Pumpkins (2012 Edition)

Posted on by Jordan

It’s been a surprisingly busy weekend here!

Friday night, Heather and I went with some friends to a special worship event put on by a church in the area. The theme was vaguely bluegrass, but it appears that just giving an electric guitar player a banjo doesn’t alter the style of the music as much as one might have expected. That being said, it was a fun evening, and they had a great worship team.

Saturday morning, Heather headed down to the capital to participate in the annual breast cancer awareness walk. She had a great time, and was happy to discover that her friends from the office were more than happy to set a pace that accommodates someone 32 weeks pregnant.

At the same time, I headed out to the building our church is slowly working to clean up for a new location. The good news with that project is that the demolition is nearly done, and the city has nearly figured out all the kinks in the permit issuance process. I still managed to get completely covered in cobwebs and dust in no time! It appears that we are going to clean by simply hauling dust out one shirt load at a time 🙂

Heather and I then met up to head to the Habitat “restore” to see about getting some flooring to use in building a photography studio style backdrop she had seen online. We found something that might work, along with some other odds and ends Heather thought might be useful.

When we got home, we proceeded to spend the next few hours cleaning up (this line may make a new low in mundane things I typed into the blog… ah well)

Some friends came over that night to carve pumpkins, and brought their newly born daughter!

Heather was happy to take breaks from carving to entertain her, and by the time the night was done I had managed to rock her to sleep in my arms for a while (the baby, not Heather)

As a small tangent we discovered that, for larger cuts, a “keyhole saw” is wildly superior to a knife! I also had rigged a handle onto a jigsaw blade, and we found it surprisingly easy to maneuver around the tight corners of our designs. The end results were something everyone was proud of, and I think that’s all we can ask for 🙂

Sunday nearly kept pace with how our weekend stared. After church, Heather had back-to-back photo sessions for friends, and then spent the evening working on her “Initials project” (more on that in an upcoming post!) I wasn’t quite as busy, but built stands for the backdrop we shopped for on Saturday, and finished prepping a bench thing we have such that it can be recovered.

I keep saying that the impending approach of the baby is going to slow our weekend pace down… so far it hasn’t, but there is still time I suppose 🙂

 

-Jordan

Nightstand

Posted on by Jordan

About the same time I was deep into the frame project, I started getting really frustrated with the little table thing that I was using for a nightstand.It was basically six boards screwed together, painted and then scuffed up enough to make it seem antique. It wasn’t particularly well made, and didn’t hold up well when Heather dealt with the issue of it being a bit short by piling seven or eight large books on top of it. Wobbly and too small more or less sums up the problems.

At that point I thought, “hey, I have a saw, and at least six boards, I should try making a better one!”

So I cut some boards:

Cutting the groves for the bottom shelf was considerably trickier than I was expecting, but the results were serviceable at least. What I had there was a table that was structurally sound, but wasn’t ever going to pass inspection with Heather to gain entry into our bedroom.

Step two, use some of this extra trim to make the table a little fancier:

A little trim, a little putty, and a lot of sanding and my little table was starting to look promising! All it needed now was a coat of “Heather and Jordan standard black” and it will blend right in! I got somewhat lucky in that it was an incredibly nice weekend, and Heather was away being the guest of honor at her (our?) first baby shower. This left me plenty of time to sand and paint.

There it is, ready for inspection… and it passed! 🙂

After moving a few large stacks of books, there was even a place for it:

As you can see, it even matches the other items in our bedroom! I came to appreciate again the brilliance of Heather’s “buy second hand stuff and repaint it” system, because if I had needed to stain that piece… well there is a lot of putty involved in making that look finished that wouldn’t have really stained correctly. Paint however, paint is forgiving as long as you are willing to do enough sanding. 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

Around The House

Posted on by Jordan

There has been a remarkable lack of blog-worthy stuff going on around here as of late.

I have a project in-flight down in the garage, but that will have to wait until it wraps up.

Heather has been busy sorting through a wave of hand-me-down clothes for both her and “Baby N.” (“Baby N,”  by the way, whom has not been born and already has more clothes than I do… this is probably not a good trend)

We reorganized the closet in our office! It doesn’t get much more exciting than that does it?

On the other hand, we probably need to rest up, as nearly every weekend through the end of November has something scheduled, so surely I can manage a post or two out of that! 🙂

 

-Jordan

Zombies? And Other News

Posted on by Jordan

This past week was noteworthy in a few ways, but the headline event was the RRV “Zombaree ” that my Scout Troop attended.

I will continue with my policy of avoiding posting pictures of random other people on here, but you can find pictures of myself and the troop scattered in here, and a deep link to our troop and the bridge that they made here (hopefully that works)

The guys had a lot of fun at the camporee, ahem, zombaree although one could be forgiven if they forgot it was a zombie event… there was a notable lack of zombies. The weather couldn’t have been better and it’s hard to complain about camping on a perfect fall weekend.

I got to pretend to be scoutmaster for the camp out due to a parental shuffle that left the actual scoutmaster at home. I was luck in that the majority of the weekend was being run by the district guys, and we had enough of the veteran scouts in our troop to comfortably lead the troop without too much input.

It’s surprisingly hard to find that balance between letting a bad plan flounder and taking over when your job is very much not to take over. I can’t say that I did a great job of it, but I probably ended up on the side of letting things fall apart instead of jumping in, so maybe it was a change for the guys.

Other notables:

Heather is 28 weeks along! This is apparently a milestone in that if the baby were to come today, odds would be in her favor to make it. Obviously we would like her to wait another three months, but it’s nice to know shes making progress in there 🙂

Also, 28 weeks is when the mom-to-be gets to drink… “glucose-up”… or some near literally named sugar concoction in order to determine if she has pregnancy induced diabetes. We had lots of good news there, Heather isn’t diabetic, and she survived the sugar drink without a massively upset tummy (A frequent problem with her and sugar)

So to recap, no close encounters with the undead, nice weekend, healthy baby, healthy mom.

I think it’s been a good week!

-Jordan