I have returned to the office today. The latency on the internet at home going through a laptop to our cloud based system finally drove me to the brink. It is very nice and quiet here with all of my work stuff, a real fiber connection, and dual monitors to go along with my printer and scanner. Ahhhh. Can't believe I'm delighted to be here.
Got a piece of my baseboard fixed up today. I took the scraper to it and all the coatings just ripped right off. As a bonus it didn't even wreck the wood. Then I ran the belt sander over it and stripped it right back to the bare wood. It's a nice looking piece, I'm pretty sure it's red oak and it's nearly 100 years old. Next job is to stain it to match the rest of the woodwork, re-lacquer it, cut holes in it for electrical back boxes, and get it back into place.
Had another hearing by Zoom videoconference today. Man, what a difference that "last mile" of internet signal is in a commercial setting versus a residential setting.
The wife was discharged from the hospital yesterday afternoon. Still a long road to recovery though. Thank you for the prayers!
A few more bits of sanding today. I think the floor is about as good as it's ever going to be. Not perfect but to get much better than this involves endlessly fighting the laws of diminishing returns. The baseboard I recovered is enough to go round most of the room. I'll need to enlarge a couple of holes very slightly to use a plastic backbox rather than a metal one. Also got a bunch of stuff done to migrate out church web site from one server to another. That's the first step in a process...
More work on the room I'm close to having rebuilt. Today's excitement was to cut holes in baseboards to take electrical back boxes. You wouldn't normally put back boxes in the baseboard but that's where they were before so the only alternative is to replace all of the baseboards, or have unsightly holes with nothing there. Next up was to run the belt sander over the baseboards with a finer grit belt, to smooth everything off after the previous rough sanding. Then I ran a router over the edge to make them a little prettier, ran an orbital sander to just smooth everything off, and then I could get to staining things to match the other woodwork. It's surprising how the aroma of the VOCs spreads - I was aware of a bit of a smell from them but when my wife came up to see how I was doing she said it was almost overpowering. So I needed to put a fan in the window to suck everything out of the room. Finally was the wipe-down to mop up the stain that hadn't soaked into the wood, and now they are drying overnight. Tomorrow I can lacquer them. I've also got some corner pieces to put in - they will also need to be stained and lacquered but they need to be sanded first, so I let them be for now because I didn't want to get sawdust into the air while I was staining. All being well I can start the lacquering tomorrow, and get the corner pieces sanded and stained. At least they are small enough I can take them to another room to run a sander over them. It's been a frustrating weekend dealing with this stuff but at least now I can see a clear way forward, and the end is in sight.
Lacquering was a process. Not a lot of time taken to apply the lacquer but the room needed to be left alone for 8 hours while the lacquer set, than another coat applied. The boards look nicer now than they did when I pried them off the walls.
I hope all the friends are doing fine. Haven't heard for a while from you all! May God be kind to us all and keep us in good stead! Amen! ✝️ @IMINXTC @RabbiKnife @teddyv @Cloudwalker
Just living the dream. Have essentially returned to life as pre-TEOTWAWKI. I have gloves and mask in the car if I need to run into any place to pick anything up. Still lots of videoconference and courts still closed, but meh. God doesn't have COVID, so that's good, too.
Hanging in. About the only things this mess has changed is my gym is closed and my Sunday School class has gone to a conference call
Our county has something like 50 cases of coronavirus in total since the silliness started, and yet we're still waiting for an announcement from the fuhrer as to whether he will be gracious enough to allow us to take a small step towards normality. Why he feels it necessary to keep a rural farming community locked down remains a mystery. Apparently it's data driven. I suspect the data relates to the fact that he is a Democrat and this area votes Republican.
It's a shame little politicians keep playing their political agenda in such critical troubled times! Very disappointing!
Hugely disappointing. It seems more and more counties are openly defying the orders, with some district attorneys publicly announcing they will refuse to prosecute any cases and some sheriffs doing the same. When it becomes clear the fuhrer is losing control over the areas where he is trying to maintain control I wonder what he will do next. In all seriousness I'm surprised it hasn't come to this long before now.