more progress, rethinking, and other miscellanea

Thursday, my SHARE volunteer day, was the last time we will be open before Thanksgiving and it was our busiest day so far with 35 families. We also had had a big food drive donation come in the previous Monday and another one come in Thursday. There was so much food and nowhere to put it as we had had a big delivery from the food bank the week before. I guess it's a good thing we had so many families because Jan kept bring cans into my station apologizing because there was no where else to put it but it was fine as I was loading it into baskets as fast as she was bringing it in. Robin was helping me the first two hours but then it was time to take her to work.

Friday about the only thing I got accomplished was cutting the new four pieces of trim and fixing dinner which was stuffed bell peppers, vegetarian version. I used a blend of barley, lentils, and split peas cooked with a little chicken bouillon, sauteed onions and mushrooms, and some leftover spinach mixed in. Sorry, no pic.

Today another day in the shop and I got one of the shadow boxes put together. What I didn't mention in my last post was that I went into Lowe's on Monday to get the new piece of trim and hopefully find a teeny tiny drill bit. No such luck but when I got home and rummaged through the little plastic box of dremel tool accessories, I found exactly what I needed and yes, I had already looked through that very same box before I headed out. Anyway I fit it into my hand drill and that's what I used to drill the holes in the trim pieces today.

a little suggestive, don't you think?

The plan was to leave the back piece the natural wood color and paint the trim pieces. In retrospect I should have just left 3/4” clearance around the cast piece instead of an inch (going with it anyway, not redoing it) and I'm not sure painting just that narrow border trim will be enough to offset the wood wood behind the cast piece. Right now it doesn't look 'finished' and I'm thinking maybe the whole thing needs to be painted. What I wanted was birch plywood, not pine, which is prettier and I think I would have been fine leaving the birch unpainted. 

I don't know, there's just something about pine that looks cheap, unfinished. I haven't glued the glass in yet and the background color is a little off because there's blue tape behind it (I don't want that part to be sealed or painted). If I don't paint the whole thing, just the trim, I was thinking white or yellow, but maybe it needs to be black. Fortunately, Rocky cut me two of each of the plywoods so I can play with the other ones.

I've got all the holes drilled in the trim pieces for the other one, the one on the red oak plywood and Rocky mused about staining the trim pieces instead of painting them. Something to think about.

Tomorrow I'm heading down to Matagorda to the beach, about an hour's drive each way, to see two of my river guide buddies whom I haven't seen in at least 15 years, probably longer. John and Elise moved to Tennessee after we all stopped guiding. Now that they've both retired, they RV all over the country and they're parked for the weekend at an RV park on the beach, heading west on Monday. 

As I've repeated ad nauseum, the arctic freeze did a number of everything here and things either didn't bloom or bloomed late. I got a few puny attempts from the yellow butterfly ginger earlier but this week two have bloomed nicely.

And I've noticed on my walks with the dog that my neighbor's live oak has produced an enormous amount of acorns this year. Live oaks are evergreens and all the ones here lost all their leaves from the freeze, so apparently they thought they're dying (they're not).

a typical sample of the ground beneath that tree