I saw a faint streak of color in the sky when I left work at 6 tonight, and I now have hope that I'll make it through this miserable winter. It's sunny for a change, but windy and cold. How long until spring?

Until then, I'm passing the time with swimming and reading about boatbuilding: my mile tonight was back to just over 25 minutes, and I know more about the manufacture of sailcloth than I ever wanted.

We had the pile of cinderblock and the remaining old wall hauled away last week and built the new wall over the weekend. Much better!

I got a prescription for statins to help my slightly high cholesterol, but I ran it through the laundry.

I need to take more photos.

And.. that's all I can think of right now.

The wood store won't be getting another shipment of marine plywood for another couple weeks, so I'm getting the shed straightened out in preparation. Today I tore out the disgusting old workbench: not only was it too high and too deep, useful only as a very inconvenient place to dump junk, but it was covered in grease and dirt from the shed's previous life as an auto shop. In its place, I built a cute little bench-slash-storage bin:

 

I tried ripping the panels with my new table saw, but it kept getting wedged. Not sure if the fence was crooked or I wasn't feeding it straight, but I had to go for the circular saw on that. Hrm. It's disappointing to get a new tool and not be able to solve every problem with it. (Now I'm dying for a chance to do a compound miter cut.)

So what's next on the boatbuilding agenda? Now that the weather's cooperating a bit, I can get the rails on the canoe that's been sitting in the shed unloved for the last few months, put on a final coat of epoxy, and see if she floats. This one's going to coworker Ian since I don't really want a boat that I can't sail, and I'll need lots of space for one that will.

Specifically, this:

I found my boat! Turns out there's a couple lunatics down in New Zealand who have designed exactly the boat I want to build: a miniature cutter, straight out of the 1800s. Lots of lines and sails to play with, my very own tiny tall ship. I hadn't seen anything like this on a dinghy scale (because, well, it's just silly) so I'd resigned myself to doing everything blind—building a hull based on other designs, designing the rigging from what I can find in books, hoping I put the mast in the right place—and wasn't looking forward to spending whatever it's going to take to build the thing just to discover that it's hopelessly broken. I'm more than happy to put up $90 on plans drawn by people who might know what they're doing.

Know more than me, any rate.

If you sent me (or anyone @opaque.net or its various hosted domains) an email and it bounced, please be a dear and send it again, won't you? Turns out one of the blacklist services I was using shut down, and sendmail was trying to connect to a server that no longer exists. Some mail was still getting through, which is why it took me a week to notice something was wrong. Sorry for the inconvenience!