Ben's Blog

October 11, 2021

High Altitude Siding

It’s hard to muster the resolve to spend a day doing acrobatics on ladders, but once things are underway, you get in the groove and it’s actually pleasant. Still, I definitely earned my beer today.

Fighting recalcitrant boards as always.

Cutting station visitor

I’m finally closing the rakes, and I’m finishing the wall how I started it: with meshing to prevent insect from going behind the siding but allow for air circulation.

The last piece!

This section is very hard to get to, stuck between 2 roofs.

In fact at a certain height, I can only reach everything by adopting body positions which are not ladder approved. At that point I grab my harness and trusty GriGri.

Tethered to some dead weight on the other side of the house.

It’s always super nice up there, the trees around the house are really growing.

September 30, 2021

We’ve been gathering apples for the past few weeks, waiting for a cold day to press outside without yellow jackets. And well, the weather has just been too nice lately, no colder days in sight so we went and pressed it all. We did it inside the sugarhouse, space is a little tight but we can close the doors and that was immensely helpful.

Bins and trailers full of apples

Cider making is another area where we are really starting to know what we’re doing. The day was full of hard work but not stressful at all. We know how to avoid yellow jackets, how to set up and use the press proficiently, we brush hogged bellow the apple trees right before the season, picked apples at more frequent intervals. Everything is better prepared and better handled. And the result is 14 gallons of cider in 1 day, for a lot of work but certainly much less work than previous years. Experience is a very nice thing to have.

After washing the apples, we crush them

Then we press them

8 gallons, more in the fridge.

3 friends stopped by and left with cider, and we gave a half gallon to a neighbor. All vaccinated, all outside, feels nice.

The sugarhouse is very multipurpose, Robin is staining shingles while we get the press ready.

September 13, 2021

Mandalagaba Plots

I’m going through a big plotting batch, including a lot of creations from Mandalagaba. It’s very lucky to have this stream of material to pick from.

Most of the work here from Hava Edelstein, 1 From Lara Laubert and a couple of unknowns.

Fountain pen

I cobbled together a program to cross-hatch colors into various densities based on luminance.

I also finally have a fast SVG to GCode converter, I’ve been after this holy grail for years but always reverted to the super slow yet reliable Inkscape converter. I rewrote a fast one I found which crashed on large SVGs (the whole reason to get a fast one in the first place). It works like a charm after turning certain recursive calls iterative.