My day off..

I slept in!

I got up at about 7 a.m. but wandered back to bed and snoozed till about 9 a.m. then had a leisurely breakfast. The weather looked OK. It is strange for me to sleep in so long.

Amazing light technology

I repaired an outside light that has two bulbs, one shining down the driveway, the other around the corner to our back door. It is one of those which senses movement and comes on. As I walked out the back door and it switched on I thought about that technology. My Dad died when I was relatively young in 1964. If I told him then that soon we would have lights that switched on by sensing movement he would have thought that was science fiction. It is technology we take for granted now days though!

Sanded a table top..... thanks Mr Maloney. 

My wife feels we need a little table in Space2B that people can sit around. There was one down the back shed with a scratched and discoloured top. I got that out today and sanded the top. I had an orbital sander which was making slow hard work of it. I got out a drill with a sanding disk on it and that cut through the varnish but seemed to liquefy it so that it clogged up the sanding disk.  Then I remembered Mr Maloney my wood work teacher back in intermediate school. He had rectangle pieces of steel and taught us how to scrape the surface of wood with them. I tried a bit of angle iron I had and it worked quite well. I then pulled the blade out of an old wood plane I have and used that. It was magic! It removed the old varnish beautifully and quickly. I then finished off with the orbital sander and elbow grease with a sanding block. A great job done.

I cleaned Wicked Wanda... "Wax on, wax off"

Wicked Wanda is my old 1990 Nissan Bluebird car. I hardly ever wash my cars. Wanda was looking very dirty and uncared for. I found some old wash and wax in the workshop and gave her a wash. I first washed the dirt off. I then rinsed that stuff off. Then I applied the "wash and wax" according to the instructions. It was a lot harder than the instructions seemed to suggest. They said something like "simply pour some stuff in water, apply with a sponge, rinse off then dry off with a shammy". "Simply?" ... after sanding the table top all morning, and washing Wanda this afternoon my shoulders and arms know they have worked. The Rugby World Cup promoters say that I could "watch history being made". Well history was made today... I washed and waxed a car!
I stacked firewood...
We have a great big pile of blue gum firewood stacked down the back paddock. Then we have cupboards we stack it in before it makes its final journey to the fire. Well the cupboards were getting empty so I brought barrow loads of firewood from the back paddock to the cupboards close to the house. It should see out the rest of winter. I did this until it was nearly dark.
I put ties on Buckets... Now I remember C = Pye times the Diameter. 
We have a Night Shelter street appeal next week. We have volunteers standing on street corners with buckets and passersby make donations. (Please let them be generous!) Well we have had a problem. Once we suspected that one of our volunteers was dipping into the bucket to help his own funds. (He would not have got much) Donors also like to feel confident that their donation is going to the right place. So we decided that we would put ties on the bucket lid. I decided that I could polish this job off tonight. I wanted three ties per lid, spaced around the lid equal distance apart. How to work this out? I used to be top of the class in maths at secondary school, but I have forgotten the formula. What to do? Google it of course! I did it, worked out the circumference, divided it by three, made up a paper disk to guide me and drilled and tied the 25 buckets. Good job done. I will sleep well tonight.


Now I better look at the readings for next week and get ready for tomorrow. I received confirmation that I will end one of my chaplaincies at the end of the month... pretty sad about that.