thing.

The first thing was to mount the electrical box on the wall to the left of the library HVAC unit, make all the wiring connections, screw the switch into the box, and put on the cover plate.  I routed the thermostat wire alongside, and zip-tied it to, the armored AC power cable.  The second thing was preparing the mounting holes for the garage furnace thermostat on the outside of the utility closet wall.  I then cut the thermostat cable to the correct length beyond the wall, removed the outer sheath, stripped the ends of the wires, and secured the cable with a zip tie to prevent it from slipping back into the wall.  I did not actually mount the thermostat, however, since I was going to wait for Darryll to connect the wires.

Three adults and three young. They are large and impressive birds.

Three adults and three young. They are large and impressive birds.

By then it was time for lunch, after which Linda left for her dentist appointment in Dearborn.  I wanted something easy to do, so I assembled the three plastic shelving units I bought at Lowe’s yesterday.  They went together easily, but one was missing the feet, top caps, and wall brackets and another one had a defective top cap.  I put them against the east wall of the garage and the floor was flat enough that they lined up well, so I don’t necessarily need the feet.  But the top caps are important, and it bugs me that I did not get everything I paid for.

The next thing I decided to tackle was the wood box in the utility closet that will enclose the electrical sub-panel and make it appear to be recessed and hide all of the electrical cables.  I cleared off the table we have been using to work on sheets of drywall and stood the scrap pieces of drywall against the back wall.  I got the two 8-foot 1×10’s I bought yesterday, put them on the table, made careful measurements and then marked them.  The two side pieces needed to be 52″ long x 7-1/4″ wide, with notches to create clearance for the top plate, horizontal blocking, and electrical cables passing through holes in studs.  I cut them to length with the Rockwell circular saw, and then ripped them to width using the Craftsman band saw.  The band saw had not been used in years but it had no problem ripping each board.  The notches were made with our Porter-Cable saber saw.  This kind of work is a pleasure when you have the right tools.

I screwed the two side pieces into place and then measured and cut a bottom cross member, and a trim strip to go below it, and installed those with screws.  I then cut a top cross member and a backing strip to go behind it between the two side pieces.  When I was done I had a box that would support a 48″ high by 33″ wide 1/4″ thick plywood panel with the outside face flush with the front edge of the sub-panel once I cut a rectangular opening in the plywood to allow it to fit around the box.  The plywood panel will be secured around the edges with a few screws and the sub-panel cover plate will overlap and cover any gap between the panel box and the opening in the plywood.  I will finish the plywood panel tomorrow or Thursday depending on when Darryll returns and how much I have to work with him to get the power connected to the new A-C compressor.

Jasper the cat in the kitty tent on the deck. He spends a lot time looking around and sniffing the air when he is out here.

Jasper the cat in the kitty tent on the deck. He spends a lot time looking around and sniffing the air when he is out here.

That was the end of my project work for the day so I took a shower and put on some clean clothes.  Linda poured a couple glasses of wine and we sat on the deck and enjoyed an absolutely beautiful late summer Michigan evening.  We brought the kitty tent out so Jasper could sit outside with us.  Linda threw a green salad together, followed by the leftovers of the penne pasta dish and Italian bread she made for dinner on Saturday.  As twilight set in we moved inside and I decided to go to Lowe’s for some grass seed.  I figured if the soil was still moist first thing tomorrow morning I would spread it around the bare and thin areas in the back and on the west side of the garage, of which there are plenty. Otherwise I will wait until just after the next rain.

I started reading Big Lake Scandal last night and continued with it this evening.  It’s the 5th and latest book in the Big Lake murder mystery series by full-time RVer Nick Russell.  Nick is a good writer, but he and his wife, Terry, are personal acquaintances, which makes reading his books that much more fun.

 

2014/09/01 (M) A Day To Labor

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One of the odd things about being “retired” is that holidays, like weekends, do not have the same significance they had when we were employed full time.  We no longer have “3-day weekends.”  We also do not have a tradition in our family of gathering on the summer holidays, so those days tend to blend into the days around them.  If not for our Saturday morning ham radio breakfast and the Sunday morning Howell Farmers Market we probably would not know what day of the week it was.

Knowing that today was Labor Day, Linda prepared vegan cinnamon rolls yesterday and baked them first thing this morning.  This was the first time she has made these and they were a real treat. Vegan, yes; whole plant-based food, not exactly.  These will be a rare treat for us.

As has been my pattern for the last few weeks, I sanded and touched up drywall first thing after breakfast.  Most of the drywall compound was finally smooth enough that I felt it was ready to prime.  I discovered that I was out of primer, so I went to Lowe’s to get some and picked up a few other things while I was there.  It was very humid today, which tends to slow the drying of paint, but primer is thinner than paint and gets absorbed into the paper drywall covering   I was hopeful that I might get a first coat of paint applied this evening.

Mike (W8XH) sent an e-mail Saturday evening to the members of the SLAARC announcing the availability of the new WordPress website and indicating that they would each be receiving a unique username and password from me in the next few days.  I wanted to wait at least 24 hours before I started creating users.  That waiting period had passed, so today I parked myself in front of my computer and registered users.

Part of the registration process required me to create a username.  That was easy for a ham radio club as (almost) everyone has an FCC call sign.  It also required a valid/unique e-mail address.  When I created an account an e-mail, with their username and a randomly generated password, got sent to the e-mail address I entered.  The e-mail also contained instructions on how to get to the website, how to login, and how to change their password.  I finished creating the last user account around 9 PM, but I did not work on this between 5 PM and 8 PM.

The vegan cinnamon rolls made for a filing and somewhat higher calorie breakfast, so we skipped lunch today and had an early dinner.  I had requested a picnic type of meal to celebrate the end of the summer tourist season, and Linda fixed a nice one.  We had vegan potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, and pan-grilled tofu slices with BBQ sauce and caramelized onions served open-faced on some of the Italian bread she made for dinner on Saturday.  Dessert was watermelon balls.  And the wonderful thing is that I am maintaining a good weight.  Eating well and eating healthy are not mutually exclusive.  However, like low-fat and fat-free foods, and then gluten-free foods, the processed food industry has discovered a “market” for foods that are free of animal products.  That, however, does not mean they are free of unpronounceable chemicals or excessive amounts of sugar and salt.  There is a growing amount of vegan junk food available in the marketplace.

We spent a little time after dinner on the back deck watching wildlife as a storm front approached from the west.  As the wind kicked up we lost our AT&T DSL connection and then our phone went out, exhibiting the same behavior we have had throughout most of August.  I shut down my computer and changed back into my work clothes to do some painting.  I put a coat of paint on the east wall of the garage and both the inside and outside of the utility closet.  It started raining really hard so I had to close the garage door, which cut down on my light, but eventually the rain let up and I was able to open the garage doors again.  The inside of the utility closet may need another coat, but I think that most of the outside of the closet, and the east wall of the garage, may be done.  That means I can finally mount the thermostat for the garage furnace and put cover plates back on switches and outlets.

I am still working on the outside of the south wall of the utility closet (with the door).  I am using drywall compound to create a smooth transition at the hinge edge of the door to correct for a carpentry error I made when installing the door much earlier in the project.  The transition will make it possible for me to install trim around the door, but I have to build up the transition in thin, tapered layers, allow it to dry, sand it smooth, and repeat the process over, and over, and over.  Ditto for the west wall of the library, which is the other side of the east wall of the garage, where I am building up a slightly recessed area where the opening was for the old window A-C unit so it will blend in with the surrounding wall surface.

2014/08/30 (S) By All Accounts

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We went to the weekly SLAARC breakfast this morning.  We stopped on the way back to the house to get a food processor.  I shut down my ASUS laptop PC, packed it for travel, and headed for Mike’s (W8XH) QTH; the first time it has been out of the house since I bought it at the end of April.

I worked with Mike on the new SLAARC WordPress website, walking him back through the process of creating photo galleries.  He then uploaded pictures from the 2014 Field Day event, added captions to some of them, and created photo galleries.

I was going to create user accounts, but that turned out to still be a bit premature.  In showing Mike around the site we discovered that the home page login widget for the WP-Members plug-in was not working correctly.  It was last night, but that was before I installed the Global Hide Admin Toolbar plug-in.  Suspecting a minor incompatibility (although the site did not crash, thank goodness) I had to engineer a work-around.  The problem and solution turned out to be multifaceted.

One aspect of the problem was that we needed to remove the WP-Members widget from the Home screen, but it was the only place where a logged in user could log out.  Another aspect of the problem was the realization that users would have to click on one of the pages in the Member Only Area to get a login screen that would actually log them into the site and allow them to navigate wherever they wanted.

One facet of the solution was to create a new page that would appear at the right hand end of the main menu bar and place the WP-Members widget on that page.  It was not immediately obvious to me how to do this, or if we even could, but I eventually figured it out.  That provided something on the main menu bar, which remains visible at all times, where users can go to logout.  (They should also be able to log in there, but it’s the same widget that didn’t work correctly on the Home page.)

The other facets of the solution involved editing the e-mail that gets sent to a new user when their account is created and editing the User’s Guide, both of which describe the login and logout procedure.  As long as I had to create and upload a new version of the User’s a Guide, I decided to put the link on its own page so it would show up in the menu structure and be easier for members to find.  I did the same thing with the links to the official club roster documents.  Adding those two page then required me to edit two pages to remove the old links.  As the saying goes “it’s a process.”

Mike was still creating photo galleries so I drafted a notification e-mail for him to send to the members and sent it to him.  He had to leave to run an errand right after I left and planned to deal with sending the e-mail later that evening.  I will wait at least 24 hours after he sends it before I start creating user accounts.

I was back home in time to relax and work on this post before John and Diane arrived around 5 PM to visit and have dinner.  They brought a salad that Diane made and two bottles of wine; a sweet Shiraz that was unusual but delightful, and a more traditional Cabernet Sauvignon.  Linda made a penne pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and mushrooms, and made Italian bread from scratch.  She also made the chilled no-bake double chocolate torte for dessert.  It was so good everyone had a second piece.

Diane now has an iPad Mini and Linda spent time with her after dinner helping her configure some things.  They also managed to get connected through the iMessage feature.  Storms rolled in around 9 PM and we had brief periods of heavy rain and diffuse lightning all around.  There was a lull in the weather just before 11 PM so they gathered up their things and hit the road.  I cleared the table and Linda loaded the dishwasher.  She started it and then we were off to bed, tired from a long but very satisfying day.