Blair's Blog

Ah, Lederbalsam! Far too infrequently, I get out the Lederbalsam and have a go at the leather furniture in the living room. It is not a trivial task.  Lederbalsam is a wonderfully aromatic concoction of lanolin & beeswax that is used to clean and condition leather items. I first learned about it from a colleague who’s daughter rode show jumping horses. The equestrian set use Lederbalsam for saddles, boots, reins and all sorts of horsey paraphernalia.

On a full set of leather living room furniture the effort is towards the Herculean end of the spectrum. The Lederbalsam is applied by hand – rubbed vigorously into the dry leather and left to sit for five or ten minutes then the excess is wiped off and the leather buffed with a terry towel. It is an exercise that would make Mr. Miyagi proud.

Conditioning the armchair, the chair-and-a-half  and the foot-stool were enough effort for today. The couch will have to wait ’til another day.  Besides, it smells so nice – why not have that to look forward to?

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For a guy that didn’t really care for coffee about a year ago, I seem to have come a long way! Not sure if “progress” is exactly the right word, but we now have a 5 appliance kitchen. Yep, the frou-frou coffee/espresso machine that served as payment for my final invoice from my previous client is now a built-in appliance in our kitchen. On Wednesday, a friend with a table saw gave me a hand cutting down a white melamine vanity cabinet to fit in the space between the counter top and the microwave shelf.

The idea was to maintain the basic structure of the vanity cabinet in order to keep things square and to avoid the need to do any edge banding. It almost worked. We worked slowly and steadily double checking all the cuts along the way – until the very end when we lost focus. The problem was that I needed to raise the microwave shelf about 1-⁵⁄₈ inches, but when we cut the top off the cabinet we forgot that meant notching each side. The front 7 inches of each side panel of the cabinet needed to be 1-⁵⁄₈ inches taller than the back. Oops! It took a bit of effort, but I ended up patching in a small rectangular piece into each side below the shelf. So I ended up having to dowel and edge band the new box before I was done. There is a kerf line that will need to be touched up with a little paint as well.

The under cabinet lighting was also an interesting twist to work around. The light is a fluorescent, so not too hot. Since the installation instructions for the coffee machine suggested a ventilation gap at the back of the cabinet, I decided to cut the microwave shelf about an inch short to allow air circulation. The microwave is now back-lit, it looks a little odd so we might have to figure out something else, but for now it all works.

It really does make a nice cup of coffee – come on over and I’ll make you one!

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Despite Balzac Billy’s dire predictions regarding how much more winter we might have to endure, there are some signs that Spring may arrive – some day. With the clocks springing forward early this morning and the lengthening days, I guess winter will have to eventually give up.

I suppose the other sign of changing seasons is the urge to deal with some of those projects that have been lingering all winter. One of those is our main floor powder room. Some time ago, the kids ripped the toilet paper holder out of the drywall and I managed to procrastinate on the repair for quite a while. A couple of weeks ago I finally patched the hole and of course that meant the patch needed to be painted. And a little more procrastinating ensued.

It’s such a small room and the paint was the original from when the house was built. So, one thing led to another and we ended up with new colours and the nasty, cheap, 90’s vintage “bulbs on a stick” light fixture got targeted for destruction. Anyway, yesterday I finished up and the results are pretty good. The patch is only noticeable if you know to look for it and the new colours and lighting are a nice improvement.

Only trouble is, while mudding the patch I accidentally wandered around the entire main floor filling dings and dents in the walls. The whole place looks like it has a bad case of white freckles – now the only way out of this mess is more paint. Ah well, it might keep us from noticing that it’s still winter outside!

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It’s been a while since the last post (especially if you missed the 1-day Robbie Burns Day item) so I’ve got a gallimaufry of topics that I’ll lump together here. It’s a cold miserable day – again. Brenda is so mad about the groundhog’s prediction at the beginning of the month that there will be 6 more months of winter that she appears to have hunted down poor old Balzac Billy and made a nice vest for herself…

Maybe you’ve wondered where our Sinterklaas post was for this Christmas season (OK, maybe not); well, we were busy welcoming our newest nephew into the family at the beginning of December.  As a result, we held Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet off by a month and had the annual Langendoen Christmas gathering on the first weekend of January after the new year.  We all met at Ronny and Carla’s place outside of Rocky Mountain House and had a great weekend with all of the cousins having a fine time skating and sledding and eating far too many treats that Oma picked up at the Dutch store.  We had a fun weekend and, despite the serious blizzard that swept across southern Alberta that weekend, none of us had any trouble on the roads. Anyway, here are a few pictures:

During one of the cold snaps that we keep having this winter, I noticed that I’d start the van (2002 Mazda MPV) up and the radiator fan would immediately start running on high, even if it was -28°C out. A few days after that, the fan started randomly running on high at any old time. A little trouble-shooting and googling uncovered the fact that the fan control module was the likely culprit and that it was the subject of a recall to replace it. So I took it to a Mazda dealer only to find out that it had already been replaced on our van. So I shelled out $100 for a new one and then waited 2 weeks for a day nice enough to do the repair outside.

It’s not too bad of a job, but I had to pull the battery and the battery tray out to gain access to the three wiring connections. All three were a pain to disconnect – 5 years of accumulated grit always makes separating under-hood connectors difficult. Once that was done the swap was pretty simple. The new module has a different part number than the old one, so I hope it’s improved.

One trick that I’d heard about when disconnecting a car battery is to use an automotive “settings keeper” to preserve the vehicles computer settings and radio presets. This prevents the computer from forgetting the various bits of data that it uses to optimize settings for fuel economy and performance and maybe saves a bit of gas for the few weeks after the repair. I couldn’t find one locally, so I made my own. Sadly, it didn’t work. After the repair was done the radio presets were lost. I think that the 9V battery couldn’t keep up in the cold. Next time, I think I’ll try wiring a 12V wall-wart transformer to the cigarette lighter adapter, rather than the battery.

The kids have this coming week off school, so we are hoping for a bit of a chinook and maybe we can take the opportunity to have a family outing – maybe a day in Banff? Or at least an afternoon matinee in a nice warm movie theater if the weather won’t cooperate.

…it seems that miserable groundhog got what he deserved…

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