on the road

Well it happened again, I spent all of last week out of town. Traveling for work again, out east this time, which is better than down south but is still out of town which means I'm not here working.

But somehow I still feel like things are getting done here. I've been hitting the housework pretty hard. Beth's folks and a couple of family friends are heading here over labor day weekend. Therefore we need to have the house habitable for humans other than Beth and I. This weekend I finally finished up the trim inside the new addition. Man is that a great feeling since it was really the last big indoor item keeping us from claiming we're "done". Pictures coming soon.

I've been following the President's lead too lately and have declared war. War on the weeds in the new grass out front. We seeded the front yard this spring and the grass really is taking off great. However in one of my reseeding efforts it appears that a batch of seed I used was tainted with quackgrass and crabgrass. It's everywhere I seeded on the last go-round. Unfortunately it seems that there's not much you can do about this stuff until the first frost, but I knew my tender grass seedlings wouldn't make it that long, the weeds were choking them out too fast. So I took matters into my own hands, literally. I've been weeding the yard by hand as a way to end my day, which actually isn't too bad of a way to end off a hard day. In three days of about 1 hour per day I've managed to rid the whole newly seeded area of weeds, and amazingly it seems to be holding. If I see something sprouting, I pull it, but there's not much out there and the grass is back to taking over. Ironically I've never been much of a person to care about their lawn (just ask my neighbors!). In this cast it's more of a matter of me wanting to win by being able to get this seed to grow than some deep seeded (sorry) desire to have a lush green lawn.

I finally finished up another bike. This frame had been done for a while, but was waiting for a few hard-to-find parts to arrive. Nathan (the new owner) has a bunch of pics of it up on his blog. The chainguard was definitely the hardest part of the whole thing. I made it up from scratch and ended up making 2 of them as the first wasn't quite how I wanted it.

I also cranked out some furniture this week. I made a new steel bed-frame for our room. With the upcoming visitors we needed another bed and we had been wanting a new platform bed in our room. So I spent some time behind the welder this week. The frame is basically a modified version of a Room and Board bed frame, but it cost me $600 less. I mig welded the frame up, couldn't talk Beth in how incredibly cool a fully lugged bed frame would have been. Oh well, the welded frame looks great and is almost done. I just need to finish staining the metal and clearcoating it. I'll post a few pictures once it's in it's finished form.

well, it's bedtime

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