Preparation, Preparation, Preparation.

For Christmas this year, DD, who has been playing the flute in her school band for the past year and a half, received a lovely gift from her grandfather.  It is a Shaker-style music stand in cherry with ash pegs and tapered rails for the back of the stand.  It is truly an elegant thing, but these pictures don't do it justice.  I'll post some more pictures when the stand is complete.  I say that because of anything my father hates to do, it is to finish furniture.  He loves to build it, but hates to finish it.  He often says that he'd rather build two complete pieces of furniture than build and apply finish to one. Why? 

Preparation.

To get a good finish requires a good deal of preparation.  The music stand as received was in great shape - very little sanding was going to be required.  However, there were certain to be some random spots of glue left behind from the assembly process.  I had raised the grain with a damp sponge and gone over it with paper when dry before she'd received it, but I knew that I hadn't gotten all of the glue spots.  So yesterday, when she wanted to start finishing the piece, I told DD to take and sand it all over with some 320 grit wet-or-dry sandpaper looking for spots of glue and rough areas.  I told her to let me know when she thought she was done.

All-in-all, she'd done a good job and I only touched up a few spots that I could feel were still a bit rough when I ran my hands over the piece.  We're using Watco's natural oil finish on this as it is more forgiving than a hard finish for DD to work with.  She can wipe it on and wipe the excess off with ease.  As the first coat went on, she could feel some rough spots that were still there and we found some more glue spots that had been missed.  A piece of the 320 grit paper quickly solved those issues and banished any trace of glue. 

Here's the head, precariously balanced on a piece of cardboard with the adjustment pegs barely visible to the left.

  

Here is the base - still waiting for another coat or two of finish.

 

I try to impress upon the canoe builders in my class that preparation is the key to a good finish as well.  The couple building the Prospector Ranger 15 were a bit frustrated by the amount of scraping and sanding that they did before finishing the outside of the hull.  They spent about two and a half class sessions doing this work to prepare the surface.  They were tired and, "just want to be done".  So, after scraping, sanding and inspecting the hull, they brought it up to the dust free area upstairs from the shop and wiped the hull down with denatured alcohol to prepare the surface.  As they applied the first coat of spar varnish to the hull, the beauty began to shine through.

While people may think I'm a task-master when I tell them to go back and do a bit more sanding or a bit more scraping, I think they find that it is worth it in the end.  There's no substitute for good preparation.

Kids

Most people who don't have children don't understand those of us who do. Surprisingly, they don't understand our offspring, either. Even though they were children once themselves, they appear to have forgotten most of their own childhood and probably don't remember the joys of it or the trials and tribulations of their (very) patient parents.

I suppose those people who are young and single don't give too much thought to the bathroom, either. They just take it for granted. Parents of toddlers have to give it lots of thought.

For example, I was in the bathroom getting ready this morning and had just flushed the toilet and was preparing to shave when DS wandered into the bathroom in a dazed manner to use the toilet.


"What's that noise?", he asked.

"Uh, that's the toilet tank filling up with water." Being that I am an engineer by profession, I proceeded to explain to him the inner workings of the toilet and why it was filling the tank with water.

Then it dawned on me.

"Why did you ask? Have you never heard the toilet tank fill before?"

I got a particularly confused look from DS.

Probably not.

For the longest period of time, DS seems to have been imbued with some mutant predisposition that left him unable to flush the toilet. As a parent of a child this age, you must understand that this had both good points and bad points for DW and I. First, there is the obvious bad point of coming into the bathroom to find that the toilet has a "surprise" of some sort in it. Then, there are the good points. You can almost instantly determine both the gastric health of your child and know if he wiped.

Yup.

Did any wiping occur? For the longest time, DS seems to have assumed that he has a Teflon bottom as he would tell us that he didn't need to wipe. A quick check of the laundry basket would always shoot this assumption down faster than a Scud missle over Tel Aviv.

'Skid marks'? Check.

C'mon kid.

We'd be ecstatic if he'd just use the papyrus as reliably as the kid below:

To be quite honest, I think that there is a distinct difference between the genders when it comes to potty training. I don't remember it being such a big issue for DD as she was growing up. As a matter of fact, it was the day that DS first came home from teh hospital that she managed to sleep through the night without a diaper and wake up dry in the morning. She just decided that was what she was going to do and did it.

At the moment, we have different issues with DD. She's at that in between stage. To borrow and excellent expression from one of DW's bloggy friends, Expat Mum ,(One of a group of wonderful ex-patriot, mostly British, blogging moms - do go visit her!) DD is turning into a...

Queenager.

While others find her to be a delightful and charming young lady when she is out and about, at home she can be much more, um, assertive.


She's decided that those things that she doesn't deign to do, she will not - and let you know that she won't.

In no uncertain terms.

At this point, her progress on the kayak that we've been building has ground to a halt and we're having a bit of a tête-à-tête in regard to the terms for doing the building work. As it is something that I know that DD wants to do, I've put a condition on when we can work on the boat. It's not extreme or anything. I've simply told DD that if we are to work on her boat, her room has to be clean. Not spotless, mind you - just neat. It still doesn't seem to be a great motivation for her even though I know she wants to work on the kayak.

I'm still looking for a motivational tool.

Got any ideas?

Oh yeah, I know what you're thinking, by the way - and no, it's not blackmail!

A little surprise.

My oldest child's 9th birthday was this past weekend - "The Divine Miss M" as I refer to her.

So, Monday - Labor Day - was a "big day out" for the family. The weather was gorgeous - sunny and in the high 7o's, clear and dry with a slightly increasing breeze. We packed up the family, three of our canoes and a breakfast and drove up to a local state park with my father.

When we arrived, we brought the breakfast over to a table overlooking the water and started a wood fire. Soon, the smells of coffee brewing in the French press, hot chocolate, sizzling sausages, home fries and wild blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup were dancing on the breeze along with the aroma of woodsmoke. Leftovers? Nahh... You're all lucky I haven't got smell-a-vision installed. You'd gain 5 pounds just from that.

While we were having breakfast, the breeze freshened up a bit on the pond. No whitecaps or anything too bad, but...

After we got breakfast cleaned up, we drove over to the launch ramp. The three boats are all hand-made. The lapstrake canoe is a Charlotte, the small cedar strip is a Wee Lassie and the larger one in the rear is a Wabnaki. The Divine Miss M had only been on her own in a canoe once. In the fall she paddled the Charlotte in a small area of the same pond. She decided that she wanted to paddle my Wee Lassie, so I was paddling the Charlotte.


My father, DS and DW were in the Wabnaki. It was DS's first time in a canoe - ever. He was very excited. DW was excited too, but only because she's not particularly comfortable in a small boat.


We finally got out on the water and The Divine Miss M was trying to paddle with a Greenland style paddle that I made for her. She wasn't having much luck as it was a bit short for the Wee Lassie's beam. She then tried a larger paddle which she managed to work with. I was trying to stay close, shadowing her in the Charlotte and at the same time having a running tutorial on paddling as she tried to go along in a straight line. She was finding it a bit frustrating as she's very light and the wind was pushing her around a bit. Pretty soon, she felt she was getting the hang of things and was paddling fairly aggressively. I warned her not to get too cocky.


It was very sudden, really. She appeared to try to take a stroke, but the flat of the blade was not oriented correctly and as she tried to push, she got no resistance from the paddle as the blade sliced through the water - over she went.

The next thing I saw was the canoe's bottom and a floating paddle. The Divine Miss M was nowhere in sight. I had a moment of panic only a parent can have and began closing the short distance at an amazing speed. While I was paddling, I was relieved to hear her screaming very loudly from underneath the canoe - I knew she was OK if she was screaming. Little girls have this really piercing scream when they want to.

As I got to the boat and rolled the gunnel of the submerged canoe up to get her out from under the canoe she darted out and grabbed the gunnel of the Charlotte. She was going to haul herself aboard.

Not so fast, young lady! Let's wait for Grampa and he can help balance us while you get in - before you swamp a second canoe and the camera, wallet, key fob and dry gear!

It took me a minute to convince her to hold onto the canoe and float while waiting for my father come over. Amazingly - she hadn't lost her hat, her glasses or anything else. She finally stopped screaming once she got in the boat again. She was wet and cold, but OK. After being transferred to my father's boat, I went back and collected the loose paddles floating in the water and towed the swamped canoe to shore to empty it.

Amazingly, The Devine Miss M wanted to get right back into the canoe and paddle back to the put-in. I've got to give her kudos for wanting to get right back in the canoe. It was very brave of her, considering the scare she had.

She did learn some valuable lessons today:

-Always, always, always wear your PFD.
-Don't overestimate your skills.
-Don't paddle with your shoes on, you may need to swim, and it's easier without them.
-If you got over, stay with the boat.
-Even when the boat is upside down, there is (usually) air underneath!

-Always dress for the water temperature, not the air temperature.
-No matter how warm the day may seem, the water can be COLD.
-Always have a dry change of clothes. You may not be going swimming, but Murphy may have other ideas.

No pictures of the after-capsize Miss M. She was a bit too ornery for them!