random thoughts – Day 2,396 (Thursday 10/8) – siding and glass challenges

Siding install now underway.

The sun burst through the clouds and the contractor arrived to start attaching the siding to the back of the house. There was a lot of noise from sawing and hammering and within a few hours, he singlehandedly had almost half of the back sided. 

Inside, belly dance music competed with the hammering as I unwrapped sheets of glass to see what might work with the glass pattern drawn this week. It was a clear illustration of the changes in the glass industry. 

My supply of old 12” by 12” sheets have prices tags on them ranging from $3.99 to $6.99. New sheets measure 10.5” by 10.5” (or smaller) and cost from $12 to $25 (or more) per sheet. 

Shattered.

A remnant of an old sheet of clear iridescent glass was chosen to be cut into half-inch strips for one of the three lines making up the border of the piece. Eleven strips were scored and made the satisfying snap with the running pliers as the pieces separated. And then it got dicey. No matter what I tried, the next couple strips wouldn’t break off and then the section of the glass shattered in the running pliers. The pieces were definitely not half-inch wide strips. Oops.

Unless I have some old larger glass that will work for the outer border with 12” sections, the size of the new sheets of glass is going to be a problem. The smaller sheets will force a design change to accommodate the smaller lengths. This will be an argument in favor of working on smaller projects going forward.

I was all set to solder the project I wrapped in copper foil on Monday, and that’s when it was discovered I don’t have any flux. There was instant regret over not buying the bottle that was in my hand in the glass shop on Tuesday. At the time, I thought I had a bottle of the stuff, but I discovered today it is flux cleaner, not flux. Big difference. Instead of soldering, I cut more glass pieces from the scrap bins for another small project.

random thoughts – Day 2,395 (Wednesday 10/7) – progress

Delivery!

Every Wednesday, it’s the same thought – “holy crap, it’s Wednesday already!” Today was no different in that regard.    

As I was finishing dressing, fresh and clean from the shower, a loud truck noise outside caught my attention. It was different than the Monday trash truck sounds and the daily oil delivery and parcel delivery trucks that pass through the neighborhood.

It was the long-awaited lumber company flatbed truck, loaded with the materials for my siding job. Unlike the partial order of incorrect color siding delivered in May, this delivery is boxes and boxes of materials, all labeled with the correct color and some unboxed pieces that are definitely the right color. The contractor is due here Thursday morning. Progress, at last.

The morning was spent enjoying the warmth pushed from the furnace that I caved and turned on last night when I saw the temperature was expected to drop to the mid- to low- thirties. It was nice to wake up not freezing. Then time was invested in reprogramming the thermostat a few degrees lower.

After that, it was back to the drawing board. I was plotting and planning a stained glass piece like it’s my job, and maybe in a way, it is my job now. Much of the design sketched on Monday was redrawn and expanded on Tuesday, and was changed even more today. Some straight lines were changed to curves. Lines were extended into the edging element to break up some of the straight runs. Then there was a leap to commitment with black Sharpie lines drawn over the pencil lines. It will be much harder to backtrack now. I may color it with pencils, which I've done on larger pieces in the past.

Next up is glass selection. The funny part is, the design started out specifically for a piece of pink, white, blue opal glass bought on Tuesday along with three sheets of coordinating clear colored glass. Once the drawing was underway, the piece expanded in size and the design grew from one central element to three and now the single sheet of opal glass won’t be enough. I can either go to the glass shop Thursday and get another sheet or two of the same glass, or totally change the glass scheme. We’ll see how it shakes out. 

While drawing the current design, I got an idea for another design and it might become a situation of endless designing and not getting around to executing. So many mysteries still to unfold, but it feels like progress.

random thoughts – Day 2,394 (Tuesday 10/6) – grandpa ray's birthday

Markie and Grandpa Ray.

On October 6, 1916, in Vaasa Finland, Grandpa Ray was born. As children, he and his sister Sylvia are listed with their parents in passenger lists for multiple crossings to and from America. The family settled in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Somewhere along the way he met and married Mummu, who had been born one day before him, half a world away. Grandpa Ray had a big reputation. According to local lore, he once physically picked up and relocated a friend’s car as a prank. In his younger years, he worked as many as three jobs at a time, including working in an apple orchard and driving a taxi. Eventually he established his own business specializing in “rebuilding, aligning, and scraping” machinery, based in Lunenburg, Massachusetts.

Mummu and Grandpa Ray divorced when Mom was six, in a time when it was unusual. When I was a kid and he visited, he would bring donuts, and allegedly, it was me who christened him "Ba Ba Gooie" because the donuts were gooey. Or something.

Yankee kids in Texas.

Eventually, he packed up and moved his business to Fort Worth, Texas, where people called him “Yank,” and he met and married Markie, a redheaded Southern Belle from Oklahoma and for better or worse and to her surprise, she became "Ma Ma Gooie." My family drove to Texas on family vacation when I was eight years old and we all got cowboy boots. Luckily, later visits involved air travel. My brother spent the summers of his junior high and high school years with Grandpa Ray and worked with him in his business (and was forbidden from addressing him as Ba Ba Gooie and had to call him Ray).

When Grandpa Ray bought a new car, he would sometimes drive to Massachusetts to visit us and “break the car in.” Grandpa Ray had some amusing theories. When driving on a curved entrance/exit ramp, he drove in as straight a line as possible because he said turns wore out the tires. The legendary “Ray shortcuts” (which we still joke about) usually resulted in many extra miles and being an hour late despite having left early.

There was always a lot of food at Grandpa Ray’s house. Markie was an amazing cook and full dinners with recipes from Southern Living Magazine graced the table nightly. Sweet potato casserole, roasts, side dishes, Jello salads, breakfast casseroles, and decadent desserts ensured we each gained a solid ten pounds during each visit.

At least once per visit, Grandpa Ray would pull out his vinyl recording of Finlandia by Sibelius, herd us into the living room, and make us listen to the entire album. There would be a visit to Angelo’s BBQ for brisket, Joe T Garcia’s or Casa Bonita for Mexican food, and Spaghetti Warehouse down at the Fort Worth Stockyards.

At the last house he owned, he converted the garage to a pool room with floor to ceiling bookcases filled with books. Pool was played by “Ray Rules” which meant you could forget about winning, because he would move the balls and lift the corner of the table at whim. That house had a pecan tree in the back yard, and one year he sent each of bags stuffed with shelled pecans.

A birthday card from Grandpa Ray.

Grandpa Ray was a talented artist, and every year on our birthdays, there was a birthday card and letter with a beautifully illustrated envelope. He did this for all the relatives – his siblings and their spouses, their kids and grandkids, Mom and us kids. Recipients often relayed feedback received from letter carriers who enjoyed the artwork. A cousin has an archive of many of the envelopes, and I have dozens of the ones sent to me in a box in the spare room. 

I wish I’d known Grandpa Ray better. We exchanged letters throughout my life, but they were about daily life. On his end it was about his roses, opening/closing the pool, harvesting pecans, or big projects he was working on for major companies. On my end it was school grades, ballet, weather, my job. I wish I could sit and talk with him once more to know him better, but he passed away in 2008.

random thoughts – Day 2,393 (Monday 10/5) – mummu's birthday

Mummu, FHS 1934.

On October 5, 1916 my Mummu was born, the youngest of ten children. Her mother was 45 years old and her eldest living sister was 20 years old, married, and had a child of her own when Mummu was born. Three of Mummu’s siblings (John W, Lilja, and John) died in infancy or early childhood. Mummu loved introducing “my nephew John, and he is 13 months older than me.”

She was the only one of the kids in her family to graduate high school (Fitchburg High School, 1934), but that was likely because with the Great Depression underway, there were no jobs for her to leave school for after the eighth grade like her brothers and sisters before her did.

There are stories Mummu told us from her life growing up. All the females slept on one bed and all the males in another. Her brothers shared one pair of shoes to alternate attending school. Her sister Julia, ten years older, once stepped into the pantry and landed feet first in some pies that were cooling on the floor. As a teen, Mummu wrote a winning essay about citizenship and received a gold medal (which I now have, and wonder if,  at the time, groceries might have been more helpful). She said she was a ballroom dancer before she married Grandpa Ray. When they divorced (an uncommon thing to do in the 1940s) she went to work in the yarn factory.

Mummu never drove and got up at 5:00 am Monday through Friday and walked to work for a 6:00 am start. She cleaned one room each weekday after work during the commercial breaks of the soaps. Laundry was done on weekends using the washer in the big, dark, slightly scary basement and hung to dry on the clothes lines on her porch. Ironing was performed on Mondays after work in front of the soaps playing on the giant TV with the loud remote clicker.

Mummu's Arabia of Finland cups and saucers.

Many Saturdays, when we weren’t watching candlepin bowling or horse racing or golf on TV, we walked downtown to shop. On Sundays, her white nursing shoes worn for work were polished (often by me) and the laces washed by hand. She always wore a skirt, blouse, and white ankle socks with the nursing shoes, and I still have the gray and white striped cotton work skirt with a metal zipper she wore for years. 

One summer when I was probably eight or nine, Mummu took me to the factory to see where she worked. It was a vacation week and the shop was closed for machine maintenance. There were wood floors, big machines, and dust motes dancing in the light coming through the windows. She was a union rep, and once took me to a union meeting at the British American Club. With no idea what the room of adults was discussing I was bored out of my mind. That union meeting stands out as the only time I did something with Mummu where I wished I was doing something else.  

Mummu loved knitting, General Hospital, and watching football, basketball, baseball, horse racing, and golf on TV. Her favorite golfer was Lee Trevino. She usually had one sport on the TV and another on the radio and kept up with both games while knitting and holding a conversation. When I worked at a bank downtown after graduating college and Mummu lived downtown in the elderly high rise, we would sometimes have lunch together at her apartment.

Mummu and me, 2001.

Mummu died in 2005 at the age of 88. She is buried in the only piece of land she ever owned – a plot at Forest Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg. I was living in Tennessee at the time, and flew home in time to see her before she passed away. I miss her. I think about her when I make her recipes for carrot cake, poultry stuffing, and meringue cookies and avoid making the complicated recipe for the raspberry truffle layered brownies that I loved. I think about her when I look at the black raw silk dress she bought in 1960 for her brother’s funeral that she later gave me and was one of the first vintage dresses in my collection. It went from a bit too big to fitting well and now no longer fits me. I think about her when I see any of the many sweaters she knit for me, and when I see her green and white coffee cups and saucers from Finland in my buffet. All the time, basically.

Happy birthday Mummu. Miss you.

random thoughts – Day 2,392 (Sunday 10/4) – pieces and parts

Pieces.

Part of Saturday night was spent obsessing over art deco stained glass designs. The whole thing kicked off because of the interesting art deco wood design in the elevator of the office scenes in a drama I’ve been watching. The diagonals and different colors of wood are fascinating, and I paused the show frequently to look at the overall effect to analyze how to design something similar in glass. The next step of the process was looking online for existing windows, transoms, and decorative panels for inspiration. The hard part will be reigning in all the ideas.

After a Sunday morning that included yoga stretching and working on some belly dance moves, there was a stop for groceries and the victorious find of B&M brown bread in a can, which often accompanied our usual Saturday night hot dogs and beans supper when I was a kid. It is not always easy to find. 

The rest of the day was lost somewhere in preparing a late lunch, playing Words with Friends, spacing out on the couch, talking to Kiki, running to various windows to take pictures of the turkeys in the yard, making supper, and washing pots and pans.

The magical dichroic rectangle bevel.

Then it got more fun again. The scrap glass containers were reviewed again, this time with consideration for the new larger panel in the early drawing process. Triangles, rectangles, and square scraps were pulled out. One of the fun parts of scrap panels is placing the available glass in the template and then drawing the pattern lines around them, instead of drawing the pattern and then searching for glass to fit.

There was also an Internet search for a specific one-inch by four-inch rectangle bevel with a dichroic center. I have one left from a long ago project and I want more to balance it. This is a tricky search. Some were found in larger sizes but not the size needed so the search will continue. It’s all part of the fun.

random thoughts – Day 2,391 (Saturday 10/3) – at the farm

Beautiful day at Hollis Hills Farm.

The day was another gift of a warm temperature, sunshine, and a blue sky, which was perfect for the day’s plans. The first stop was in Ashburnham to visit with friends who had a table at the art center for the citywide yard sale. 

After a while, I headed to Fitchburg on a gorgeous ride along winding country roads flanked by the changing foliage. The destination was a meetup with my sister at Hollis Hills Farm to sit outside, enjoy the weather, and hear the musician who is an acquaintance of hers.

When I arrived, several parking areas were full or nearly full. The picnic area still had plenty of tables available, but over the couple hours we were there, it filled up and lines grew for food and drinks outside and ice cream inside the barn. Mostly country music wafted in the air and I, not a country fan, knew a couple of the songs the singer performed, especially when it was old school Johnny Cash. I knew more songs when it was the recorded music on the singer's break (White Stripes!).

Pumpkins outside the barn shop.

Families chatted, babies occasionally cried, and kids chased chickens. The singer offered up $5 to any kid who caught a chicken and the younglings got busy trying. Meanwhile, I was trying to offer the chickens refuge under our table and cheering on the ones who found safety under a food truck. One highly motivated boy pulled it off, caught a chicken, collected his pay, and then declared to his family he should get a job as a chicken catcher.

Hollis Hills has flowers and fruit for picking if you like to do the farm labor yourself and displayed in bins if you prefer to be a consumer. There is honey, locally raised meat, ice cream, and more in the large barn shop. Outside has plentiful outdoor seating, the chickens running freely, penned goats for hand feeding, and a big green tractor popular for climbing up and sitting on. The musician was set up on a trailer with a beautiful backdrop of rolling hills and local mountains.

Apple cider slushie - yum!

The Farm's kitchen menu is impressively full and varied, with hummus, burgers, wraps, mac and cheese, poutines, pulled pork, chicken, and more. We had both already eaten so we stuck with cold beverages. 

Apple cider slushies beat out water as our beverages of choice. Thick and frosty with a rich apple flavor, it is possibly my new favorite chilled drink. I may need to return to Hollis Hills soon for another one. And maybe some cider donuts as long as I'm out there.

random thoughts – Day 2,390 (Friday 10/2) – like christmas

Hedge looks like Christmas.

Sometimes, an ordinary day can feel like Christmas. The temperature was around 80, which felt like a gift, and I finally got around to taking the kitchen runner outside to hose it off and wash it. This specific project had been on the list since spring and just hadn’t happened, and every time I looked at the runner I was annoyed with myself. Now, if I can get a dresser sanded and painted, and then paint the shed, I’ll be right on schedule. Sort of.

While putzing around in the yard I noticed the smaller of the hedges, which also had the least trimming done this summer, has red berries and looks a bit like Christmas. I didn't notice berries last year. I used a plant ID app to identify the hedge and it is some type of yew. The two larger hedges don’t have berries, but they also got a lot more pruning over the summer which could be a factor. Or. they are different types of bush with similar needles.

Getting started on a panel.

When I bought the house a year ago, I had a plan to make a stained glass piece for the opening between the kitchen and living room. There was a colorful panel hanging in the space when I first looked at the house, and it looked great. Today, I revisited the book of patterns I drafted ages ago, which include pieces I forgot I made because, except for two small pieces and a couple gift pieces, I sold everything I made. Worse, I neglected to get photos of the larger pieces, or if I did, they are not in the binder and are lost somewhere.

The trip through the patterns was great inspiration to finally get started on the piece for the house. The tape measure, pencil, ruler, and graph paper came out, along with the boxes of bevels which will be placed and then designed around. Six pieces of graph paper were taped together to make a sheet large enough for a 26-inch by 14-inch panel. Pencil lines began. The boxes of bevels were fetched and some were rough placed to get things going.

English muffle glass!

Beneath the smaller boxes of bevels that were in a bigger box lay the surprise of another box labeled “English Muffle Glass.” In the several recent visits with the bevels, I didn’t realize there was another box below them. The box held sheets of gorgeous, deep colored glass and twice as many sheets of various textures of clear glass. The good day had gotten even better. 

Now I need to get busy drawing the colored elements in the panel design, and decide if it will be done with lead came or copper foil. Let the fun begin!