(Actually this was several Friday's ago but I have been on the road and camping out of cell service range so am just now getting around to posting it.)
Around our house completion of projects and chores was expected and pretty much the only praise and positive feedback we got most of the time for that was more along the lines of negative feedback if we fell short of expectations. I don't know how much of it is me and how much is the result of the environment I was raised in. Either way, I tend to measure my worth, and worthiness, based on the chores and projects I've completed.
If I don't have at least a couple of projects on my list to prove my worthiness - well, that's too unbearable to even think about!
They don't have to be big projects, like building our house, though that was a great one! Little projects, like the half-hour it took to remove the manufacture's vinyl-stickers off the sides of the teardrop trailer, count too.
Today there's six waiting projects there on top of the tablesaw and I'm as happy as a pig in Valhalla - or something like that.
Starting at the top-left corner and working around counter-clockwise, there's a box of 6 ramkens.
I carry a small 1.5 liter presure-cooker in my trailer(s) which, in addition to cooking up 5 cents worth of real rice instead of using one of those $2 packages of highly processed gunk in about the same amount of prep-time, also does the warming-up job of a microwave without that pesky neccessity to be plugged into shore-power.
I have been fashioning small 'pans' out of tinfoil to heat/cook things in it that I don't want laying directly in the water (presure-cooker + no water = explosion!), but that's awkward, fiddly, and heavy on resources, so I figured I'd try using an oven-safe ramken instead. (On-line you can only buy these in six-packs, so I now have two in each of my trailers as well as a couple spares.)
Next are 4 small mesh bags.
One is to be used as a more hygienic way of corralling my tooth-stuff than the plastic ziplock which kept everything perpetually wet. Another will keep my four perscription drugs under control while rattling around inside the food box. (The food box because it lives inside the cab of the truck when on the road - or at night when it's cooler and bears may be wandering - and inside the trailer, which stays cooler than the parked truck during the day)
I took the sewing machine to the other two mesh bags and made them even smaller to keep the ramkens snug and secure with the handy draw-cords when slamming down the road.
The next item is a new remote for our ceiling-fan because the old one lost the ability to turn the fan's light on or off. (I had to get the 8' ladder out and remove the bulb because it got stuck on 'on' and we can't live in our small space without the fan turning, so shutting the whole damn thing off at the wall-switch was not an option.
BTW, the new remote didn't help, so now replacing both the reciever up inside the fan as well as the remote to operate it has been added to the project list. (Oh goody! More projects to look forward to!)
Now we come to a couple of 14" soft-close drawer slides.
The slides that came on the two drawers of the teardrop work perfectly well. Except that they are hard-close. And when I say close, they really close.
So much so that I had to add handles to the drawers in order to get them open again without physicly damaging myself on the puney little cutouts provided as handles.
But they also close with a bang, no matter how careful I try to be, and unnecessary noise is just one more thing I'm sensitive to.
But the soft-close slides didn't work any better than that remote for the ceiling fan.
The drawers are square, the cabinet is square, but no matter how much shimming and fiddling I did, I could not get those slides to consistently shut all the way,
so I ended up putting the original slides, which work perfectly every time, back on and gluing a 'bumper' of open-cell foam to the back of the drawers to help deaden the 'slam'.
Two for four so far. Batting 500. Good for baseball, sucks for projects!
The next item is sports tape
for the Wife's 20 year old self-defense bat who's original wrap had turned into a sticky black goo.
After a lot of slicing, scraping, and sanding, the bat is ready for a new wrap.
The sock on the end of the bat is so that if your assailant trys grabbing it away from you they are left with a handfull of empty sock and you have more time for a low, knee-shattering swing to put them on the ground. Also, I'm not, by nature, comfortable with violence, but this is not the movies or TV. Once they're on the ground keep swinging until there is no longer any posibility that they will get up again. (Here in Texas it's a lot simpler to have a dead intruder on your property than a badly injured one.)
That final item is a Shimano 7 speed index shifter, but that's worth a post of it's own. For now let's just say the project-to-success rate has improved to 4 for 6. I've had better, but that will have to do.
