Rubbish Rescue --> fixing a Free-Pile folding chair for good juju

I don't need a folding chair -- and in fact, I didn't keep this folding chair. But I fixed it because (a) it was easy for me to do, and (b) I figured it would bring me a bit of good Free-Pile juju.  

There's a guy down the road that has one of the most amazingly lovely free piles.  When he moved into his fixer-upper of a house two or three years ago, it was stuffed to the gills with the previous owner's accumulated stuff.  William started putting all sorts of this stuff out on the lawn at the edge of his house.  What emerged was amazing combinations of antique trash and treasures.

That corner where he lived became its own minor version of a tourist attraction for a few months, as people figured out how to make use of what they found there on the lawn, and then William replaced what had been taken with new-to-see assorted marvels.

Meanwhile, he slowly rehabbed the property.  He added a knee-high retaining wall along the boundary of his lawn, made of scavenged stones, and he did all the work himself.  I'd stop and chat as he wiped the sweat from his brow.

The house is in pretty darn good shape now, and the wall around his lawn only occasionally has goodies to sift through.  But many of the pedestrians along the street keep an eye on the property, partly out of habit and partly out of respect for his propensity to surprise us with the latest unearthed goodie.

For a couple of days, I'd pass by the folding chair he had out, not paying it particular attention because --- as I noted above --- I don't really need one.  I was surprised it didn't get snapped up, though, and so one day I looked a bit more closely and saw that the strap of one armrest had been cut or ripped.

The armrest (lower left) doesn't have a strap connecting
it to the plastic guide (upper right).

Well, I could fix that.  And I did; I brought the chair home, used my mighty little seam ripper to remove the old snippet of a strap, dug through my nylon strap pile to find a suitably sized replacement, sewed that on with a bit of quick sewing machine work, and Done.

Now the armrest attaches to the support pole.

I carried the chair right back to William's corner, where it had waited patiently for a new owner. The next day when I returned to take a photo of the whole chair, it was gone.  Success.  

I hope whoever got this chair uses it in good health and happiness.  

Rubbish Rescue --> a Cutting board rack

It started with two small pieces of scrap wood: one, I know, came from my son's broken and then disassembled former bed frame, and the other from some random rescued thing I took apart.  I added in a dowel rod that I'd bought new for a project that didn't need as many dowel rods that I'd bought. 

I used a circular saw to trim down the bed frame piece, and also to cut the dowel rod into 5 equal sections. Then my sander.  Then my drill with the 1/2'' drill bit -- by clamping the two scraps of wood together and drilling holes in both at the same time, I didn't have to measure where they holes go in order to get things to line up.  Then a mallet to pound the dowel pieces into the holes.

Now our cutting boards stand up, and they have air underneath so they drain better. 

I figured this one was going to be a trial run: I'd see how it worked, figure out what I needed to adjust, and then design another one that worked better.  But instead, it seems to be exactly what we were looking for all these years. It frees up counter space (our boards had been lying flat in this corner), and allows damp boards to dry. This cutting board rack isn't going to win design aesthetic awards, but -- wow -- do we love it. 

So, not bad for a project that took 5 years of procrastination followed by ten minutes of sawing and sanding! 

Making my 80's costume happen

 My daughter invited me to an 80's themed theater event, and said we should dress the part. I was like, what does it mean to dress 80s?  I know I lived through it and all, but I'm not very fashion aware -- really, quite the opposite.

She told me, "leg warmers".  That's when I remembered seeing the movie Flashdance with my friends.  The song goes, "Take your passion; make it happen" -- but I thought the song went "Take your pants off; make it happen" (which also fit the plot of the movie, really).  My friends understandably ribbed me for that, so the movie sticks in my mind.

I never owned leg warmers that I recall, so I didn't happen to have an old pair lying around.  But I do have lots of hand-me-up clothes that other folks gift me.  One sweater was getting so loose around the neck, plus it had a stain, that I'd been thinking about turning it into rags.  Instead, I turned it into my 80's costume.

I cut off the sleeves and used rubber bands to help hold them up on my legs.  The top looked a bit like a work-out sweatshirt.  Add a neon-hued under shirt and some kicks that I'd rescued from the side of the road, plus a head band that was pretending to be a sweat band, and I had my costume.  

Take your sweater, and Make it happen!

Rescued Rainment

Each of these pieces of clothing had been abandoned on the ground somewhere.  

I walked past the winter coat pictured on the left and also the "Los Angeles 79" hoodie many times; they'd been rained on repeatedly before I decided their owners would never return to reclaim them.  The UnderArmor compression shirt was of more recent abandonment, but  it was in the middle of a grassy field where industrial lawnmowers threatened it if it hung out there much longer.  The grey hoodie was one my husband found by the side of an empty road and brought home as a gift to me.  (I tell people that he must truly love me if he's willing to bring me a gift that costs $0; most people I know would shudder at the thought, despite knowing me so well).

Aside from needing a good laundering, they were all in perfect condition.  Now they're laundered.  I'll release some of them back into the world via "Free" boxes and/or thrift shop donations.  The hoodie my husband gifted me, I'm keeping; it's become one of my favorites to cuddle up in.

A new leash on life . . .

I've got this song running through my head -- not your usual Christmas song, but a Muppets song.  Apparently, none of my kids nor my husband had ever seen The Muppet Movie, [how?! how!?], so this past Wednesday, when our family Advent calendar flipped open to reveal "Movie Night", we had to rectify that.   

Side note: my running buddy June was raised Mennonite; she says that the Muppet Show was the only show, besides Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, that her family watched.  Her dad, however, didn't like the Muppet Show, because it was too irreverent.  Be warned. 

My husband was mostly impressed by the guest cameos: Steve Martin, Orson Welles, Richard Pryor, etc etc.   My daughter said, "I kind of recognize some of those people. but they look so much younger than I think of them."  Well, yess.

For me, though, I was almost disappointed by my favorite song from the movie, which comes when Kermit and Ralph commiserate over women.  [Of whom there are disappointingly few in the movie, I must admit].  I was disappointed because for years -- decades even -- I've been singing the song to myself, and then in the movie they left some of my favorite verses out!   

How could that happen?  How could I know more words than Kermit and Ralph did?  It turns out that the sound track I'd listened to while growing up came from the British version of the movie, not the American. 

Through the miracle of the internet, I tracked it down:  "This is a rare clip from the 97-minute UK cut of 'The Muppet Movie', shown only in British theatres in 1979 and once on VHS. This extended scene features additional lyrics not included in the US/international cut." (Available here, with a list of glowing and bubbly compliments.  I'm not the only fan of this song.)

Just feast your ears on these awesome lyrics:

 A collie that's classy,  A laddie needs a lassie;

A lover and wife . .  . gives you a new leash on life!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.  I'm going to take myself for a walk now.  

My homemade canning jar lid rack for the dishwasher

And here -- because I don't apparently have anything to do -- is a project I've been contemplating a long time, and I finally just gave myself the gift of a half-hour in the basement and made it. 

Behold the canning-jar-lid rack,
sitting happily in the dishwasher,
with canning jar lids along for the ride.

We do a lot of canning jar lid washing, and our dishwasher has no good way to stand them up like plates (does yours?  does anyone's?  no idea).  Apparently, it's possible to buy these racks online, but of course I'm all to-heck-with-buying-stuff, so I thought and thought and thought, and finally came up with this design.  It's inspired both by the existing peg-up structure that the dishwasher already sports so jauntily, and also by the fact that I had a bunch of skinny dowel rods leftover from making soap dish racks last Christmas season. 

When I made this, I got to play with a bunch of my favorite tools:  the cordless drill (so much!), the circular saw to  slice down the base strips, a new orbital sander because -> fun <-, a mallet to pound dowel rod pieces into the holes, and a bolt cutter to snip the dowel rods.  (That last one was not exactly super professional, and it means that the ends of the dowel rods have a crimped appearance, but it's not like gazillions of people are wandering through my kitchen to look at stuff inside my dishwasher, are they?)  The bars along the bottom are held together with really short-snipped dowel-rod pegs.  I like that this is an all-wood thing that is just held together with wood.  

Canners all know that you're not supposed to reuse the metals lids for next year's batch of applesauce or whatever (and then, we confidentially tell you that we reuse them anyway . . . shhhh!).   But the metal lids are perfectly fine for everyday purposes, and the Tattler plastic lids are fine for reusing over and over again in canning projects for decades.    Because of that, and because we use canning jars for storing leftovers, yogurt, butter, pesto, . . . basically, for just about everything . . . we seem to have lots and lots (and lots) of canning jar lids in every load.  

And now, my canning jar lids are upstanding.  yay!

Random thoughts on my computer co-dependency

I once went to a talk by a philosopher/psychologist who studied the way that tools can become an extension of our bodies: canes, glasses, scissors . . . if we get good enough with them, they begin to feel not like separate objects, but extensions of ourselves, he argued. Today my computer went through one of those required software upgrades and had to shut it self down and then reboot, leaving me with 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of the day during which I could not do anything with my computer. I had pored over my to-do list, and the only thing -- the only thing that I could do with my computer inaccessible to me there in the middle of the day -- was to go bug other people who were hard at work and tell them bad jokes. This is an indication that my relationship with my computer is perhaps a little bit too intense.

But at least I know a bunch of bad jokes. 

With my husband off in Madrid, I'm trying to get to bed at 8 and wake at 5. I try to finish up my email at 7 so I have one hour with no blue light, although I don't always succeed. One morning this week, I woke up and had 31 new emails waiting for me at 5 AM. Another morning I woke up and I had 24 new emails. Oh. My. Goodness.

My to-do list as an associate dean is getting so long, and so convoluted, that my paper planner method has become insufficient. Today, I combined my various to-do lists into an Excel spreadsheet, so that I could sort based on urgency or category of the tasks. I had 39 items at the beginning of the day. I had 45 at the end of the day. Well, at least I'm grateful for spreadsheets.

I love my "start dictation" button, and the fact that I can just speak aloud and have my computer write down mostly what I say. When my brain starts dribbling out my ears, I become a terrible typist. Huzzah for dictation!