You can get waxless skis that use a "fish scale" grip for hill climbing. There are some again with "skins", we used to call moleskin, which is smooth in one direction (forward), but stands up and creates grip if moving backwards. If you are into it, you go with various waxes depending on the temperature and conditions. But that is usually for more advanced skiers. I just have a set of waxless fishscale and a set of skate skis (no grip on those). It is a very good workout as your whole body is active.
It sounds a lot like hard work. I guess with cross-country skis you get to slide downhill and only have to really work when going uphill?
Back to house breaking. Yesterday I tore down some more of a wall and the end of a banister. The intention is to extend a wall to make an existing room slightly larger. Along the way I took out two doorframes with matching doors. One of the doors is going to go into the wall between the two halves of my house, which will mean I can get between the two halves upstairs. Today's job was to start pulling down the lath and plaster ceiling. I want to replace the ceiling with drywall and also replace the insulation. I'm hoping to be able to do it without lifting the floor in the attic. With the price of materials these days I don't really want to rip up 100-year-old flooring and then pay hundreds of dollars to replace it with nasty OSB, and the cost of replacing it with quality wood flooring will run to an ugly number - it's hard to see it costing less than $1000 to cover even half of the total space. Sadly the existing floor is held down with nails that are sufficiently large and sufficiently old it's impossible to lift the floor without splintering edges, which makes it very hard to reuse the material. So far I've pulled down about 200lb of plaster. Once I get all the plaster down I can pull down the laths, which in turn will mean all the cellulose insulation will fall with it. Then I can get that bagged up and hopefully feed fiberglass into the space from below, using wooden batons pinned into place to support it if necessary.
Some more house breaking. I put this part on hold because we had a cold snap and I didn't want to leave it partly done overnight. I pulled down the ceiling in the room I'm working on. I decided to try working from below rather than destroying the floor above and then having to pay through the nose to replace it. So now there's a huge pile of dead laths in a pile on the floor in the room, and three huge sacks of somewhat compacted cellulose insulation. Tomorrow I'll throw the laths out of the window so I can drag them straight onto a porch ready to be taken away and burned, and put fiberglass into the ceiling cavity. Along the way I drilled a run of holes and ran a cable that will feed a light switch for the room. That's a little bit down the line, but things are moving forward again.
I got my fiberglass cut and put into place last week. It was a bit tricky getting it pressed into place from below - usually I'd lay a roll in the cavity from above and unroll it, but doing it this way worked reasonably well. It saves me a lot of money in replacing the floor in the attic so it's worth dealing with it. I'll need to disturb it to run a cable from the new light switch location to the new light location but that should be easy enough to do. I'll also need to disturb it to seal up a few gaps that are awkward to access, but in the meantime at least the cold air can't gush into the house. Before I disturb anything I'll pin a few batons into place to make sure that gently pulling the end out of position doesn't result in accidentally pulling an entire strip of it out of position.
You have no idea how many days I wish we'd just sold the house. But having come this far the least I really need to do is get the other half presentable because selling the house now would massively reduce its value, because the only people who would be interested in buying it would be contractors who would want to flip it. As an interim measure I plan to blow cellulose insulation into the walls on the side we're using, simply because it will be a while before I'm in a place to gut and rebuild them. But that means moving a load of things away from the outside walls in the attic, which in turn means laying some more floor in the attic, and so on. So take a wild guess what I was doing today.... Some more fiberglass in the room I was working on last week, and a few batons cut to size and pinned to support it, then laid some floorboards in the attic (the OSB that was $20/board is now $55/board, so I've been avoiding buying any more unless I absolutely have to), then started moving some stuff around. The biggest bind is going to be shifting a pile of the floorboards I already lifted and stacked, but I can move those along a bit and then create a space to get behind them, and move everything to the other side of the attic. That's the side over the rooms that are either finished or under reconstruction so I really hope I can get away without having to lift anything there. I still need to figure how to contain the mess when I pull down the last part of the ceiling in the room I've been working on. As an alternate project I ordered an mSATA drive for my laptop. It's older technology but my laptop is coming up to 10 years old. I want to see whether solid state technology will give me the boost I'm looking for before buying a 4TB SSD. If it doesn't I'll save the money on the big SSD and put it towards a new computer. I hope I don't need a new computer, something with a spec even comparable to the one I have is more than I really want to spend, and of course something with a higher spec pushes the price up substantially. I'd probably get a desktop and take a load of files off the laptop, because for probably 99.9% of the time my laptop doesn't move from my desk. Speaking of which, what's a good place to buy a desktop PC this side of the water?
I forgot to mention, I think I've trashed another shop vac. It makes a nasty whining/grinding noise when I run it. Chances are I've sucked enough fine dust into the motor to wreck something. I may be able to blast goop out of it with an air compressor but I'm expecting to be needing another one soon. I think that's two that I've wrecked, not including an ancient one I found in the attic that ran for a couple of weeks at most. The first one to die was spectacular, a whine, then a pop, then a puff of black smoke from around the motor's housing. And that was the end of the shop vac. It's like the saying goes, electrical appliances run on smoke. If you let the smoke out the appliance dies.
I've been getting my HP's with customization from the online HP store, thus, the factory, with free shipping. They give you many options - I've got one tower, with added graphics and HDD+ storage; and the other tower has SSD + storage. SSD is awesome - I'm way past original warranties on both. Zero problems. I like the HP Envy TEO1 series with customizations (which jack up the price tag). https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/slp/w...X_Google_All_SEM_Exact_Core-Brand&utm_term=hp
Starting to really enjoy the other site though things are a bit slow for now. I must credit the awesome Administration of Athanasius for the in-depth moderation and tech skills. I think things will eventually really take off though the site has it's share of erratic posters who are carefully moderated. It is the type of forum I had been hoping for.
It looks like they are basically starting over from scratch. I popped over just to see if I was registered. I was never banned from the old site that I know. My handle wasn't on there.
I tried building something that I liked. I gave up when the price went over $1800 and didn't have the storage I'd want, so I figured another $2-300 for a big disk later on. For now I'll hope that $500 for a 4TB SSD for my laptop will overcome my issues.