Now that I have myself a leash-trained cat, I take Nitro
outside for a nice walk each afternoon. “Nice” being subject to Nitro’s moods and the weather.
I have learned you do not walk a cat in
the rain. Don’t even ask.
On one particularly nice day Nitro was exploring the back
yard and treed hissef a squirrel. Deep down some primal kitty instinct knew he
was meant to do something involving the tree and the squirrel, but being a
deprived house cat many generations from his hunting ancestors, he didn’t know exactly what. Nitro hung on the tree watching the squirrel chatter at him for a
while, his itty bitty kitty brain plunging it's depths for a reason why a squirrel in a tree should be interesting, then both moved on.
Here Nitro’s acting on his primal instincts again. He knew
he was meant to climb the tree but got to the crotch of the tree and couldn’t
figure out what to do next. Most likely he's waiting for his dinner bowl to be delivered.
Nitro likes to go along the fence line and check out his
turf snuffling along for bugs and blowing leaves. Today he was so busy snuffling
along he didn’t see the large predator only a few feet away from him.
Scratch
the emerging primal instincts I spoke of earlier.
Then Nitro spotted Jake, the large neighboring predator only
a few feet away from him. I had decided there was no way this was going to end
well…at least not for me. But Nitro didn’t appear to be frightened at all and Jake,
being a hunting pointer, just stood stock still and pointed at Nitro.
Jake stood perfectly still while Nitro walked right up to
him and stuck his nose through the fence and tried to get a closer sniff of
Jake all the while erasing all hope of Nitro demonstrating any primal instincts that
might be suggesting he run for his life.
This was so amazing to watch. Neither appeared to be afraid
of the other. Jake was perfectly still and Nitro's ears were up. I felt we were a fraction of a second from disaster. A bark from Jake’s would
send Nitro running with his leash reeling line at super-sonic speeds or a fast move from Nitro could set Jake off. My guess is both are too dumb to realize what they should be
doing.
Friday night we packed up and headed for the cabin along
with the rest of Puget Sound that felt they needed to up-sticks and go away for
the 3-day weekend. Thankfully we weren't planning to go north and don’t have to get
involved with the missing bridge mess that has diverted the thousands of cars
that travel I-5 into two-lane roads through tulip fields. What a mess.
Bob had carefully packed the tools and smaller materials
we’d need to put the soffit on the front porch as this was the goal of our trip to the cabin. As we got to DuPont, Bob said “Now I remember what I forgot”. After all
his careful planning, he forgot to bring the little trailer so we could buy
plywood in Astoria for the soffit. In response to my text explaining this to
Kyanne, she told me not to worry about it, we’d just have to get creative. My thought was "Just
how do you get creative about not having a trailer to haul 3 sheets of 4'x8' plywood???" While we were eating our Subway sandwiches in Lacey, I grabbed the Home Depot
flyer for ideas. I saw they had 6’ fence boards on sale and with a bit of
measuring when we got to the cabin, we had an easier, cheaper idea to finish
the porch that we could transport inside the car where it was dry. Thanks Kyanne. Also worth
noting, Kyanne was the one that came up with the idea to sheet rock over the
pine walls in our bedroom to “dilute” the overpowering dark wood without damaging the beautiful wood tongue-in-groove planking. Here you get the idea while the guys take a nap in the sun last summer.
A trip to Astoria Home Depot netted us a car full of wood and free hot dogs for Customer Appreciation Day. On the way home, Bob finally got his wish, I have been relegated to the back
seat while the wood rides shotgun. If Bob thought this was going to shut me up, he was very, very wrong.
On our way back from Home Depot, I see that I have an super colossal whopping amount of mustard smeared all over the front of my "cabin jacket" and gave it a good washing. After I put it in front of the fire to dry, it was immediately occupied by Nitro who liked that it was much larger and softer than the little rug usually allotted him.
After all the work we have done on the cabin, the porch still looked kind of ratty, roofing nails stabbing
through and all, so Bob wanted to enclose the underside and create a soffit covering the whole
operation making it look neater and cleaner.
Bob worked his magic on the soffits even in the pouring
rain. It was hard to work, cut, and have materials all under the porch where it was sort of dry, but
he got the soffit done.
Of course it still needs to be painted, but it looks so much
neater than it did before.
Along with the soffit project, we needed to replace a broken
window pane since we've moved in. I bought an old window to make a stained glass picture for Kyanne and we used an old pane from that window so it had the same wavy handmade glass look as the rest of the panes. Now that we've finally replaced the window, we
can paint the window trim to make the porch project complete.
Bob anxiously awaited his $600 gasket kit he ordered for
the Jag. This kit has all the rubber gaskets needed to rubberize the Jag back
to its original state. Some of the gaskets on the car were rotted and gone when he took
the car apart and he didn't even know some of them existed until he opened
the box. The “kit” consisted of little bags of rubber gaskets with a part number
sticker on each one. No name. No instructions. So Bob spent the evening looking up
each and every part number and carefully labeling the package for easy "findability" later.
Labeling parts is something he learned the hard way with the
240Z project. He took that car apart with the anticipation he’d do some body
work, paint it and put it right together. Along came the Jaguar XKE and the 240Z was shelved for 6 years while Bob played with the Jag. When it came time to put
the 240Z back together again it was a big game of pick-up sticks. He had boxes
and boxes of unlabeled parts that only massive research and determination got
back to the correct locations. Here are
some of the little labeled bags of Jag
parts.
The sun came out for the first time since Bob painted
the Jag so he toted one of the Jag doors outside to have a look at the color in real live lighting. It’s one of those strange colors that cannot be captured accurately
in photos. In the garage majhal it looks
almost black and in the sun it’s dark grey. In this photo there appears to be a
lot of blue color that isn’t really there.
Just when it looked like things were going back together it’s
time to take the car apart even more. The next task is to paint the door jambs on
both the doors, hatch, and the car body. Basically this is a stalling tactic since what
Bob really wants to do is start
polishing the paint to see what the final finish but it’s too soon to start
that process. So he masked the car off...again...
...and he painted the door jambs. This should be about it for paint and the car should start going back together pretty soon!
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