Not Much Happening

 

The late summer doldrums are here apparently because this is the first post I've written in a couple weeks now. The last couple weeks of posts were all written maybe a month ago and set to publish when they appeared. There are another couple weeks of posts wrapping up my vacation that will publish in the coming weeks. I do this specifically for times like this when I have a large swath of time with not much interesting really happening. It takes the pressure off of posting something so people don't begin to wonder if I'm still alive.

Above is a picture of an origami boat made from a dollar bill. One of my many volunteer activities to give back to my community is to count the Sunday collections for our church about once a month. The sight above is not my favorite sight to see because it slows me down, especially when there are dozens of origami or just tightly wadded up bills that I have to individually unfold and/or flatten so that we can more easily count them and later the teller can run it through their machines. I'm pretty sure the origami folder has never considered that their actions make not one but two people's lives more time consumed to undo their creation.

Also during the late summer doldrums, I celebrated a birthday. Not a big one for it ended in a non-zero but it was at least another one in string of future ones that are less numerous than the ones already past. I'm guessing nearly all my blog readers are in the same boat. My family celebrated it a few days early before my eldest left again for college which is fine by me. Today as I write this post which you will see a couple weeks from now, is my actual birthday and I celebrated it by going to see my doctor for a semi-annual checkup. My doctor finally ordered a test for casein proteins in milk to see if my recent years intolerance to milk is protein related or lactose related. Judging on my experimentations, it is a some of both. These days I just avoid cheese and anything I consume with milk is made using almond milk. I still get bit occasionally when I eat out, such as my last episode when the breaded tenderloin I ate sparked it. After the fact, I learned it was likely soaked in milk before breading which makes it so tasty but hard on my gut later.

I'm still working in the garage most mornings while it is still cool. The church that asked me to build the alter last year asked if I could build some furniture for a class for kids on the workings of a church service. They asked me to build a child sized ambo or lectern for speaking and two holders for the large church candles. The only requirement was that they be made of scrap so they matched the scrap wood kid sized altar too. Below is the results of that build which was nice as it got rid of quite a few smaller pieces of wood in my scrap pile. 

I'm undecided yet what my next project will be. Likely it will be a small one where I don't need much planning because I don't have anything planned right now. I have a couple bigger projects in mind for perhaps next year but I need to do some design and planning work on them before starting because despite the heat now, I know all too soon it will be cold and I'll have the opposite problem in my garage. Now it is mostly just my comfort of working in a hot garage. In winter, it quickly gets too cold where things like glues and finish won't apply well or cure due to the temperatures. The joys of having an unconditioned work space.