Christmas Has Arrived at Maple Leaf Gardens

The “nesting” has continued and Troy put a lot of work into rearranging the entry way. The coats are behaving on a bar; the offending coat rack has been consumed by fire.

I came in afterward and cleaned and cleaned (but don’t picture it too clean—there’s still no eating off the floor or anything), and got so carried away I fished out some Christmas decorations and dressed up the room.

Feels good. It’s been so long, unwrapping the ornaments was like finding old friends. Or more like meeting old friends you thought were dead. Speaking of which, a few of the nicer gold balls did die in what we will just call the incident of 2009 and say no more of it. (Except that I hope it is the incident, as in the only one this year!)

That was yesterday during the afternoon. In the evening we reached a major milestone and moved the biodiesel processing into the shop. Troy prepared things by making sure all the drums were empty and clearing the biodiesel area in the shop.

The weather prepared things by lightly raining and sleeting on and off the whole time. But rain does mean milder temperatures and we survived our exposure.

We started by lifting the first drum and its wheeled stand and carrying it all the way from the garage to the shop. The next one we tried to push on the wheels—snow, water and ice on the ground notwithstanding. That worked reasonably well and that’s the method we stuck with.

Troy started his first batch of biodiesel in the shop today and is very excited by it. (Ok, not dancing excited, but “Yes, it’s nice to be able to produce biodiesel in the winter” excited.)

This has also led us to decide to burn the oil stove in the kitchen as much as we want. (It’s for heat, not cooking.) Troy can continue to make more, unlike last year when what we could store was all we could use over the winter. Running that stove makes a tremendous difference in the comfort of the house so this decision is making us very happy.

Today, we used the space newly available in the garage to stack up the metal siding. Troy has given up on getting all of it up “before” winter (now that it’s already arrived) so it needed to come out of the weather. We will still try to finish at least the south side when we have a nice enough day. The Tyvec on that side is the most weathered and could use some covering up.

That’s what’s happening around here.

Have a good week!