cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also I Made Barbeque! The amount of email in my personal in box is staggering following memorial day weekend and not really being online at all since last Friday. I'm afraid of it. There's so much that I can't even begin to think of sifting through it all until this afternoon at the earliest. Major progress on the workshop over the long weekend. On Friday afternoon I got the other gable end overhang framed. Then I busted ass all day on Saturday. I cut and installed the very last pair of common rafters in that spot where I'd been considering building a dormer. I ran out of lumber so the decision about that was essentially made for me. Then I decided to build out a little overhang of the roof over the front door. Just enough for 2 people to stand under and keep out of the rain while fumbling for a key. It will also keep rain well away from the bottom corners of the door frame and prevent the kind of rot that one often sees there after 5 or 10 years. The overhang was built by sort of grafting on extensions to the rafter tails that are above the door, except that I have them at a softer angle than the 12 in 12 pitch of the rest of the roof. It will look nice. I realized that if I built that overhang first, it might then be difficult to install the front door. So the thing to do was clearly to install the door right away before moving on to the overhang. I flashed the rough opening with roofing felt, using a staple gun to attach the felt. Then I asked Trish to come out for a few minutes to help get the door in place. After about 45 minutes of fiddling with it, I got it properly secured. I still need to plane down the top edge of the door so it doesn't stick as much as it does, and I need to fill some gaps with foam insulation and make some trim, find and install the old salvaged lock set and door knob I've been saving for just this sort of occasion, etc. But the door is hung, which was all I needed to do at the moment. The overhang is going to look really good when it's done. It needs some more support but I'm completely out of 2x4s and don't even have any scrap big enough for bracing. When I build the front steps I will cut a pair of cedar posts from out in the woods and use those under the lower corners of the overhang. The cedar posts will also be part of the framing of those steps. Having the front door installed gives the thing a whole new feeling of house-ness. Especially when I sit inside with the door closed. It's very satisfying. Sunday I didn't do any construction. I spent the morning repairing my smaller step ladder, which is made of wood and has taken quite a beating over the last few months. There were number of broken pieces that needed to be copied and re-fabricated. The workshop is now partially functional as a workshop, as evidenced by the fact that I brought a damaged object into it and found that I had enough tools and other equipment on hand to fix it better than new. I'd been planning to build that afternoon, but Trish's parents came over and it was a whole social thing. Then at 3 pm Paul (the blacksmith) came over and we shot a whole fuck-load of clays. Literally, we filled a box that is 2 cubic feet in volume with empty 12 gauge shells. We only stopped shooting when we were out of shot shells. Then we went up on the roof of the workshop to shoot a Mosin Nagant rifle and my .38 snubnosed revolver at various targets below. Paul managed to take out a carpenter bee in mid-air with his shotgun. This gave me the brilliant idea of using .22 shotshells in my Marlin .22 bolt action rifle to deal with the growing carpenter bee problem. Carpenter bees look like bumblebees and I would bet that they are very closely related. I am typically disinclined to hurt or in any way even discourage a pollinator of any kind, since there is a huge shortage of honeybees right now and we need all of the pollinators that we can get in North America. However, these fuckers chew into to wood to make their nests. They bore a long, deep hole the diameter of their bodies into whatever wood has caught their eye. They fucking LOVE the workshop, since it's all raw, unpainted wood right there for the taking. Now, imagine a tunnel that is half an inch wide and bores into a joist for 6 inches before branching off within that tunnel to make further 'brood cells.' When you've got excavation like that right in the middle of a joist, that is just inviting catastrophic failure of the framing. As in the floor suddenly collapsing under one's weight. Especially since there's a whole bunch of these fucking bees making their tunnels. It's a real problem. I've been trying to get them with wasp spray but it's tough, especially when there's a breeze. And these things move pretty quick. So yesterday I brought the rifle out with me with a little box of .22 shotshells. 5 shots, 5 dead carpenter bees. All of them shot on the wing in mid-air. I got all of the rafter tails cut on one side yesterday. Today I expect I'll get the other side done after work, if it isn't raining. Work yesterday was slow going and difficult on account of it being pretty hot with no cloud cover. I was just up there on that ladder baking in the sun. The tendonitis in my left elbow is fucking killing me today. I have an appointment with my orthopedist on Thursday. At Jenny's suggestion, I'm asking him for cortisone injections in both arms and a prescription for vicodin or something of that nature. Sitting at my desk, my phone is on my left side but I have to reach all the way over with my right hand to answer it because literally me left elbow is so fucking shot that I can't pick up a phone with that arm anymore. It's not that the arm is completely useless. It's only certain motions that are trouble. Lifting a telephone handset from that angle is definitely out, but I could still pick up, say, a heavy concrete block from the ground with my left hand if the block was directly in front of me. All around, I am in rather good physical condition right now. It's just these fucking tendons. Aside from that, the construction work really agrees with me and keeps me in excellent shape. Oh! I made barbeque yesterday and it was fucking awesome. I'd bought some beef back ribs last week because they were marked down to about two bucks and I put them in the freezer until I figured out what to do with them. We're basically out of venison until late September so if I want meat these days I have to pay for it. Anyway, I wasn't sure what to do with the ribs since I'd only ever cooked ribs once before. I know that they are supposed to be tough, so I marinated them for a couple hours. I threw together a marinade using my Dad's home made hot sauce (he makes it out of peppers from his garden), some peach preserves, sugar, soy sauce, a bit of teriyaki, some worcestershire sauce and garlic powder. After 2 hours, I made a fire in the grill with fallen dead wood from the maple tree in my front yard. The plan was just to sear the meat on the grill and then slow cook it in the oven for a few hours to make it really tender. But after I'd seared it the wood had gone to nice coals and I thought I'd try cracking the lid in order to smoke the meat for a bit. I took a tin can and poured some beer into it and set that on the grill next to the meat. The idea being that it would create steam to keep the meat from drying out. After about 45 minutes I took the ribs off the grill. I tasted a little bit of the meat and it was So. Fucking. Good. Suddenly I realized that I had inadvertently made barbeque sauce and smoked ribs. I took the ribs into the kitchen and carved every scrap of meat off the bones and shredded it. Meanwhile, I poured the rest of the marinade into a cup and stuck it in the oven long enough kill off any bacteria present from when the raw meat had been soaking in it. Then I combined the 2 elements and had what was seriously some of the best barbeque that I have ever eaten in my life. I've lamented my lack of barbeque before. It was the hardest thing to leave behind when I stopped eating pork. Most barbeque is made from pork. While there is such a thing as beef barbeque on the menus of some Southern barbeque joints, even good barbeque cooks just don't take the beef version seriously enough to do a good job. The pig meat is the star of the show and hardly anyone orders the beef. Well, now I see that I've been suffering for no good reason since I can just make my own damn barbeque with cow meat and it seems that I'm quite good at it. 10:50 - 2008-05-27 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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