Visitors and members would post with whatever topic or event occurred to them and others would chime in their 2 cents worth and their events.

It doesn't necessarily have to be about woodworking - hence the location in Off-Topic.  It could be about plumbing, a car, a DIY house  issue, going for an operation anything really.

It gives members an opportunity to "experience" the lives of others in a casual thread.

For example:

Today, I'm going to add a few coats of Varathane to my cabinets, work some more on my dust system for my rolling carts and start building a downdraft sanding box.

Pics to come

If you find this of interest, feel free to add your "day" to the thread - if on the other the mods find this of no value, feel free to move or delete

The half way point of the gauntlet. Past the low temps and cold wind. Next is dodging the tropical storms. Harvest time is late July to mid August. The avocado is also blooming. In the beginning stage. They harvest end of October to late November.

Anyway, I recently picked up a new lens and got to play with it a bit on a vacation to Florida. I got a Canon EF 70-300 IS ii. It’s my first lens longer than the 105mm kit (except for a similar lens on a crop sensor). 

Here are a couple pics I took while getting familiar with the lens. Nothing special or particularly good. 

First time taking a pic of the moon. Could be much sharper, but this was handheld 1/80 at about 275mm. I’d say the IS did a pretty good job.

These little guys were everywhere.

Pelican, also everywhere. 

I generally just shoot my 50 or 85 primes. I almost exclusively take pictures of my daughter and family, but enjoy mixing it up and trying other things. 

Last month one popped up on Marketplace a few minutes before I looked that day.  I had missed several because someone else had beaten me to it.

The next day after I agreed to come get this one, bad weather set in with snow and ice.  I don't drive my truck when there is salt on the road, but the owner was patient in waiting for me to co-ordinate good weather with a day that a pool table moving professional could come.  Yesterday was finally that day.

The table is a Gandy Big G, a top of the line 9' one.   The slate top is in three pieces about an inch and a half thick and weigh something over 200 pounds each.  The pool table was on the third floor in a beach house in Sandbridge, Virginia, 103 miles from our place.

They had been trying to give it away for several years.  Not many people have somewhere to put a 9' table, nor the wherewithal to move one from a third floor. They bought this house seven years ago.  It's a tall beach house built on pilings in the sand.  The house sways when the wind blows hard.  I can't think of a worse location for a pool table than on the top floor of one of these houses.  They had new cloth and bumpers put on it, but could never keep it level.  It's decades old, but in perfect condition.

I left here at first light and arrived there at 9:20 due to construction, wrecks, and rush hour traffic.  The plan was for me to get there a couple of hours before the pool table pro came and take the rails off myself and pull all the staples to save the new cloth before they came.  I was pulling the last few staples when they showed up a little past 11..

They knew what they were doing.  The owners were very polite, nice people.  They had required whoever took the table to hire pros to move it.  I told them the first day that the only way I would take it was go get pros to take it down the three flights of stairs, wrap everything, and load it in my truck.  I enjoyed working with the two strong guys.  They do this every day and really knew what they were doing.  I worked with them with my moving blankets and drop cloths and tied everything down on the truck myself.

Total cost was whatever diesel fuel the trip took, and $600 to the movers.  The new cloth that's on it, that I saved, costs $473 if it has to be replaced. Pam didn't like the color when I first showed her the ad, but after getting it home yesterday she liked it fine and it's a good match for the color of the ping pong table top that will be it's mate in the game room.

https://monsterbreakbilliard.com/electric-blue-simonis-860-tournament-billiard-table-cloth/

They had absolutely the right stuff to handle it with including a really fancy hand truck built just for pool table slabs with 27" biccyle  wheels and tires on it.  They had no trouble with the lifting and handling and the hand truck made the three flights of stairs a non-issue.

I made it back home about 4:30 and my Nephew helped me unload all the wooden parts into the house.  I'll leave the slabs in the truck under the shed until some more help shows up this weekend.  I'll put the base together in place then four guys, including me, will each take a corner and walk each slab into place through a garage door about 10 to 15 feet to set each in place on the base.  

Picture of the pros with their fancy hand truck.  I had fun working with them.  It was a long day for me though.  I'm taking a day of rest today. 

The owners were Really glad to see it go.  They had bought the house, built in 1976, seven years ago with everything original still in it.  This was the last room they had left to do and had been doing the work themselves.  I brought stuff to patch the screw holes in the wall when I took the cue rack down and the Wife payed close attention and was appreciative when I called her to show her how I did it.  They hadn't done as good of a job on some of their other patching.

I could have bought one for real money earlier, but this came soon enough for next to nothing.  It's in perfect condition.

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The light in that stall had quit working from the cold, so I was using my phone for the flashlight.  The phone went flying in the fall so I couldn't call Pam for help.  In the pitch black dark, I got the hay bales off of me and the ankle was in severe pain but I didn't think I had broken anything or sprained the ankle.

After some number of minutes I was able to get the hay bales off of me and very awkwardly get up.  I had a hard time getting my foot out from between the pallet boards without doing more damage.  I found my phone, gave the horses hay, and hobbled back to the house.

Almost worse than the pain in the ankle was Pam yelling at me, "You have to be careful All the Time!!  You're old."

I kept ice on it for a long time with it raised on my recliner and it kept me awake most of the night.

I finally got to sleep about 3 in the morning and this morning it's a lot better already.  There is no lost motion, a couple of skin abrasions but no blue bruising.  There is still some swelling but it's gone down a lot since last night.  I'm able to take longer steps this morning so think it will be back to a functioning foot in a couple of days.

The instant that my foot slipped I remember thinking there shouldn't be any reason for it to be that slick.  There is not any bare ground to walk on the 75 feet from the house to the barn.  What only came to me later was that I had put that foot around the corner of the house into a flower bed to check to make sure the hose was off a freezeproof faucet on my way to the barn.  That shoe was completely glazed over with compost stuck in the tread on the shoe bottom and probably was frozen by the time I got to the barn.

Looking at the pallet this morning, when I gave the horses their morning hay,  I can't see any easy way for my foot to even go between two of the pallet boards.  I was very lucky.  Much more damage could easily have happened.

Going to replace it today, I found that both the connections were loose so decided to tighten them with a screwdriver and give it a try.

I now have a spare, new thermocouple.

I found a new source for woodworking related tees for those interested, Sawdust Style. I haven't bought anything from them yet, so can't comment on the quality.

Here's one example that I like.

Cons: As you might expect when adapting woodworking to be a TV show, any reason you can imagine to hate the show, you will probably find it. The editing is too fast to really appreciate what is going on, the woodworking is dumbed down for a general audience, there artificial drama and arbitrary skills challenges, lots of wood burning which was all the rage for finishing back for a while, and, I infer, limits on what tools can be used. A big oddity is I have yet to see a table saw. From what I've seen contestants get their requested lumber already rough cut.

Pros: They emphasize creativity in design and it's interesting to see what the different contestants come up given the same directions and their different build techniques. The skill level is on average pretty good with the better contestants clearly doing better than I would do.

Here a link to the Wikipedia page which - *spoiler alert* - lists the winners of each season: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handmade:_Britain's_Best_Woodworker

Any recommendations for a dryer vent cleaning kit? I've heard the cheap ones on Amazon aren't great. I'd estimate I have close to a 25' run with a 90* bend.

Any ideas on what could have caused that?  

I take an occassional interest in tracing my family tree. Not enough to do the research that used to be necessary, but the interwebs make laziness work. I happened across an entry in the LDS familysearch.org web site, for one of my paternal ancesters from about 5 generations back. From there, I was able to follow the line (same web site) all the way to a person born in Ireland in 1365 (with supporting docs), and on to a man born in 1280 (with sketchy docs).

Anyone know how reliable the LDS website actually is? This kind of blew my mind.

I have no good idea how old this tree was because all the sapwood has long since rotted away leaving only the Heartwood that is very resinous.  This one was so old that even the big roots had turned into lighter.  It was so heavy that I had to pick most of the dirt off of the root ball to be able to pick it up.  The machine will pick up 3200 pounds with the arm extended all the way out and 6300 with the arm curled all the way in.  Even with all the dirt picked off of it I couldn't pick it up with the arm extended.

I had to roll it out of the hole and pick it up close.  This is the biggest lighter stump I've ever seen and the only one where it goes down into the roots.  I need to get a dump trailer because I had to walk this one a couple of hundred yards to where I dump stumps.  I have a lot of other work to do here much further away from my dump site.  I've also figured out that it would be easier when digging something up to just put the dirt and roots in a dump trailer to haul away and fill the hole back in with clean dirt.

I'll start by asking something:

What is the best place in Ohio to get a burger?

We're doing a bit of taste testing to find the variety of Pecans that grew on the huge tree, now gone, that was at one of my Grandparents' place.  

We've received a few different varieties ordered online.  Closer to Christmas, we will have a big meal and get together of a bunch of our friends.  There will be a couple of authors there that can explain things better than I can.

To start with this morning, Pam opened the bag of Pawnee Pecans to use on cereal.  They're good, but not what we're looking for.  They're better than ones that you get in supermarkets, but not the sweetest ones like the ones we're trying to find.  So with them being the first that just the two of us have tried, there is no ranking order to put them in yet.  They have the good taste that we're looking for, but something else too like maybe a little bit of bitterness added.  I'll post better explanations once we get some people really good with words, but this is just a start.

The tree at my Grandparents was huge and at least 75 feet tall, probably being a bit over a hundred years old.  We have seven acres that the plan is to plant the best Pecans we can find on.  I'll plant just two to four trees per acre and hope future generations will get some benefit from them.  The tree at my Grandparents house probably covered at least a quarter acre.

LawnMaster FD1503 Electric Wood Chipper Shredder 15-Amp 1.8-Inch Cutting Diameter Max 14:1 Reduction

https://amzn.to/3KLi2ql

Earthwise GS70015 15-Amp Garden Corded Electric Chipper, Collection Bin

https://amzn.to/4aZ0mlw

however, i am having trouble deciding which one would be better for me and i would love to get your expert advice and hoping maybe some fellow homeowners or landscaping pros on this forum can also share their advice.
i usually chip up branches from pruning trees and clearing storm debris in my yard and need something reliable, easy to move around, and powerful enough to handle limbs up to a few inches thick. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance