Some odds and ends for the Spring Fling kit...it will make sense later.
On a totally unrelated note, it's my best friend's birthday today, let's all sing...
Happy Birthday to you
You live in a zoo
You look like a monkey
And you smell like one too!
That's what my Dad sang to us as kids...it caused a few awkward birthday party moments for us, until we learned everybody else sang a much different song.
Susan, the UPS man will be there with your present today :)
I was going to build a bench from scratch, but I found this cheap cradle at Ben Franklin the other day that lent itself to a quick alteration.
I made a few lists when I started the Spring Fling kit, including a timeline of when I should have certain things accomplished so that I'm not rushing at the end. I was doing okay until two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago I drove my assistant to the emergency room and I don't have her back yet. She's fine, she's recovering from surgery...they found that five ovarian cysts had grown together to totally encapsulate one of her ovaries...the mass they removed was a big as a volleyball and weighed ten pounds. They had to cut her open vertically in order to get it out, across the grain of all her abdominal muscles, so her recovery is going to be lengthy.
What this means for me, until I have a much more cheerful assistant back, is that I have twice the workload I normally do. I have spent an insane amount of time at the office in the last two weeks, so have hardly worked on the Spring Fling at all. I'm not sure I'm going to get it done by the deadline.
I'm trying to remain optimistic...perhaps I can take a week of vacation toward the end of June, or perhaps I can farm out some of the small items I have to make from kits to friends and family. My daughter has yet to find a summer job, maybe I'll make her work for me in exchange for room and board. Nah, who am I kidding, I'm too much of a control freak and a perfectionist to let anyone else work on the project.
I know I've got my priorities straight, getting my job done and giving my assistant time to recover instead of rushing her back are more important that the Spring Fling kit...but I'm still disappointed.
I keep reminding myself that bought the kit because it fits something I've been wanting to build for a year, not because I wanted to enter the contest, the contest was coincidental and is a secondary goal. Reminding myself isn't working...secondary goal or not, I would like to participate. I haven't given up though, we'll see if I can still pull this off.
Since I can't share with you the project I'm working on I will share with you a song...
I went to the office an hour early yesterday, and ended up staying an hour late...I was worn out when I got home, but I wanted to finish the last of the prep work on the base unit of the Spring Fling kit so that I could glue it together this morning. Have you ever known you were too tired to be working on something but carried on anyway?
Ah, you know what I mean...you'll sympathize with me then....
The things I had left on my list were to glue the interior window trim on the second story, put beams on the underside of the second story floor, and to cut a door in the second story wall between the base unit and one of the additions.
Notice in this picture that the interior window trim was glued to the exterior...that the beams on the underside of the floor were glued down the full length of the floor, not just the part that's inside the house, so I had to cut and scrape off part of them this morning in order to put the front wall up...and I'm sure the first thing you saw is the gaping hole in the side of the second story wall where I cut the opening for the door part way over the roof line of the addition.
I knew I shouldn't have been working on the house last night but I didn't listen to me...when will I learn that I just might know what I'm talking about?