What have you done today? (Pt 2)

[Gopher Gary]

I have been planning this for a very long time, gathering the goods when I find them for sale, but nearly free.

I have collected a selection of twenty three of some of those cheap Chinese combination wrenches, we call them over here. The kind of wrenches like mechanics use with one end open and the other "boxed" or closed or hex.
The bigger, the better.

They have a high chromium content and break easily, but they ring like bells when you hit them.

I have made a wind chime using these crappy import wrenches as the "chimes"  and it sounds amazing. No one can see, because I used some wood to hide the actual bells, so it just looks like a magical wooden box hanging that makes "music."  It has worked out even better than I had thought it could.

I'd like to see a picture of that, DirtDawg. 

[Gopher Gary]

I did usual Saturday chores and a big grocery shop. 

[Genesis]

Made a dish with those fancy Ramen Noodle packets I got, went with Dad to get gas, picked up my meds, now I'm planning ahead the tasks I need to do complete this week.

[renaeden]

This was yesterday but I took my summer blanket off the bed, washed it and hung it out to dry. Put a new cover on my winter blanket, changed sheet and pillowcases then put winter blanket (it's really a quilt) on the bed. I have an aversion to doing this kind of thing so I think I did ok.

Made room in a stamp album for Posta Romana stamps. Some of them were quite big.

I too, would like to see your wind chimes, DirtDawg.

[DirtDawg]

I have been planning this for a very long time, gathering the goods when I find them for sale, but nearly free.

I have collected a selection of twenty three of some of those cheap Chinese combination wrenches, we call them over here. The kind of wrenches like mechanics use with one end open and the other "boxed" or closed or hex.
The bigger, the better.

They have a high chromium content and break easily, but they ring like bells when you hit them.

I have made a wind chime using these crappy import wrenches as the "chimes"  and it sounds amazing. No one can see, because I used some wood to hide the actual bells, so it just looks like a magical wooden box hanging that makes "music."  It has worked out even better than I had thought it could.

I'd like to see a picture of that, DirtDawg. 

Sorry, but it's just a piece of 2x12 wood, about a foot long, with 46 holes drilled in to hold twenty three wrenches, suspended with cut sections of clothesline string. It's Fugly, but I figure the bigger string will hold for much longer than other attempts I have made with other "bell sounding" things I could hang up.
I decided to go with what I had and I had twenty three old cheap ass, big as I could find, Chinese wrenches, not worth the steel they were made from, but these high chromium wrenches ring like tiny bells when struck.

But then I suspended twelve left over sticks of old wood  around the entire thing to hide how fucking ugly it is. Painted the wood before I tied it up to hide the fugly. 
But to really understand what I have done, take a wrench, the biggest one you have. Hold it with anything metal like maybe a screwdriver or a piece of string, but don't touch it, just let it ring, and smack it with another. It will ring like Hell!
It makes a high pitched bell sound which has some degree of "carry"  to it and it vibrates for many seconds from just one strike.
Now do that with all the largest ones you own. I have collected old wrenches from about an inch or so, to over two inches bolt size. They all make a different ring. It is not musical, but more cacophonous.
I do love this! In fact I always pause for any ringing bell like sound. I just do. And then I do it again and again until someone tells me to just FUCKING STOP!!
I like the sound of something ringing. I just do.

The whole thing just looks like some kind of improvised Tiki decoration thingy that no one will ever look at twice. But yet, it makes a wind chime noise, tempered by the wood that hides the redneck evil within. Today was rather windy, so I got a good sense of how this will be enjoyed by me as the seasons pass.

I have another one coming, but I won't be able to explain it any better than what I just tried to do.

The next project is actually a wind chime as well, but one I have used for over twenty five years at our old home. I have to engineer something a little more elaborate for this suspension model.
I used re-claimed rollers from a system of shades (we used to use them for background doing photography work - useless now), which were about two inches in diameter, very thin-wall aluminum tubing and the longest is seven feet long. I did not try to tune them, but cutting them to various lengths has made a sound very much like Orchestral Chimes. Not a tinkly ting type sound, but a BONG, BUNG, BOWN, BOWW BONG type of sound.

Extremely creepy, quite dark, almost Goth and not like any other wind chime you have ever seen or heard. One expects to see ravens gathering when you hear them.

I had to disassemble it to move it safely (those large tubes are kind of fragile) and I plan to re-think things a bit and make it even better with my newly imagined process of hiding the Fugly with hanging strips of light wood, painted, so no one knows what it is, etc. But when the wind kicks up, OMG, it is like the Black Sabbath first album is happening in the back yard, almost.
Creepy as if all Hell has come loose and I intend to hide it a bit and make it so no one knows where the magic sounds are coming from.


None of this is going to make any sense to you unless you know a bit about me.

A picture will do you no good whatsoever. You just have to hear them to understand why I put so much effort out for something you could possibly buy at the home store. But you can not buy one like mine!

You know the Rick Roll song, "I'm never gonna ..."
Well, I'm never gonna stop looking for bells. That is a deep part of me.

[Pyraxis]

When I gardened in home made raised beds at first, I set 4x4 cedar corner posts, just standing on leveled ground, 2x4 cedar stretchers between and cedar fencing along each side. The posts gave me something solid to screw into for a long time and the stretchers allowed me to replace the vertical fencing boards, one at a time, as they weakened. There was a lot of cutting of wood, but cedar was really cheap back then. Phosphate coated screws were also very cheap. Zinc coated would have lasted longer, but those have never been all that cheap.

....

The beds I have are smaller posts (2x2?) with two horizonal 2x6's making each side wall. I think it's all cedar, but honestly they were built while I was pregnant and brainfried, so I don't remember. My mother was there at the time though, so it's probably sensible. That sounds like a sturdier plan you had with the vertical and easily replaceable boards.

We should have placed the screws better at first, like crossing through both planks and posts at adjacent right angles (it would be easier to draw what I mean) so they can't pull out without the force pushing against the opposing right angle screw.

But the biggest mistake was covering the grass beneath the beds with layers of newsprint under the soil. This fucking grass. It didn't get choked out, it grew straight through the layers of paper, and now I have to pull metres of grassroots out of the beds every spring and it always comes back savagely during the summer. That's the real reason I want to rebuild the whole things, and tear up the ground underneath them with some kind of industrial strength mulcher machine, and then get pavement stones for around the beds instead of mulch, thinking that mulch would do jack squat against this fucking grass. Right now I have thick black contractor bags over the mulch, pinned down by bricks, and they've been there for a season, but the grass is just turning pale and growing out the cracks at the edges of them.

I see now why grassroots movements are called that. 

[DirtDawg]

Those damn roots!

That's one of the reasons I dug so much soil out to build into berms when I started building my raised beds. It helped, but every year they are right back. It seems to be a constant battle.

When the kids were small we kept an 18' diameter, by four foot tall pool in one corner of the yard. They only last a couple or maybe three years, anyway, but one year I noticed the pool was leaking and I could not find a hole to patch. I looked the damn thing over dozens of times. Couldn't find the leak.

Turns out one of those damn roots had grown up from somewhere in the middle of the pool and punctured the vinyl pool in the middle of the pool floor. That was bad enough, but that was our third or fourth pool (kids were pretty big), and by that time I had ramped up how I set up the things. I had laid down two layers of "VisQueen" which is heavy duty, 6 mil thick BLACK poly-vinyl underlayment used for building foundations.

I had dug out about a foot of soil and dumped a truck load of sand the make the perfect bed for the "permanent" pool. My idea was to lay the pool on a more perfect bedding, maybe I could get another year out of the things, because having some kind of pool was ESTABLISHED as helpful to every one of our family members.

One day I stepped on a damn root in the middle of the pool, which had somehow, grown through how ever many feet of clay, a foot of sand, two layers of underlayment, punctured the bottom of the pool and found water. It was happy; I was not.

Damn roots!
 

[DirtDawg]

At this place, the entire house is surrounded by a curvy outline of concrete, sectioned bordering, filled in with very nice, fertile bedding soil and lanscaped very tastefully with desirable plants all around. Deeply mulched over, looking great.

My thought:  COOL! Gardening is over except for a bit of table greens and such. With spring here, I can see that same grass coming up all over the place.
Still a lot of maintenance to do! Fighting those damn roots is still a big part of the game.

[Pyraxis]

Why oh whyyyy did humans decide that as much grass as possible, as thick and green as possible, is the appropriate covering for around every single house in the country? It is so stupidly arbitrary.

Zen gardens for the win. 

[rock hound]

Why oh whyyyy did humans decide that as much grass as possible, as thick and green as possible, is the appropriate covering for around every single house in the country? It is so stupidly arbitrary.

Zen gardens for the win. 

I totally agree!  We had a "wild" lawn when we lived in Maine.  A lot of wild strawberries and wild flowers.  Of course I had to mow occasionally to keep the ticks at bay, but, otherwise low maintenance.  And when I built our vegetable gardens, I dug up the area to below grass root level and did a raised bed with timbers and to also build fencing around the beds to keep the deer and woodchucks at bay!

[rock hound]

Grocery shopped and bought an anniversary card for Carla.  Tomorrow I get the flowers!

[Parts]

Yard work, bought stuff at the flea market,  cleaned up some stuff for next weekend show

[DirtDawg]

Why oh whyyyy did humans decide that as much grass as possible, as thick and green as possible, is the appropriate covering for around every single house in the country? It is so stupidly arbitrary.

Zen gardens for the win. 

Zen, for real. In our old home, July I was between bloom stages for the really hot, dry month, but I had more people stop by and ask about how I got all the texture and beauty with nothing but green foliage. I just said it took me years.

I was anxious to help a budding gardening interest, but shit man you have to study a lot of things to do this. And when I moved here, learning how to do it in Indiana was a completely new level of study for me. That's fine. I succeeded.

Explanation of all the grass is easy for me. We bought a home located on a golf course.
Not cheap, but very nice and my wife deserves nice things!!

A few days ago, one of my near neighbors (don't know them, yet) who had a rather sketchy looking lawn was invaded by about forty workers from the HOA committee. I'm sure there was some coordination that I never saw.
They came about eight o'clock one morning, ripped their lawn to shreds with two huge skid-steer track powered machines, hauled it all away in a huge dumpster, tilled the entire yard using additional attachments to those same skid-steer machines, added improvements, tilled again, re-set some of the sprinkler system plumbing stuff, etc.
Then another big flatbed truck arrived with rolls of turf which they cut and fit in by hand over the entire yard, applied a bird proofing like product laced with straw, which also came in rolls to serve as a mulching function.

Got it all done, buttoned up, watered down and they were gone by about five PM. Whole new lawn in one day. I was kind of impressed watching the entire process unfold.

[Genesis]

Did what I was supposed to do... and not annoy my department head 

[Gopher Gary]

Jack finished ruining my weekend around six, so I still had time to clean the cars. I'm not even sure how good of a job I did. I was racing against the sunset and I don't think I've ever done it so fast.