Alrighty.
I’ve been working on installing wall-mounted shelves in my new dining room, but it’s taking me forever.
I had to paint all the metal parts- that’s 7 x 100" of uprights and ~40 shelf brackets. That means de-stickering, sanding, painting (all the sides!) and finding a place warm for them to dry and cure. Great.
Shelves are built, but staining them is turning into a pain- the stain we got is really thick, and it’s a paint-on-wipe-off deal, and I’m not sure I’m liking it. In fact, I may abandon it and get something else. Then (after staining), I get to layer on polyurethane. In the winter. So that’ll be fun. But I need the freaking thing done already.
Ugh.
I’ve gotten virtually no other useful projects done in the meantime- besides tuning some of my bikes for (maybe) riding in the upcoming spring. I need to overhaul the suspension forks and whatnot before any really serious riding, too.
The list is too long.
Update: I made another accessory. With a super high-tech self-balancing mechanism even! (I glued some fishing weights inside a ball).
ETA: here are the two together. The birthday present was a hit!
Is this one of the little spore’s characters? Sure is one of my son’s favorites.
You use Testors paints? Well if you are not adding a clear coat that will last longer but such a pain to work with compared darn near anything else out there. Otherwise that some nice work.
Test flight of the FT Arrow: launches easy, lands easy, flew beautifully right up until the heat of the motor softened the glue holding the firewall in place and the motor/prop assembly fell off. Oops.
It glides well, fortunately. 
Repaired with a more heat-resistant glue and some twist-tie safety straps.
Just made some stuffed animals for a rainy day project. My kids did the conceptual design work for the sock monster and the bat.
I’m afraid that I had to make the ultimate sacrifice in the process of making them though. (It’s OK, I have a spare.)
My knitterly friends all swear that knitting really helps with their mental health. I believe them, for the same reason the “relaxation response” is known to work.
My landline connects through the modem (probably to force me to pay for more than one service). If the power is off or the modem stops working for some reason, I get nothing. My mobile is much more reliable.
Are you sure that’s not a VOIP line?
If you have a modem, there should be a phone jack in the wall that it plugs into (as well as an electrical outlet). You can get an attachment that turns one phone jack into two, so that your land line is attached to the phone jack directly, not the modem. Then it would work like a landline.
I have cable internet, and everything goes through the cable connection. There are telephone sockets in the house, but they’ve been cut off from the system. I agree that traditional landlines are still useful (and my in-laws get a lot of use out of whatever it is that we’ve got), but what we’ve got loses a lot of those benefits (and I’ve had much more reliable modems in the past too, TBH)
I made a small batch of soy candles the other day because my brother wanted to learn. These are actually supposed to be yellow. Not quite sure what I did wrong but I suspect using more dye would have prevented it. They do, embarrassingly, turn a bit yellow around the edges when you burn them. 
Even more embarrassing, we gave one as a gift before realizing it would turn colors like that when burned. 
Other than that, they went well.
Then you don’t have a landline, you have VOIP. (Voice Over Internet Protocol, I think)
That was exactly my point! Landlines have not been fully replaced yet.
I’ve failed you, crafting thread.
I got some beeswax I’d ordered, so I’ve made a couple of batches of hair pomade. Second batch is better, but I need to keep working on it. Not creamy enough, yet.
Got some raw wool in, so I’ve been experimenting with darning socks with felted wool. So far? Maybe.
I continue to do battle with the shelve install from hell- finding my power sander was a win of a battle, but the stain we’ve chosen may yet win the war.
Bookshelves Phase 1 are done and they look great.
Mostly plywood with a stained wood edge attached to the front to finish them off. The stain mostly matches the newel post at the adjacent stairs.
The tricky bit was reusing the baseboard that had been on the wall behind, we wanted these to look original and were really careful to disassemble and reassemble, have a look at the corner:
The original baseboard did have a giant hole in it from a receptacle that had been moved up the wall a few years back, so we decided to make it back into a receptacle and now we have a place to plug in the vacuum at the bottom of the stairs:
No top molding yet as we’re putting shelves across the entire wall with window seats as well.
Sure do miss those Billy bookcases.
Good work. I also approve of your reading list.
Thank you sirrah! No books have been sorted at this time. Vowell would never live next to Chabon in the real world. Well, thinking about it, they might live near each other in the real world, but not on a bookshelf.
