Life in General

I just had a look at the last time I posted anything on the bar project, and realized that I’m way overdue. Last posting was January 16th!! My apologies to all my loyal readers 🙂 Although things haven’t been steady, I have definitely made a lot of progress since the last update. I had to first go out and buy a router table, and then put it to extremely good use by routing all of the various pieces for the bar. Who knew cabinet making was such labour-intensive work? I can definitely appreciate why custom-built cabinets cost big bucks. Every step along the way has unique challenges. In the picture to the right, I’m holding up a couple of my favourite examples of routed wood. These pieces are for the cabinet doors. I’m not even sure of what all the steps were called for those pieces. I think I did some rabbets, mortises, tenons, and even some radiusing. Of course, when it’s all done, to you, it’ll just look like a cabinet door. To me however, I’ll remember that at the onset, it was a rough piece of 1×6 Clear Red Oak, 8 feet long, and some 1/4″ Oak plywood! There’s a certain satisfaction in doing something all by myself from scratch. It can be pretty relaxing.

You know, for all the complaining people do about how cold and miserable the winters are around here, I must disagree with them. Take for instance a great weekend that I had on Jan 21-22nd. That weekend had all the trappings of a classic Canadian winter outing. A group of 13 of us guys got together to snowshoe out to Jim Doucette’s property out by Calabogie Peaks for a night of Poker, Cigars, beans and booze. What could possibly make for a better outing I ask you? The cabin, although not completed yet, was plenty comfortable for us. I hauled out a proper poker table, and Jim brought out a ton of food. To make the outing even better, Mother Nature blessed us with a dump of like 25cm of fresh snow. Were it not for that, it might have been a slush-fest. Instead, however, we were treated to a nice peaceful trek in the snow (and of course an associated shovelling of a path to the outhouse!). When we got out there, Jim put Darcy, Kevin and myself to work getting things ready for the rest of the crew. Once 3 other people showed up, I declared a shift change, and the 3 of us went out for a great little snowshoe around the area. Kev took a bunch of pictures throughout the weekend, and you can check them all out in his Calabogie Poker Night set.

When it’s a friggin incredible deal!! Take this tri-suit pictured to the left here. I got an incredible deal on it. Now, I may seem to go a little overboard sometimes on my gear purchases, but that’s because I look around for bargains. Most of my gear was bought either used or on clearance of some sort. This tri suit is no exception. This one in particular is the Ti3 Elite Tri Suit by Orca, arguably the best tri-suit in the world. Last year, I wanted one of these, but there was no way I could afford it. They run $180+tax new! Enter great local shops and their great service. I bought this baby at one of the best local stores for triathletes, Cyclelogik. I can’t recommend them enough. Guess what I paid for this? Give up? $20!!!!! Yeah, that’s right, less than what I’d have to pay for a pair of shorts or a T-shirt. Heck, 10 minutes later I paid $17 for a pair of underwear!

Well, the bar is still coming along, albeit at more of a sloths pace than a gazelle, but what can you do, right? It’s winter, yes, but I’ve still got other things to do. In this picture, you can see most of the rought cut pieces for the bar. Before building, I plan to cut, rout, pre-drill, sand, stain, and varnish most of the wood, so when the time comes to assemble the bar, it’s more like an IKEA project, although much nicer. The little green stickers are the numbers for each piece as per the project plan. If you want to see a few more pictures of where the bar project is at, check out the pictures on flickr. I’ll keep adding more as I go.

Apart from having all the wood cut, I’ve also started tackling the routing. This in itself is proving to be a new challenge, since I’ve never actually used a router. Just to make sure I do an alright job, I snagged a brand new plunge router, as well as a routing table. I’ll say this. After spending 3-4 hours playing with it yesterday, I can safely say there’s no way I would’ve got the project done without those two additions. Now of course, I’m thinking I want a drill press as well. Sheesh. This bar is suddenly getting really expensive! On the plus side, I’ve decided that when I retire, I’ll definitely start doing woodworking much more frequently. Although it can be frustrating at times, I enjoy the precision and the satisfaction of doing something with my own hands. No doubt I’ll tackle a few more projects in the coming years. This bar will be the biggest one in a lone time though I’m sure. There are just so many steps and things I’m learning along the way! Oh well, I guess that’ll make future projects seem that much simpler.

So Jody and I ended up hosting a smallish Christmas gathering this past weekend. We just wanted a chance to see everyone once more before the holidays and heading off to Cuba. We just made it an afternoon gathering with munchies (way too many munchies….), muzak, and a little gift exchange game. The usual suspects were present, altough there were very few really bad ideas put forth. The only things that came close was courtesy of Darcy. For the gift exchange, Darce was kind enough to re-gift a beer blaster, which, lucky for all of us, was chosen by Kevin. Funny enough, Kevin didn’t actually know what it was before. He looked in the package, and didn’t know what it was, so he avoided it on his turn. Because of this, I figured it wasn’t anything good, and skipped it as well. Had I known…. I’d be the proud owner of a beer blaster instead of a plastic flying saucer! Although in the end, Kev donated it to my bar, commenting that the only time he’d probably use it would be at my place anyway :-).