China Cabinet Project

I have been spending most of my project time since early December on making a china cabinet to replace a crude built in in our dining room. It is ambitious and I don't know if I'll get it to look as planned.Here is a sketch of what I am aiming for.

The lower cabinet doors were something of a challenge. The quarter round pieces in the corners required me to develop a new hand tool to make the half round molding on the edge. You'll see what I mean if you enlarge the image.

 The molding on the straight pieces were easier, I made them with a plane produced by the Stanley Tool Co. about 60 years ago( and no I am not the first owner). Each door contains 9 pieces

and had 12 mortise and tenon ( deep groove and tongue) hand sawn and chiseled joints; one at each corner to hold the frame together and two at each corner to hold the quarter round piece in place.

It also took a long time for me to find the exact piece of board with the right figure in the grain for the central panel of each door. Finally last Sunday I got them glued together using traditional hot hide glue as was used two hundred years ago ( not by me). Cold temperatures meant the gluing had to be done in the kitchen rather than the unheated shop or barn. The doors are far from perfect and still need some touch up, but overall, I'll call them  successful.

The mahogany and the shellac finish combine to yield  a finish that is iridescent and that changes color and tone with the angle from which the wood is viewed.

I am now using scrap wood while practicing making up the sides and tops of the lower cabinet. With mahogany plywood going for $125 a sheet, and solid costing $10 a square foot, I need to get it right on the first try when I get to the real boards.

Apple Valley in January

We still have plenty of snow and did a few hours of snowshoeing on Saturday and Sunday.

Here are a bunch of pictures from a brief walk around our neighborhood yesterday.

 Our big sugar maple, like its current owner, could never be accused of being excessively orderly.

 I thought these windswept clouds were worth a picture.

 A few pictures of the valley.

Home sweet project.

One neighbor raises cattle and has a couple of dogs, one of whom refused to pose when she realized it would be too cold for her to roll over and get a belly rub. The other was already back in the house where it was warm. 

Another neighbor has a goat named dog (no picture of him) a few Guinea fowl, a red hen, all seen running past the truck, and a goose named Cat. Cat generally looks after the fowl and keeps them off the road, but this time I had to shoo them back to safety.

Other neighbors raise goats and chickens and the two small pigs hiding in the back of their pictures. They usually come running over to see if I have food, but they had just been fed and were to busy to bother with me.

I'll try to get some pictures of the sheep and lama another neighbor keeps soon.

January Visit to New Jersey

Had a nice visit at Ridge on Monday getting to see Dr. Jaeger, Mrs. Mitchell, Mr. Florance, Ms. Moroni, Mrs. D'Armiento, Ms Muraview, and spend some time with Ms Musumenci, Mr. Lee and Mr. Fry. I also got to spend an enjoyable and interesting few hours with the Verbrugge sisters, Audrey Becker, Lizzie Le Orlando, Neel Choudhari, Eric Wei, Jack Aaron. It's always a pleasure to meet with alums and see how you are doing.

While in Jersey I got to see some old friends and neighbors and do some furniture repairs for some of them. I brought our camera and brilliantly forgot to take any pictures.

What I didn't forget was to load up on bagels, cold cuts and other goodies hard to find outside the New York metropolitan region.

Got home Wednesday evening to find another 6"of snow on the ground, but all nicely shoveled our son Chris and plowed by our neighbor.

Contact info

If you need to reach me tomorrow try 201 444 8206. This is my on the road number I don't check when I am home.

More on Visit

It look like room 506 will be okay to meet at about 2:30. I might be going out for a while with faculty members from about 3:15 to 5. If anyone wants to get together either at 2:30 or later, let me know by email or comment.

Another Visit

For those of you looking for a reason to head back to college early, here it is.  I am hoping to visit Ridge on Monday. I'll post more details as soon as I clear up where and when.

Student Visit

Henry Chen, Akil Kadali , and Dan Golding dropped by last Friday.  It was a very enjoyable evening, at least for me, I'll let the boys speak for themselves. It was our first students since Julia's visit last summer. We wouldn't mind seeing some more of you up here if you can find the time ( and the way).

Photos from Ridge 12/21

Here are a couple of pictures from my visit to Ridge on 12/21. Tony, Melissa, and Kristen are looking great, not so sure about the other guy. I really enjoy seeing you folks. I may be down next week, I'll try to provide more advance warning.

How the New Year Started

Been a busy several days. Took Daniel to Boston on Sunday. We went to two pretty quiet New Year's Eve parties around here. We spent the first two days of the year with friends in Glen Rock. 

On the days we were home we did some snowshoeing from right out our door and some more beginning a few hundred yards down the road . Ah country life. I am getting used to my new MSR snowshoes, but I am having a hard time breaking in a new pair of heavy boots. Oh my aching toes.

Sunday, we went to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield to see exhibits of Native American art and orchids, and to watch an outstanding performance of Bizet's Carmen, recorded a few years ago at Convent Garden in London.

We then walked around Pittsfield, found a store selling British food, and yes some of it makes pretty good eating.

We met friends for dinner and then went back to the museum to see Chasing Ice, a film about taking time elapsed pictures of glaciers retreating, a very convincing sign of global warming.

I've been in touch with many students via email and facebook messages. Some are starting out on their careers, some doing great things as undergrads and grad students.

Students, Family, Snow

Its been a great holiday season with getting to see students, friends ( I guess at least some students fit in this category), and family and SNOW. Here's a photo of our gathering in Basking Ridge. Thanks to Jared for taking a fine picture, although if he moved the camera a bit he could have left me out and included the much better looking Craig Hawkins.

 I also got the chance to eat too much at my great nephew's Bar Mitzvah. I'd post some family photos but our camera battery went dead sometime before Friday 12/21 and I couldn't recharge it 'til we got home.

We've had our son, Daniel, with us since Friday and we had  a nice Christmas eve and Christmas with my step son Chris and his family. Our good friend Megan was with us for a couple of days and brought bagels and lox, bless her.

We got 16" of snow on Wednesday night and Thursday so I got to shovel a lot and snowshoe a little. There are about 6'' more on the way today.

We had friends over yesterday and their two little boys got to sled in our backyard. Have you noticed that at least one kid cries during most sledding sessions and virtually all snowball fights but we all, including the kids, insist on them ( sledding sessions and snowball fights) anyway.

I hope the photos give you some idea of how pretty it is here. I just loving living in a Currier and Ives print.

I wish you all a great new year filled with happiness.

Visit

I am going to try to be at Ridge by about 2:30 this (12/21) afternoon. Since it's  1/2 day I'll be at the lobby or in the nearby parking lot if  506 is not reachable. Look for a newish red Volvo wagon with Massachusetts plates. Call me on 201 444 8206 if you want to get in touch.

Mid December Posts

Here are some posts in reverse chronological order for mid December.

12 /17

We returned from Portsmouth NH last night. We spent two and a half days there. It is a charming and very lively old seaport established in the first half of the 1600s. The old center of town has many colonial and early federal buildings and a sort of museum  district called Strawberry Banke.

We had a fine time seeing a dramatization of Dicken's  Christmas Carol and listening to Carolers ( not anywhere as talented as the A Cappella or other choral ensembles at Ridge) and an excellent folk singing  group called "Great Bay Sailor" singing some Celtic and seafaring at Strawberry Banke.

Lot's of craft and other shops and an extraordinary number of place to eat and drink. Portsmouth is now well known for microbrews including Smuttynose ales and lagers.

Coming home was slow going with icy roads and some overly cautious drivers ( and one not very cautious driver who went off the road and caused a minor traffic delay as he got hauled out of the woods). A stop at a friend's house for dinner was a very enjoyable break in the drive.

 all below from 12/ 13

1) Went to see Lincoln yesterday. It was a powerful movie with great performances, but the most powerful part of it to me was the conflict between the two seemingly irresistible choices , one ending a bloody war nearly immediately, the other: prolonging the war but ending the practice of slavery.

I hope none of us have to face choosing between two such compelling and conflicting alternatives.

Hope you all have great and joyous holidays. Spend time doing the important things with the people to whom you really matter.

2) We have been following our grand daughter's choral career. Last night was the seventh grade orchestra and choral concert. The Amherst Middle School auditorium can only accommodate one class at a time. They were not bad for seventh graders. I do miss the Ridge concerts and the wealth of talent they displayed.

3)  Almost another two weeks gone by, wow. We are in the middle of Hannukah and nearly into winter. My wife gave me a set of Vivaldi choral music CDs music that I first heard at a Ridge choral concert and sometimes sounds more angelic than human.

The weather has been mild by western Massachusetts hills standards. I don't think we've dipped into the teens yet and there have been fair number of bright

 sunny days along with some really dismal foggy ones.

I've been working on furniture, starting to build a mahogany china cabinet to replace the handy man style built-in in our dining room. I decided that the doors should have a bead molding around the panels. Then I decided the doors should have quarter circle internal corners. That meant figuring out how to make a bead on a quarter circle. It took me two days to figure how to do it and it still takes me nearly an hour to make one. I need eight. I'll post some photos as I progress.

Another week of music and projects

Two and half concerts this week. The first was by the University of Massachusetts Orchestra and was an excellent program of Beethoven's Coriolanus Overture ( one of the most dramatic and tragic pieces he wrote), Prokofiev's Lt. Kije Suite, and Bruckner's enormous Fourth Symphony, all performed very well.

Then it was the Hartford Symphony conducted by a member of the world famous Julliard String Quartet. We heard the Pachalbel Canon, a viola concerto by Telemann, Vaughn Williams' Fantasia on a them by Thomas Tallis, and Tchaikovsky's First Symphony. The first three pieces are for strings only and were played nearly perfectly. The Vaughn Williams was particularly beautiful. The conductor's rendition of the Tchaikovsky was very individualistic and even a bit jarring in the first two movements. While the sound from the instruments was beautiful and precise, the total result was not completely satisfying. On the bright side, the last movement was rendered superbly.

Yesterday, we collected our two grandsons and went over to Amherst to hear our granddaughter, Audrey, sing in the 7th grade chorus holiday performance on the town hall steps. It was cold, but they were worth hearing. Hearing them was difficult at times as the American public, even parents and grandparents, have so much to say that they cannot possibly be quiet during a performance. Rudeness and inattention are rife.  Too many people attend events at some cost or trouble and then treat them as background for their conversations or phone messaging.

I have been doing a lot of wiring, or at least spending a lot of time wiring, to replace some of the electrical madness in our house. I broke up one circuit that fed a microwave, thirteen light fixtures, and several outlets into three circuits.

Some Photos from late autumn

Here are some pictures of projects I worked on and our Thanksgiving.

The porch ceiling was delaminating plywood so I replaced it with a "beadboard" ceiling that I stained a sort of pumpkin pine. It took about fifty boards. I added the green trim to match the shutters.

The deck on the porch was painted battleship gray and had peeled badly. About 1/4 of the boards showed some rot, so I replaced the bad boards. I stripped and sanded the remainder 

 and stained them a redwood color. The boards are nice, tightly grained, and very hard, douglas fir.

I repaired the bases of the columns with treated wood, that I'll stain white or green next spring.

This is what the mudroom interior looked like at the end of June, after I replaced the studs, sheathing, and siding. I left it alone until November while the treated lumber dried and ( I hope) stabilized. Then I installed rigid foam insulation and reinstalled the old " rustic panelling." I spent a lot of time shimming and measuring but the panelling went in with little trouble. The doors were another matter, requiring lots of adjustment.  I have two four foot levels and they don't agree, which made matters a little trickier than they should have been.

I started getting back into woodworking with a gift for my wife and some some long overdue picture frames. Jean loved this picture, so I purchased it and made a walnut frame for it. It now hangs in our dining room.

Sarah Valente gave me this picture about 18 months ago and I knew I wanted to make a frame for it rather than purchase one. I finally got to it in November. I made the frame narrow so the picture would dominate. It is a real gem ( the picture not the frame) and it hangs over my desk, where I see it every day.

My last AP classes gave me this great montage and I feel much better now that I have framed and hung it. I can't quite make out a few of the signatures, so I have to rely on my old rosters to try to decipher them.

We bought this print from a real old fashioned printing shop in Assisi. The printer was nearly as old as the equipment and was extremely gracious.

We had fifteen people, including ourselves,  for Thanksgiving. It took two tables end to end and stretching from the dining room slightly into the back parlor to seat everyone at once.

My sisters and their families are harder to get all together these days and even our son Daniel couldn't make it back from Colorado. Still one sister and one of her daughters and her family combined with our son Chris and his family and some friends from a nearby town made for a very good time. There would be more smiles, but by the time  I remembered to take the picture two of the boys and a couple of adults were pretty tired.  The big hit of the night, aside from the great food, were a set of small magnetic balls that kept the kids and some of the adults busy for hours.