Aww, what a lonely little log. Needs some company.

He wasn't alone for long

Project: Resume weight/resistance sessions
Status: Absolutely Pathetic

The day before yesterday my PICC-line was removed and I was cleared to resume training sessions the next day. After over a month and a half off, I expected some muscle strength/mass and endurance loss. A gross understatement, as it turns out. I knew I was unlikely to hit 12 solid full pushups per set, and didn't. I didn't even hit 10. First set I managed 8, the final three being questionable. Set two I struggled for 5. Third set was a goose egg. I resorted to "knee pushups", which I should be able to do twenty of in my sleep. I struggled for 10. Dumbbell exercises were no better, with some scares when one arm or the other totally gave out during a "lift". My Bullworker and resistance sets went better since those somewhat adjust to whatever I'm able to do.

Ever a glutton for punishment, I attempted a traditional "light" session this morning. (Tomorrow will be a day off, weight/resistance-wise.) Which makes sense since it utilizes lighter weights. Still, I again goose-egged full pushups, resorting to knee pushups, of which I did two sets of 12.

Oops, just got a call from the place that installed/removed my PICCline. Someone is on the way here to check on my health! Later all!


It's later.

My visit went well, all vital signs were measured as acceptable. However, I learned something I was not made aware of while in hospital. Not only did I have pneumonia, but also Sepsis, which is a big deal. It also explains some of my February symptoms.

This afternoon's exercise-walk was okay. I went the full two-and-a-half miles. My pace might have been slightly slower than pre-illness, and there was no spring in my step. To the plus, I scaled the incline from hell without issue and managed a short, prissy jog near the end.

Project: Acquire decent quality furness filters
Status: Possibly solved

The filters I use are apparently an uncommon size, 14x24. Regardless, until a few years ago I could find upper-end filters locally. It then became hit or miss, though low-end filters remained available. Fast forward to yesterday. Home Depot carried only low-end filters, and Walmart had none in stock. Amazon to the rescue. I ordered a six-pack of off-brand high-end filters for $46US plus tax, or roughly $7.67US per filter. That's less than two dollars more than Home Depot's low-end filters, which filter only dust and pollen, and far less than what I pay locally for high-end filters, if and when they can be found.

Project: Remove cancer from leg
Status: Phase one completed

Visited dermatology yesterday morning and had it removed. I've a follow-up in three months to see if more needs to be done. Hopefully not, but better safe than sorry.

Decepit, I hear you on the furnace filters! Around here, I get mine from Ace Hardware. It's pleated and does a good job catching all the cat hair and dust from the house. I change mine monthly just to be sure with my crap lungs.

Out of curiosity I checked, and they do carry it in your size. Let me link you: ACE Hardware Furnace Filter

Not sure if they would ship to your location, but it might be worth looking into for the future.

Thanks. Following your link, I was greatly surprised to find an Ace Hardware near me. What's more, the website claims it stocks my filter size. Looks to be a rather decent filter for the price. (The one I bought at Home Depot yesterday filters only dust and pollen, sad to say. Better than nothing, but not by much.)

I'm making a thing


Clearly not done yet, but almost. Can you guess what it'll be?

Some sort of a shelving kind of a shelvie thing?

My guess is a cabinet

It's a contraption. Probably devious.

Partially correct


Eh, not quite


I'll try to make it nice and friendly


It's a thing to put a TV on, at least it will be when it has a top and four wheels underneath.

Shelvie thing/possibly devious contraption done


and in active service

Fabulous! That's very nice looking wood - are you going to leave it unfinished?

It's clear coated actually, two layers with some very fine sanding in between

PROJECT: create better covers for Project Gutenberg books
STATUS: a drop in the bucket, mistakes have been made

I've downloaded tons of "classic" literature free of charge from Project Gutenberg these past several years, though only a pathetically small percentage have been read. One issue I have is that many books' "covers", which appear as thumbnails on my Paperwhite screen, are useless or nearly so. Some have no text. Some have text that can't be read. Day before yesterday, I decided to rectify this via Paint.NET, Inkscape, and Calibre. Here are a few of my results thus far.

BOOK COVER utilizing the author's image found online

BOOK COVER utilizing an image from within the book

BOOK COVER utilizing an appropriate image found online

BOOK COVER utilizing an image appropriate to the subject matter

Alas, all hasn't gone well. A good many of my covers end up not much better than the useless covers they replace. My problem? Covers as seen in their "finished" forms in Paint.NET don't always read well when reduced to sub postage stamp size on my Paperwhite screen. Hopefully I'll get a better feel for it as time goes by.

Project: Exercise Walks
Status: as mentioned below


Several days ago, I timed an exercise-walk for the first time this year, 2025. I wasn’t sure what to expect. My late January through early Mar serious illness zapped a good bit of my strength. I have recovered some of my loss, but how much? During 2023 and 2024, I clocked in at a fairly consistent 2.5 mph, give or take a few minutes one way or the other on any given day. I ought to point out that my route now measures some 2.65 miles, much of the increase being along the “incline from hell”.

(I once tried to find out how many “steps” my route is, but ran out of fingers before the halfway point.)

To my great surprise, I clocked in at 2.94 mph! Admittedly, I could tell from the start that, barring the unexpected, it would be one of my better post-illness walks. Still, I had expected to, at best, match my average 2023/4 speed.

Speaking of the incline-from-hell, I include a Google Earth image taken partway up it. Until late last year, I walked to the far end of the maintenance building parking space, then made a U-turn and began my descent. I then extended the walk to the lone tree seen left of the street at mid-distance. The first time I did so, I felt a sharp, thankfully brief pain in my chest at the tree, as I was turning around. I knew then and there that I had to visit the tree during every walk. It would either make my heart stronger or finish me, one of those options being preferred but either being acceptable. Nowadays I walk past the tree a ways before turning back, with no hint of chest pain, though my legs often rebel.

<link>image of the incline-from-hell <link>

Glad to hear you’re getting past the tree and back, Decrepit. I have a hell-adjacent incline on my daily walk. I sometimes shamelessly let the dog tow me up it.

First day of vacation and as such it's time to start some projects! I cheated a bit though and started yesterday with sanding down the outdoor bench I made about ten years ago. I've done this a couple times now but I think I can do it a few times more


What's that, mALX? Pics or it didn't happen, you say? Very well, then!

One
Two
Three
Four
Five

Looks like that'll be a pretty sturdy bench!

It is


It's made from a plank either my grand- or great granddad made for a neighbor back in the day. That's why it says "Grek" on it. It's a misspelling of the neighbor's name. As you can see I've intentionally kept it and made that side of the plank the bottom side in order to preserve it.


Nice little history from our part of the world

Don't tell me the proper spelling of the neighbor's name was Geek?

Am I right in assuming the legs/feet have a tenon into a blind mortice in the seat? I don't see any nails or dowels.

It wasn't


You are absolutely correct! I also did that with my sister's TV bench earlier this year. Drilling holes for tenons was actually my job from 2000 to 2013 so I guess that's why I do it. Easy enough and keeps a clean look to it

What a nice planer!!! Ours is a Dewalt, and surprisingly not as effective as we hoped it would be. I am also in awe of your paint job, how did you manage to not get a single drop on the glass, but still get all the trim painted? Awesome job, I always love to see your projects!



LOVE the bench! Are you going to polyurethane it or keep it natural?



Oh, I had imagined this in my kitchen!!! Love it!!!




Really nice to do that, that is real perfection and craftsmanship! (don't look at my work, screw heads can be clearly seen, lol). I watched a thousand YouTube vids on how to do those dowels to do invisible shelves that seem to not be braced but really are = just never could get it right.

By carefulness


My planer is from Biltema so it's no way near anything high-end, but it works for what I do. I can even shift the blades if they get damaged without having to buy new ones


I'm gonna sand it one more time with a 100 grit paper (used 40 grit first go-around) and then I'm gonna oil it. It sits under a small roof so it's pretty protected. Last time I did this was two years ago.


As they say in the Oblivion persuasion minigame; you do me too much honor. It's really quite an easy thing to do, just make sure to measure carefully, drill straight and not all the way through


Thanks for your nice comments!

Always love seeing your woodworking/building/and landscaping-landshaping. You do wonderful work! It is always inspiring to me, gets me hyped up to do projects of my own, lol.

Project: replace "inferior" Project Gutenberg book covers with hopefully superior self-created covers
Status: I'm nearly caught up with PG titles currently on my Paperwhite

A project of mammoth proportions. As of now, I have created some 435 replacement covers. Considering that I began (so far as I can tell) on 05/08/2025 (with Moby Dick), a goodly portion of each day has been devoted to cover creation. At the same time, I removed 174 PG titles from the Paperwhite, considering them of questionable worth. (They still exist on my hard drive, and of course at the Project Gutenberg site.) I can't say that any of my covers have artistic merit, but they're IMO at least better than what they replace.

Some questionable quality PG covers remain on the Paperwhite. I might or might not replace them. And of course, any new PG download is a candidate for cover replacement. In other words, it ain't over yet.

Another window project


As always I just do the outside frame, not the window itself.

Nice!

Thanks, Acadian


-Guys, I'm making a thing again!


Instead of this,

we will have this

Inside

Oh that'll be great! Sheltering a bit of the inside will be nice. Do you have any lights inside as I'm guessing this will make that work area a bit darker.

I will have that window as part of fixing that problem but I am pretty much convinced I will have to install some overhead light fixture as well. Probably the same kind we put up in the middle of the tractor garage as I call this building. And obviously I'm not done with the horizontal beams but I didn't have more time today.


This also opens up for a potential door to protect the ATV from snow blowing in on it.

Before

After

Inside



Project status: Complete (Well, the window needs a bit more cleaning...)

Very nice! More protected inside but still light and airy.

I always wanted to build something there, never did like the complete openness. Building doors is a challenge and I'm not sure I can do it in a good way. But that wall is at least something and I'm glad I didn't mess it up

Nice job, Mirocu!

So, while M's been building a workshop, I was writing a book... which was why I vanished for the summer - I do like to dive into things. The book is fantasy fiction, that somehow grew out of the fan fiction I've been posting here, but it has its own world and story. It takes inspiration from the late Roman Empire but is not very historically correct (hey, it's fantasy!) and draws rather heavily on the Hebrew Bible, mostly on the books of Ezekiel, Judith and Enoch, with a touch of Solomon's verses. For anyone not sure what those books are all about, let's just say they've got angels (fallen and otherwise), Nephilims, giants, undead, spirits, visions, magic, love, sin, judgement and wrath... You know, all the usual biblical stuff. It is my intention to have the book self-published on Amazon eventually, so I won't be posting it here (sorry). Besides, it has quite a bit of adult content (mostly not sexual but adult in other respects), so it would not fit with this forum. The main themes (besides the undead) are slavery and cruelty, faith, self-sacrifice, personal integrity and morality, and love and sexuality (a.k.a. what is love?).

The book turned out quite long, 560 paperback pages, 155K words, divided into 12 parts with a total of 66 chapters, which is comparable to 66 posts in the fan fiction section because I kept the chapters to roughly the same length as my episodes (2000-2500 words on average). It also has 176 illustrations - elements generated with AI, then put together manually using my own brain and a lot of GIMP magic (which brings the page count to 634). So it has been quite a project, and yet I am not done... because the story continues, the second book is already planned out and started, and I can see into more of them to come. The story covers some 30-40 years and follows the lives of several main characters, it's all in my head, it's getting crowded and needs to get out. Considering that the first book only covers 16 months out of those 30-40 years, there's potential for a book series here.

I think I'll take it to Amazon when the second book is done so that I could publish both of them together. Or may be I'll wait even longer, we'll see. I haven't made it into the ePub format yet, it's just in PDF for the moment, although I did have a quick foray into converting it into ePub, just to make sure it's not too hard with all the illustrations. I made sure it was a workable structure and stopped at that for the moment. Because, you know, the first step in publishing a book, is to write it... (you wouldn't believe it, but that's what self-publishing tutorials find necessary to point out... dohhh!!).

With that said, it doesn't mean that I'll stop writing fan fiction in the universe of Elder Scrolls. I feel like I've had a break, and now Lena Wolf is starting to complain that she's bored and wanting new adventures... Meaning that I'll be back to modding and gaming later this Autumn, and also writing and posting, because, after all, I am Lena Wolf...

Busy, busy, Lena! I hope your book does well.

That is great! Good luck Lena!

Congratulations, Lena! Best of luck with your series!

Congrats and good luck Lena!

Thank you all! The book will be sitting quietly on my PC for a while longer though, the main goal being to write it and get those words out of my head and into the computer. Perhaps I should back it up, come to think of it... who knows, huh?

Project: Winter tires on car
Status: Complete



Was gonna wait a bit but since we have freezing temps I decided to change the tires on the official Rocu Car™. Better do it now since I'm moving back home tomorrow. It's getting cold in Chez Cottage!

Nice!




Huh? Pics or it didn't happen? Lol. (in other words, pics or I won't know what you are talking about doing here, lol)



Will you be enclosing it? And by the way, your roof on that shed is just plain PERFECT!!! I am in love with how it is still looking exactly as it did ten years ago or more!!! You did a wonderful job on that shed!









Oh, I LOVE that inside view!!!! How did you manage to get the exact same paint color? Awesome job, as always!!!







Pics or it didn't happen,





Wow, what a huge undertaking!!! What was your inspiration to write about this, was it the Bible or something recent in your life?

We got some paint from the very guy who painted it nine years ago so that's why it's the exact same color. And funny you should say it looks how it did ten years ago because that's exactly how old the garage is now. The frame and roof were completed in October 2015

Holy Cow, I didn't realize that! I do remember you building it, watching it go up in pics right here on this thread! I am in awe of your handiwork around that place!

Do you treat the wood inside the shed with anything like Polyurethane?

Those stories and characters have been living in my head for the past 30 years or so, changing and evolving and eventually connecting with each other so that it started making sense. And also over the years I've been reading the stories from the Old Testament on and off, as you do... no specific Bible study, just an odd reading... and once you get used to the style of the language and learn a few things about old traditions, you no longer get lost in them and start understanding what the stories are actually telling you. Some of them are tragic, some are funny, some are erotic even (like the Song of Solomon), and of course there are a lot of fantastic visions and dreams. And all of it is there for you, open to interpretation, and once you get used to reading the actual text instead of reading the interpretations and indoctrinations of that text, you start seeing things in it that you never thought possible... not in the Bible! But yes, in the Bible... So that then merged with the fantasy world in my head and sent my characters on a quest of discovery and a fight against the undead, because obviously we had to have the undead. I chose Late Roman period as the backdrop, because let's face it, the Roman Legion was the coolest thing under the Sun... The main character is a Legionnaire, sent on a very special mission to an archipelago on the other side of the Great Ocean, so far away from his native Imperial Mainland that even the Legion does not have a presence there, and so he has to uphold the Imperial Law all on his own. Which can't be easy. He'll have to make friends and alliances, he'll be joining the Order of Ezekiel which stands against the undead, he'll have to learn about the local Faith and customs and have his strict Roman moral values challenged... and besides, he is a Nephilim. So yeah, plenty to talk about.

I am on the second book now. I've done a rough plan for all the stories and events that I currently have in my head - they fill 11 books... But there will be more, these things tend to multiply when I'm sleeping at night. The story is almost writing itself, the characters imposing their will on the events, and I'm only the scribe, more or less... But it's great fun to do.

Lena, that is outstanding! Best wishes for your continued creativity and please let us know when your words are "released into the wild."

Thank you, Treydog! I'm not ready to release yet, I feel like I want to have more of it written down first and then release several books at once. Not that I'm being a chicken, but...

Nah, no one ever does that. Especially not on a simple building like this.