Pegolation

You know how when you start a project it seems like such a complicated thing you will never get past all the technical difficulties?
And then you just put your head down and one thing after another, you just get into it?

And then one day you say to yourself "Holy shit, I'm almost done!"

You get a little twinge of separation anxiety when you think about not having more to do, it was such a part of your life.

That's me.

The cutoff scraps are piled up on the floor to the right. And my latest trip to the Devil Store yielded the cute little wooden boatbuilder's clamp which I always wanted one and I thought the guys who had and used them were pretty much the shizznit.

I did sweep the floor yestaerday, but I look around this place and there are planered-off curling wood shavings in every odd corner. I stuffed a giant paper grocery bag as full as it would get yesterday and the day before. With a pair of very sharp hand planes the shavings just seem to float off by means of the gesture alone, there doesn't seem to be any actual resistance work involved.

That piece of brown leather was given to me by Brother Bob for crafts but I like to look at it draped over the couch, and I only very reluctantly use any of it for actual crafts. I did split up the ropemaking jig he made me to make pegs out of, it was an early prototype that had been redesigned and reiterated. I did hate to cut it up, it was a beautiful thing on its own. But we must sacrifice for art.

Last night I whittled some scraps of red cedar into little pegs to tap into all the little nail holes in the, what is now clearly mast, which is no longer just a slab of used lumber, but a slender graceful thing of its own.
Somehow "mast-ness" has been incarnated into a slab of salvage, astonishing and beautiful. I'm thinking I shall take my time in these last stages and enjoy the sight and the feel of this fine thing, this blushing peach tinted thing revealed from the heart of some ancient forest giant..

Rehab

Even I knew the only chance I had was to shut up and go to rehab. It was bad, the condition of my life,  and I didn't care.
I did alienate my entire family.
And then I changed genders, and I did care again, a lot, but in terms of family public relations, an unbridgeable double chasm of weird.
In 2008 my sister Marilyn was the first of the sibs to take a chance and meet up. Cool.
In 2010 my brother Bob took the plunge, traveling from Salem to Scappoose to meet up on the Felicity Jane at the dock of McCuddy's Landing, not exactly the dock of the bay, but close enough. And then we were friends again. That Fall the three of us kids (all 60+  or as close as makes no difference) met up with Mom for lunch down at the coast, on the bayfront at Florence, Oregon.
Nice.
But the other sister, Suzy, didn't buy in at all.

Mom is shrinking.

 Nor did my kid, Jeff, yield hardly any slack. He was busy, in Azerbaijan, and I failed to make even a blip on his radar. Fair enough, I told you already it was bad.

A tall, handsome, terribly serious and exceedingly polite young man.

 My stepdad, Alan, died last fall, 2011, and we all of us met up in Coos Bay at the cemetary and then the church for his services. Tell the truth, him and me didn't see eye to eye about very much, but I was sad to see him go, and he did me a solid on the way out. The meet-up.
I kept my mouth shut. I felt humbled and priveleged to be there. Really.
This year we all of us got together at Mayrilyn and Jim's place up the hill one ridge over from Mount Ashland.
Suzy and Larry were very nice, Larry let me tag along on him and Jim's whirlwind Black Friday shopping extravaganza, Mom was old as weathered granite and we all ate a lot of very good stuff. I made Ambrosia, which seemed to have hit the mark, and coconut candied yams which fell considerably short. I have an idea for a sweet orange-pineapple reduction which should make a difference and I shall try it again next year.

Larry is an actual Rocket Scientist

I went shrooming, soaked in the hot tub, and me and Jim chopped up some Oak Bark to tan my spritsail, the day after this massive and highly successful family dinner.

These are not Chantrelles, you can tell because the gills do not connect to the stem. The color is roughly similar, but Chantrelles have a fluted irregular trumpet shape.

 I kept my mouth shut.
It seems to be working.

Power Move

The Good Part

I think I may have died and gone to heaven.
The other night I spent a wonderful hour tuning up my brother's big jack plane, getting all the rust and crud off it, not much really, and then putting it through the whole kosher three-stones-and-two-strop sharpening cycle. I was aware, for that hour, that I was as fully engaged in the love of pure life experience as I have ever been in my long strange life.
This afternoon I finished the fourth of the eight rip cuts on the mast blank. I  have learned a lot in these twenty-four feet of sawyer work, mostly how to pay attention and be honest with myself and check shit out with the instruments. I live too much of my life on autop[ilot and self-assurances that all is fine, a kind of magical thinking that I know without actually looking, whether or not I am operating correctly within acceptable parameters. Usually I am not, and the feeling of knowing has absolutely no correspondence with the facts.
So I now know how to make a twelve foot cut accurately with a handsaw, which is harder than it looks. The key is to check with the try-square whether the sawblade is at right angles with the face of the work, and  every foot or so to roll the work over and cut from the other side. You cut at an angle, so when you roll over you are then cutting into your kerf so the under side of the blade is now following the cut you made while looking at that line, and you guide the blade on the line on your now side and things don't wander off too far and hey this last slab isn't too bad at all.
And this is what we call a good time at my house.
Just now, in laying out the guidelines for sides 5 through 8 I had occasion to try and even up some of the more egregious wandermarks from the time long ago when I was still in denial about magical thinking and mystical knowledge and the cut kerf wandered around like, as Reggie GIlmartin used to say at Bandon Erection, like a snake on a rock.
I will tell you one thing: That fucking jack plane is sharp as shit. Sliced that old doug fir like greasy bacon, and one more thing, too.
This here old growth fir is beautiful stuff, rich and peach-red, grain so close together it looks like the edges of the pages of an old and well-written book.

Stuff

Fuck you, Mitt Romney. You are right about the stuff thing, though. I voted for Bronco Bamma because he promised us more stuff. Stuff like a rational foreign policy, and an economic policy based on scholarly study of real world forces. Stuff like control for women of our own bodies, and equality for minority groups, and if you think that means people marrying objects or pets you're the pervert, to even think that up. I know, I know, we all see the world through the lens of our own prejudice. I guess that means  guys like you are really in it for the money. Big surprise...
And, yes, stuff, material things, for myself as well. Stuff like food,so that even the fucked-up and stupid like me have something to eat. Stuff, like as much public commitment to the health of my body and mind as there is for fighting fires in your garage elevator. The public supports full no-expense-spared firefighting facilities and teams for any careless asshole with too much stuff passed out drunk or too  busy fundraising to set the sprinkler system or pay a decent wage to the guy who looks out for shit like that. Healthcare should be the same, after all its guys like you that pay for the ER care for folks like me with no insurance. Wise up!
Bronco Bamma promised me stuff like, say, schools for the neighborhood kids, and books with actual science and history so we don't keep making the same fucked up self centered delusional choices as a society and stop killing the world.
And a warm place to take a shit!
Wish you were here.

CVG

If you have a sail for your boat you will not get very far if you do not also have a mast from which to fly your sail.
Back in the day I rowed out to Valino Island in South Slough by where we lived and I chopped down a little Port Orford Cedar. Bad girl, yes, but fuck you it was a long time ago. And actually I did not chop it down, I used a hand saw. The thing was maybe ten or twelve feet tall and three inches in diameter. After I got all the bark off, and let me say the Port Orford Cedar smells like the better neighborhoods in heaven, and sanded it down a couple coats of boiled linseed oil made a wonderful soft smooth stick of wood for my  spritsail I made fron Kmart nylon.
Unfortunately Hayden Island does not have any Cedar Trees, only stupid mcrooked-ass cottonwoods. Which also smell wonderful when they are in leaf, but the wood is lousy for making shit.
And as defiant as I might think myself, I'm really pretty tame and I wasn't, in the end, attracted to the pirate logger solution. even though there is a Red Cedar grove alongside Hwy 30 between St Helens and Rainier.
Last Sunday my pal Maggi and I ran around North Portland to look at salvaged lumber at a couple of places and Lo and Behold there was, at the Salvage Center where Harvey Hardcock used to work, a pair of clear vertical grain old-growth Douglas Fir 3x4 sixteen feet, or as close as makes no difference, perfectly knot-free straight grain perfectly cured and dry for perhaps a hundred years.

There's 20 grains to the inch.Those are nail marks near the layout lines, after all , this beam held up somebody's beaverboard front porch ceiling for many years. You can fill them with  a splinter and some glue and call it a dowel and feel quite properly bloated with your skills.

This is an amazing thing to find. This shit takes a thousand years to grow, and there just isn't any more of it being cut.
And nobody in their right mind made 3x4, even though that is exactly what you need to make a proper pair of oars unless you want a glue joint down the middle. And there is a mast in the other piece as well.
These mugs at the Salvage Center, cleaning and warehousing building material donated for recycling by all kinds of cool leftwing Portlanders, aren't in this for the money, because they only asked for a dollar a lineal foot. I would have paid five, and you would pay 7 or 8 if you could find it new in a specialty yard like Crosscuts or Woodcrafters.

In my infinite vanity I imagine myself capable of makeing a mast and pair of oars using only hand tools!
The mast, 11 feet long, round in cross-section, 2 3/4 inches in diameter at the partners tapering to 1 3/4 at the tip and butt, will require approximately 48 feet of ripsawing with an ordinary carpenter's handsaw/
Last night I laid out the first two full-lengh side cuts, and later on I got out my new old handsaw and I went to work. Unfortunately my rate of cut is about one foot an hour.

I will be looking for a saw-sharpening service quite soon. There used to be an old retired logger or two in every town in Oregon with a little sign on his garage who amused himself with an excuse to put on his hickory shirt and stagged-off tin pants and dip snoose and spit in the garage all day. There don't seem to be many of those guys left.

And that's not even counting the work with the jack plane to make it round, and, please, shut up about the oars.
 It's going to be a long winter.

PS EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide strip of the walnut dyed canvas, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later. (Actually this was on the 29th Oct)

EDIT2: Nov 15th There's little black spots of mildew on the untreated piece of canvas on the windowsill. I can't tell if the other one, the treated sample, the walnut dye-job, has any or not because of the color. I willl give it a few more days and then break the seal and really try to make a determination.

EDIT 3: Nov 24th I took the dyed brown strip out of its bag today and it looks like it is finally getting a bit of mildew started. I dont think it was there on the 22 when last I looked.
The undyed strip has a lot more mildew spots now but it used up all the moisture. I think my point is proven, that the dye inhibits frungal growth, but it doesn't stop it completely...more later...

Treatment

Mixture for rope treatment

In a 4 qt copper-bottom saucepan floating in a big pan of water on medium heat.

Commode wax 47 grams

50 cc kerosene

50 cc turpentine

30 cc pine tar mixture.

10 minutes warm to touch, wax beginning to dissolve

20 minutes quite hot wax dissolved with vigorous stirring

heat off

I dipped the 6 strand round sinnet halyard/laceline which absorbed readily the hot mixture. I squeezed the rope through my gloved fingers, draining the excess back into the pan.

I likewise dipped the snotter and mangled off the excess.

The last thing was the twin fox nettles on the big pully block.

There was approx 30-50 cc of mixture remaining, which I put back into the small pine-tar can.

I put the treated lines in a cardboard tray and set it on the toilet with the exhaust fan left running. Cleanup was with paper towels which I put out in the dumpster.

I put the canvas rags in a double ziploc in with the rest of the stinky stuff to offgas the volatiles.

This stuff had stink like a tar-baby, eye-watering pine smell, like that time at computer school where the substitute had a germ phobia and scrubbed all the keyboards with pine-sol. I shut the batrroom door and ran the exhaust fan all day while I was out.

Then I broke out that wax commode ring, what was left of it anyway.

See the way I did the braided ropes by separating the yarns it made all the fibers stick out from the rope all fuzzy, and dipping it in the pine-tar solution did not help. All the pine tar went into the body of the braid nice and dark but the fuzz was still there. So I gooped up some of the ring-wax, which is soft and sticky, and smeared the wax into that fuzzy looking sinnet and guess what it worked just fine and lathered the fuzz down just right and it made it look like some kind of industrial leather substitute. I was a bit worried that it would rub off on my hands and clothes and stuff but it is just fine. 

I hereby declare this process a success.

Then last night I had a dream that I was in Donald Trump's apartment and he had let loose a gorilla to get me, a big old silverback, and I was scared as shit, but just then this big kangaroo got the gorilla from behind in a headlock, a rear naked choke, and the gorilla passed right out, collapsed out cold or dead even maybe, I didn't stick around to find out.