It's cold out there

I went outside about an hour ago to hang up another bird feeder.

This gives us 6 total. There are four (Niger thistle, hulled sunflower, no-waste mix, and suet) on the big pole in the yard, one (hulled sunflower)hanging from the eaves by the window over teeka's computer, and now a corn-cob feeder hanging in the crab apple.

A month ago we put a deflector on the pole feeder to limit the amount of seed the squirrels get (now they have to jump for it, and can't just run up the pole). Thursday I put a deflector above the window feeder because the squirrels are starting to do damage to it (we took that window screen out a while ago because they'd leap off the roof, grab the screen, and then leap or stretch to the feeder, tearing up the screen in the process).

While we were out helping the local economy yesterday (shopping at Menards and Farm & Fleet), we bought a bird bath heater (didn't find a bird bath we liked, so we may use a pie plate for now) and a hanging corn cob feeder, which we bought to feed the squirrels with, to make them a little less frantic in their attempts to get to the other feeders. We may eventually get a real squirrel feeder, but for now, we don't want to encourage them too much.

After the second squirrel hit the deflector on the window feeder, I got dressed and hung the hanging feeder in the apple tree. I may have picked up just a touch of frostbite in the minute or so it took to screw down the quick link on the piece of chain I grabbed to hang the feeder from (I looked afterward, and the wind chill was listed at -25F).

Today I may put some plastic up on the garage ceiling to reduce the volume of garage that needs to be heated, and am thinking about playing with the lathe.

Wood turning

I did about half of the ceiling of my side of the garage in plastic, and then was tired of climbing around the garage, so I got out the lathe to start playing. Eventually I'll finish the ceiling, which should make it a little easier to heat the garage (we'll see - it's still a fairly large area).

I started with a chunk of apple. misteropinion did some tree trimming on our folks' orchard, but then left all the pieces laying around their yard. Dad pile them up so they were out of the way, but since misteropinion hasn't picked them up (he was going to use them for smoking), we took most of the large diameter pieces to play with on the lathe. I made a small bat from a section of log. Right now it's in a paper bag full of shavings drying out on the table in the living room. Eventually I'll have to put it back in the lathe and clean it up. hopefully it won't check to badly. We're probably going to give it to either my dad or teeka's dad as a fish bat, but that will depend on how it turns out (and whether I decide to make more).

Then I loaded in some 1.5" square oak stock and made a couple of beads. They mostly served to tell me how I need to regrind the tooling that came with the lathe in order to make it easier to do the turning I want to.

Tomorrow I may mount a large-diameter chunk of apple on the flat plate and try roughing in a bowl.

Turning update

I just found this article on Woodcraft's web site, so the bat I made is now soaking in two quarts of soap solution (and the bat was wet enough it sank when I put it in the jar).

We're probably going to Woodcraft tomorrow to get a spindle gouge and look at chucks. I don't have a spindle gouge (the lathe came with a pair of roughing gouges, a skew chisel, a misground parting tool and a curved scraper).