Weeknote 3 - 28 Sept to 4 Oct 2024
What have I been doing?
This is the second to last week of cross country. While I love cross country so much, I'm also ready to be done with early wake up calls and long Saturdays. Now onto the end of my race training!
In trying to decide on a woodworking bench design, I remembered that I had already bought the material a while back for Rex Krueger's low Roman-style bench. While it's basic and will not meet all the needs I'll have for woodworking, it's:
a) a start, which is what I really need and, b) "free" since the materials have already been bought
I'm trying to do this in spare little free moments I have -- 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there. I figure it's the only real way I'll be able to actually pursue a hobby that's a craft and not just wasting my time. Once the bench is built I'm hoping to learn to cut some more precise joints, and maybe make a few of the projects from Matt Estlea's free woodworking school.
I took Wednesday off and we all went to the Texas State Fair. Besides the heat, it turns out Wednesdays are a great time to go. The crowds were very low, and we had such a great time. We all ate some good fair food (the strawberry pop-tart beignetffle was a winner). Paisley won a fair game and got a giant stuffed boba tea. We saw a horse show, a magic show (meh), and did the petting zoo. The fair isn't really my jam, but the low crowds meant I didn't find it too overwhelming.
Elaine entered a photo competition a few weeks ago and was selected as a top-ten finalist, so we went to the event for that last night. Not a winner, but it was still exciting to be in the top ten. We ate dinner with Shelby at Red Robin after, and it was great to catch up after a long time and after all the sickness over the last couple months that we've been dealing with.
What do I need to take care of?
- Finish up refinancing on the house. We should be able to save almost $300 on P&I on our home, going from 7.625% to 6.125%. (Unfortunately, our taxes were also GROSSLY miscalculated, so my guess is our monthly payment will roughly stay the same AND we'll have a pretty big tax bill that we'll need to catch up on. Bummer.)
- Find a decent budget software and actual start working on it / sticking to it with Elaine.
- Clean out the shower (it's due for it's monthly grout cleaning) -
What caught my interest?
I found a YouTube Channel that has some episodes of Britain's Best Woodworker, season 2, which is fun. Sort of like that British baking show, but for woodworking.
When I was watching some guitar maintenance and building videos last week, I came across an old school HTML-style site that seems to have some really great info on guitar care and maintenance (diy): http://www.frets.com/FretsPages/OwnerManual/manssguitar.html
There are a bazillion different lists of "tools you need to buy" when starting woodworking. It's pretty dizzying, but this site really did narrow it down to a somewhat manageable list: https://woodandshop.com/learn-traditional-woodworking-with-hand-tools/getting-started-traditional-handtool-woodworking-step-1/ <-- I've written the list down elsewhere but I do think that this is a helpful place to start.
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