Christmas Has Come

Christmas has arrived!! Thanks again to Peggy who provided me with my first artificial tree. (My first tree in years.)

I managed to pick up Isaac from O'Hare today and Tom and Clures arrived yesterday.

And I have a five day weekend. (That's how to manage your work week!)

Remember the star I knit last year? It's found a place to "shine."

The tree is the most overloaded I've ever had. Tom thinks it needs a few more.

I had a lot of fun hanging each ornament with a comment starting with, "Remember this one..."

Christmas Day at Maple Leaf Gardens

We had a nice quiet day for Christmas this year.

We went to the Christmas Eve service (and there was none this morning) so we had no where to go. Which was very nice considering the wet windy weather. Miserable, if you have to be out in it. But we did not.

I was knitting and blogging. Peggy was trying out her first crocheted plarn bag. Warren was manning the remotes. Troy was out doing his thing in the shop. (He's getting dangerously close to finishing the taping of the drywall, and has been priming/painting in spots where he's already moving stuff in.)

When we had enough of doing next to nothing, Peggy got us going on our popcorn project. I had mentioned that I wanted to shell some of the copious popcorn we had so I could bring some to my sister tomorrow. Troy had mentioned he just needed to grab the sheller out of the garage. (Doing it by hand is possible but not very handy or comfortable. Last time I did some I wore leather gloves and still got a couple blisters.) And we had a lot of corn to do: two Rubbermaid tubs full.

It turned into a three-person job. They rotated duties, but in this pic, Troy (center) is feeding the cobs into the sheller and turning the crank to do the actual shelling. Warren dealing with the emptied cobs and finishing the shelling on cobs the sheller didn't complete. (It was made for fieldcorn and didn't really like the smaller cobs.)
Peggy is holding a cob against the sheller to try to improve the shelling of the smaller cobs.

(I took a video of the sheller in action and if I get somewhere I can use a fast-speed connection sometime soon, I'll upload it. Make sure to check out all the popcorn flying out the top too--we had a lot of sweeping up to do!)

Troy had built a wooden box to mount the sheller onto (this was way back when we lived in the last house). It's since been repurposed as a kindling box, but we emptied it out, cleaned it out, and got it set up again for the sheller.
By the time we had emptied the two tubs of corncobs, we had 31.5" x 10.5" x 6" of corn in the box. That's almost 2000 cubic inches of corn which is just about a US bushel if my online converter worked right.

If you want to see it in a more familiarly sized tub (I'm assuming), here it is after we poured it back into the [14 gal] Rubbermaid tub:
So all of you who have been invited often to our house, I will give a word of caution: you may be put to work! For surely, how many of you put your Christmas guests to work? We are shameless.

Merry Christmas!

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!