Beeswax, torch, dog run
I'm melting and filtering beeswax tonight and man, is it sticky. It looked so clean and white when I took it out of the hive, but now that it's all melted down there's all this fine brown ... stuff ... I don't know what all is in it (besides dead ants and bee hair), but when I pour it through the filter about an eighth of the volume of what I've melted ends up being this substance that sticks in the filter like dust, only all melted together with sticky wax. I started out with a half gallon Ziploc bag full of wax flakes, and have ended up with a solid slab of beautiful pure beeswax about four by four by a half inch. Nice.
Last week I forgot to mention that I did get a torch and practice firing some of those PMC pieces with it. As I feared, I ruined the first piece – melted the detail right out of it, and then decided to go ahead and see how much more I could melt it, just to get a feel for the torch. The top of the piece went from flat to round, leaving me with a half inch square solid silver cabochon that I embellished with files and metal stamps. It actually turned out kind of cool once I polished it up. No idea what I'm going to do with it, but eventually something will come to me. And it was fun to play with those metal stamps again. I bought a bunch of different sizes when I was learning silversmithing and haven't done anything with them for at least four years. You can stamp little words and sentences into almost anything metal with them – tools, lawn mowers, mailboxes, lids of canning jars ... whatever.
Anyway, after that first item I did get the hang of it and am now pretty confident I can torch fire at least the little pieces without destroying them. So, no need to buy a kiln, which means more money for supplies and tools. Yay! I love tools.
Other news of the boring: I accidentally bit the inside of my bottom lip yesterday, and today I started counting how many times I bit it again, and lost track after 12. The last time I bit it so hard I actually sank to my knees on the kitchen floor and cried for about a half a minute, I was so mad. It's now so swollen I may have to go on a liquid diet until it heals – every time I try to eat something, I bite it again.
I have also wiped muddy dog footprints off the kitchen floor at least 12 times in the last two hours. I had decided to kind of let it go for a few days last week, and finally today I had had it – the floor just inside the dog door was disgustingly black with dried mud, with footprints all the way across to the living room ... I spent a half hour on my hands and knees scrubbing. Of course, within minutes it was dirty again, though not as dirty as before. The good news is, I think I almost have Mr. A convinced that we really should route the dog door through the garage first, and THEN into the kitchen – instead of directly into the kitchen – because then we could set up a whole automatic dog foot cleaning system that they would have to walk across to get into the house. As it is, we have little mats on the back step and also inside the door, but there isn't room to set up anything really effective.
I also told him my latest great idea for the yard – about how instead of letting the dogs have 24-7 free access to the entire fenced area of the back yard, we could create a separate, smaller dog run area on one side of the yard and route their outdoor access through the garage and into the dog run. I've been campaigning to move the fence back about 50-100 more feet to make the enclosed part of the property bigger and the fenceline less visible from the house, but Mr. A doesn't want the dogs to be able to get that close to the neighbors house – he envisions them standing at the fence and barking at deer and raccoons all night, and us having to slog all the way back there in the dark to drag them back in, which I have to admit I can imagine happening, too.
With a dog run we'd have the option of limiting their outdoor access whenever we want, like at night, and we could always leave the gate open to the rest of the yard when we wanted to give them more space. It'd be nice to have a smaller area to patrol for dog poop, and we're going to need a smaller, puppy-safe area next year anyway. Plus, if we lay down a load of wood chips or some other dog park type of ground cover, I think we can do a lot to minimize mud in the house during the rainy season.
So that's my latest brainstorm. I think he likes the idea. For now, I've pledged to be vigilant in my defense of the floor, and wipe up the footprints every time I see them. Not that I don't have anything better to do with my Saturday nights!
Last week I forgot to mention that I did get a torch and practice firing some of those PMC pieces with it. As I feared, I ruined the first piece – melted the detail right out of it, and then decided to go ahead and see how much more I could melt it, just to get a feel for the torch. The top of the piece went from flat to round, leaving me with a half inch square solid silver cabochon that I embellished with files and metal stamps. It actually turned out kind of cool once I polished it up. No idea what I'm going to do with it, but eventually something will come to me. And it was fun to play with those metal stamps again. I bought a bunch of different sizes when I was learning silversmithing and haven't done anything with them for at least four years. You can stamp little words and sentences into almost anything metal with them – tools, lawn mowers, mailboxes, lids of canning jars ... whatever.
Anyway, after that first item I did get the hang of it and am now pretty confident I can torch fire at least the little pieces without destroying them. So, no need to buy a kiln, which means more money for supplies and tools. Yay! I love tools.
Other news of the boring: I accidentally bit the inside of my bottom lip yesterday, and today I started counting how many times I bit it again, and lost track after 12. The last time I bit it so hard I actually sank to my knees on the kitchen floor and cried for about a half a minute, I was so mad. It's now so swollen I may have to go on a liquid diet until it heals – every time I try to eat something, I bite it again.
I have also wiped muddy dog footprints off the kitchen floor at least 12 times in the last two hours. I had decided to kind of let it go for a few days last week, and finally today I had had it – the floor just inside the dog door was disgustingly black with dried mud, with footprints all the way across to the living room ... I spent a half hour on my hands and knees scrubbing. Of course, within minutes it was dirty again, though not as dirty as before. The good news is, I think I almost have Mr. A convinced that we really should route the dog door through the garage first, and THEN into the kitchen – instead of directly into the kitchen – because then we could set up a whole automatic dog foot cleaning system that they would have to walk across to get into the house. As it is, we have little mats on the back step and also inside the door, but there isn't room to set up anything really effective.
I also told him my latest great idea for the yard – about how instead of letting the dogs have 24-7 free access to the entire fenced area of the back yard, we could create a separate, smaller dog run area on one side of the yard and route their outdoor access through the garage and into the dog run. I've been campaigning to move the fence back about 50-100 more feet to make the enclosed part of the property bigger and the fenceline less visible from the house, but Mr. A doesn't want the dogs to be able to get that close to the neighbors house – he envisions them standing at the fence and barking at deer and raccoons all night, and us having to slog all the way back there in the dark to drag them back in, which I have to admit I can imagine happening, too.
With a dog run we'd have the option of limiting their outdoor access whenever we want, like at night, and we could always leave the gate open to the rest of the yard when we wanted to give them more space. It'd be nice to have a smaller area to patrol for dog poop, and we're going to need a smaller, puppy-safe area next year anyway. Plus, if we lay down a load of wood chips or some other dog park type of ground cover, I think we can do a lot to minimize mud in the house during the rainy season.
So that's my latest brainstorm. I think he likes the idea. For now, I've pledged to be vigilant in my defense of the floor, and wipe up the footprints every time I see them. Not that I don't have anything better to do with my Saturday nights!
1 Comments:
I feel your pain about muddy footprints with the 20 paws we have at our house.
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