Peter Sieling—MASTER BEEKEEPER

I know of two ways to achieve this highest level in Beekeeping. You can pay several thousand dollars and take a plethora of classes at Cornell University. Then in a big ceremony you receive a titanium plated smoker inscribed with your name and date (actually you just get a certificate, although I've acquired several nice three ring binders from Cornell). Or you can attend an Eastern Apicultural Society Conference, pay fifty dollars, take a test and receive the same title. Taking the Cornell route, by the time you complete the required number of classes, you’ve probably forgotten most of what you learned and they don’t really grade you. Pay the money and they’re happy. Taking the EAS quiz, you have to know the stuff, but you save a lot of time and money. I got a copy of last year’s exam for practice from Clarence Collison, the test master. If you read his monthly quiz in Bee Culture, you’ll get a good idea on how you rate. You need an 80% to pass. I squeaked by with an 81%. I could be a MASTER BEEKEEPER. Wow.

Now that I’m an unofficial MASTER BEEKEEPER, I’m ready to dispense advice to any beginner or intermediate beekeepers. Master Beekeepers are expected to teach others. So…e-mail me today at garresonlumber@hotmail.com . I can guarantee you’ll get the correct answer at least 81% of the time.

books

Son GM Sieling tagged me. That means I’m supposed to answer these highly personal questions.

1. Total number of books you own?

Probably less than 1000
2. What was the last book you bought?

The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum. Kim is one of my editors and has edited Bee Culture magazine for almost 20 years. With this book, a beginning beekeeper could almost buy, handle and manage bees without assistance. It’s an excellent reference.

3. What was the last book you read? One of my Dad’s old textbooks: A history of Christianity, published around 1950. Interesting but too many passive verbs and awkward sentences

4. List five books that are particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order).

1. The Superannuate, by William Ryder, an itinerant Methodist preacher who died of ALS before anyone knew what it was in about 1848. It has a lot of flowery ponderous prose but the narrative sections describe a life of adventure, humor and suffering. He attended the meeting of a preacher posing as the Great Lorenzo Dow, then later heard the real Dow (see book #5).

2. Fifty Years among the Bees, Dr. C.C. Miller, a writer of the late 1800’s and an early columnist in Bee Culture Magazine.

3. The ABC of Bee Culture, another early bee book, still full of useful information. Here among other stuff, you can learn the truth about the man behind the Hoffman Frame, the frame beekeepers love to complain about.

4. Folk Music by Peter Sieling, my first sort of real book of three I wrote for a series on American Folklore. Please don’t take it out of the Library and read it. They gave me the chapter titles and I just filled in the spaces between the titles. The series consultant didn’t feel I took the subject seriously and called me a wise cracker.

5. History of a Cosmopolite by Lorenzo Dow. I believe Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, the father of modern beekeeping, was named after the author. Hundreds of parents named their babies Lorenzo in the early 1800’s because of him. Today he is virtually unknown. If you want to know how to get a girl to marry you, you’ll have to find a copy and see how Lorenzo managed it.
5. Tag five people, any five people who read.

Tag yourself. I don’t know anyone to tag.

Has Gary told any of his friends some of his many childhood nicknames? I almost used one today, then thought he might not care for that and I still sometimes need him to fix my computer.

Farm/City Day

Hosted by Steuben County Cooperative Extension

It’s a pretty big deal . A large farm hosts the event and Co-ex does all the work. They get thousands of visitors. We set up a lumber and honey exhibit. Lesson #1: when they put you in a merchant tent, your booth is supposed to face the inside of the tent. We set it up the backwards. I noticed when the crowds started walking through and everybody else faced in.

My young bee apprentice helped. “Mr. Sieling, may look at the displays?”

“Sure.” As soon as she left, the crowd thickened. I had to switch from lumber talk to bee talk as fast as a TV switches from one camera angle to the next. TT returned as the crowd thinned. She brought cartons of free chocolate milk.

“Mr. Sieling, may I go up in that thing?” Steuben Rural Electric had set up a truck with a twin basket cherry picker. They were giving rides in the baskets. The truck’s grill stared at our booth and the engine ran in my left ear all day, making it hard to hear, especially the little Chinese man with the two pumpkins who bought honey and tried to tell me something about our figured ironwood sample. “He paints on wood!” Shouted the large white woman with him.

TT returned with string cheese. Later her family came. They got lost in the corn maze. She brought back two of everything: Food samples, magnetized signs, compasses, thermometers and two rain gauges. I wondered if we could sell them.

Lesson #2: Prepare displays to handle wind. Our honey variety poster blew over 1,000,000 times. Lesson #3: Price everything to the even dollar including tax. There’s no time to use a calculator when there is a line of people grabbing jars of honey. The wind especially wanted to grab twenty dollar bills and blow them into the parking lot. Rather than carefully sort bills, I finally stuffed them straight into my pockets until they bulged.

Lesson #4 Take along an 11 year old that likes to talk. “Mr. Sieling, what color are your eyes? What color was your hair when you were my age? Did you know a compass doesn’t point to true North? It just points to the nearest metal object. So if you follow the needle, you’re sure to find civilization, or at least an old junked car or steel barrel. I think you’d like the corn maze. Could we go through it after we pack up?”

Three hours later…TT has her compass out. “Which way now, Mr. Sieling?” I’ve seen that same flyer on the ground at this intersection three times. There should have been a sign in/sign out book at the maze entrance. How many people could be lost in here? I imagined sometime late in November, the farmer would come upon two skeletons while cutting corn, lying in a primitive corn hut—an unidentified adult male and female child. Around them he’d find a few rude stone implements and some woven corn leaf blankets. Their two compasses pointed toward the man’s mouldy steel toed shoes, the two rain gauges were set up to catch water. A short journal was scratched onto a flat rock nearly obliterated by weathering: “33 days, thirst, can’t go on much longer. TT wants to do this again next year…

Dresden’s Mad Scientist

<>As a teenager I worked in the village cemetery. I tended the grave of Zimri Norman, Dresden’s mad scientist and inventor of a perpetual motion machine. Thirty years ago friend Mark and I interviewed several lifelong residents. We never wrote it down. Stupid kids, we probably could have earned extra credit in History or English.

Gladys lived four or five doors down from me. She was in her eighties in the 1970’s and remembered Zimri riding around town on a large tricycle. All the kids ran and hid when he passed.

Another man, (he played the marimba every year on Memorial Day at the Methodist church) remembered the perpetual motion machine. He is supposed to have patented this. It was in a glass display case like an old cheese case you’d see in the grocery store. Two brass balls revolved on a shaft but he didn’t know how it worked. He said they just sat there slowly revolving.

Zimri also may have obtained some other patents, one for a rail car coupler. I have never been able to find a record of that.

According to legend Zimri caught and pickled the town cats and dogs. Mark and I poked around the abandoned Zimri home then in the middle of an auto dump. We found a cement cistern and of course opened it, expecting to find bones. Instead we found thousands of pumpkin seeds—the more recent remains of a Halloween theft.

He kept rabbits in cages. One resident remembers them somehow escaping and a big rabbit chase. Zimri had a wife and two children. The son hit another child with a baseball bat, knocking him out. He stopped one of his children’s teacher’s on the street one day and handed him a math problem to solve. The teacher couldn’t, so Zimri explained it to him (or her). Both children died young, maybe scarlet fever or another childhood disease.

Today a psychiatrist would diagnose some form of schizophrenia and Zimri could have lived a more or less normal life if he took his medication. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century no one knew how to handle him. He became a menace and eventually some men seized him and committed him to Willard, then an insane asylum situated six or eight miles away across the lake. He soon escaped, stole a boat and rowed back bellowing all the way. A lot of men were pretty nervous as they heard him coming.

Whether it was then or later, I don’t know, but eventually, men cornered him under a porch. Apparently he kept them at bay with some kind of weapon. In about three days he died under the porch. Whoever told us this story remembered the stench.

There is one photo of him, taken on a trip to New York City, probably in relation to obtaining a patent. He stares out of the sepia photo. His greasy black beard covers the front of a threadbare black overcoat. His tormented eyes stare back at you. Well, maybe his eyes weren’t really tormented. Perhaps it’s because I know how the story ended.

Hot pants and go-go Boots

Her older sister told me this story. Over thirty years ago Debbie came down the stairs in an outfit that her father considered indecent. He carried her back up the stairs kicking and screaming, gave her a spanking and made her put on something more modest.

Yesterday at the parade we watched a flatbed pass with the hillbilly kickers. They were line dancing to a song titled something like “Ain’t it Great to be a Redneck”. They reminded me of the backwoods version of the Rockettes—a dozen large older women who came dangerously close to stepping off the edge of the platform with every whine of the steel guitar. And they could really “shake that thang!” They mostly wore in jeans and t-shirts that said “I kicked it”. Except Debbie who is still pretty well preserved for a grandmother. She wore hot pants, go go boots and a cowboy hat. I wondered if her dad, now in his upper eighties or nineties knew what she was up to, and if someone had told him, would be chasing after the flatbed, trying to catch her and put her over his knee.

Tater tot helped me at the honey/lumber booth. I quizzed her on the display of lumber species. She knows nothing about identifying hardwoods. That’s a real hole in her education. Occasionally we had a crowd around the booth. As I explained the nearly miraculous virtues of honey, I heard Tater on the lumber side going into great detail on the various hardwood samples to people, imitating me perfectly.

Many people assume dark honeys are bitter or strong tasting and unpalatable. I have quite a bit of bamboo or Japanese knotweed honey, a dark mahogany color with a full but mild flavor. One woman from Colorado bought a jar, took it to her car and tasted it. She came back twice more and eventually bought almost all our bamboo honey.

radiator covers as romantic gifts

Confidential to Brent in Eugene: No, I don’t recommend an arts and crafts style radiator cover for a 25^th wedding anniversary gift. Women like romantic things, but not too romantic. My suggestion: Go to Garresonlumber.com and buy the book Drying Lumber without a Kiln. Tell your spouse that with the money you can save with the book you’ll have enough to buy her a new vehicle. Then go buy her a pickup truck so you can haul the lumber you are going to dry. By your 26^th anniversary, you’ll have enough lumber to cover all the radiators in the house and I hope to have finished another book: Radiator Covers: Plans for every Major Furniture Style. It will include Chippendale, Shaker, Mission, Queen Anne, Danish Modern and even post Modern.

To Tater Totters: I got 3 responses: 2 at 10 and 1 at 11. Thank you. She turned 11 in the spring. A writer should be able to show a person’s age without telling. Tater’s going to help me at the honey booth at Howard Community Day. Her mom says she’s been proudly showing her stings to everyone. Unfortunately the swelling has gone down already.

Tater Tot gets stung

TT came over to play bees with me yesterday. My job: assess the condition of the bee colonies, decide which to steal honey from to give to the poorer hives, and decide who might and might not survive the winter. Later I’ll “deal with” the condemned hives (I’ll combine them with healthier hives as long as there’s no disease. The condemned queens go into the freezer for mad scientist experiments in the spring). Tater tot, or TT’s job is to chatter, ask questions and keep notes. Here is an example of TT:

“Mr. Sieling, I’m sorry for hanging up so abruptly on you. My dad was ready to bring me over and I’m like, well, as soon as I hung up the phone I’m like oh my goodness, I think I hung up awfully abruptly on you. I hope you’re not offended…”

“Don’t worry, TT. It sounded like a normal goodbye to me.”

“I hardly ever use my gloves anymore. Do you remember how I used to be so nervous around bees? I was quite jumpy, but now I’m getting used to them. Can you pick up a bee without it stinging you?

“Yes.” I poked at one to demonstrate. “Now TT, it's time to take notes.

“Would you like them in print or cursive?”

“Last time you said you couldn’t print.”

“I’ve been working on my printing this summer. I really could do it, I just didn’t like to very much and wasn’t very neat.”

“Print this time. I already have a sample of your cursive in case I want to do a psychological analysis.”

I dictate. TT writes. At a tall hive: “Mr. Sieling, can I come over and look in that hive? I mean, I don’t have to if you want me to keep taking notes.”

“Come on over.” TT comes over and peers inside. “Strange,” I think out loud. “Lots of half filled comb and no bees working it. Let’s take this super off and check the next one down.”

“Can I take it off?”

“Can you lift 30 lbs?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t grab underneath, you’ll squish a handful of bees…”

Just as TT lifted the box, she started and winced. I felt a poke on my thumb, another, then one on the leg.

“Set it down carefully.” TT let go the box and backed away, her hands up in the air like someone had a gun pointed at her. I followed.

“Let’s see your stings.” She hadn’t removed the stingers. I brushed them off.

“I’m glad I finally got stung.” She said. “I’ve been praying that I would get stung—wanted to get that part of beekeeping over with so I wouldn’t get discouraged later. How many stings did you get?”

“Two, no three.”

“Oh.” TT was disappointed.

“But yours are swelling a lot better than mine. Look—your hand is starting to look like an inflated rubber glove. I’ll close up the hive and we’ll go put some ice on it.

Back at the house she held the ice pack for nearly three minutes. We looked through Bee Culture Magazine. Then I drove her home.

“Nice you have someone of the same maturity level to play with,” my wife said.

Can you guess how old TT is by the dialogue? The closer you get, the higher the score. The answer in a couple days.

Wood Shop Cat

Woodworkers are always looking for the newest tool to make their hobby more fun or their business more profitable. Sometimes, however, you can find new uses for old tools: the shop cat, for example.

The traditional use of a shop cat is to control the mouse and bird population around the shop. It’s annoying to find mouse droppings stuck to a freshly finished table top in the morning when you come to work. Shop cats eliminate that problem. Now, instead you find mouse heads and gall bladders, or a heap of starling feathers stuck to the freshly finished table top. Some woodworkers find cats make good self cleaning tack cloths for removing dust prior to finishing.

I never thought much about shop cats until I acquired one last year. Charles, a stray kitten, moved right in to our house, put the dogs in their place and put the humans to work serving him. We soon learned that Charles is a “licker”. At five AM you awake to find Charles lying on your chest licking everything in reach: mostly your face. Cats have rough tongues, I’d estimate about a #80 grit in sandpaper. Charles, like most cats, also has an on/off switch at the base of his tail. You rub that spot; the tongue automatically comes out and licks everything in reach.

One day in the shop, while finishing some table tops, I discovered I’d run out of coarse sandpaper. It’s fifteen miles to town, and the customer was due to pick up her table late in the afternoon. There were mouse droppings, a gall bladder, a mouse tail and a pile of goldfinch feathers stuck to the freshly finished top. I felt my feline tack cloth rubbing around my legs. In desperation, I picked him up. Holding Charles like an auto body grinder, I rubbed the base of his tail and sanded the table down to bare wood. Charlie’s saliva raised the grain a little. Fortunately the customer wanted a satin finish. Best of all, I didn’t need to wear hearing protection while sanding.

If you are considering purchasing a shop cat, here are some tips:

1. Go to the animal shelter and run through the cats, scratching the base of their tails. Some aren’t wired correctly for licking so wear a pair of welding gloves. Some—kitchen cats—will bite. Give these to the family cook for chopping vegetables in place of a food processor.

2. Most shelters require spaying or neutering. It’s too bad since a good sander can cost a lot of money and still requires frequent replacement of sanding pads or discs. If you can find a fertile cat you may be able to sell the offspring to other woodworkers. Just make sure the father is also a licker before allowing any procreative action.

Next time you are tempted to buy the latest shiniest new fangled tool in the glossy woodworking catalog, think about new uses for traditional tools. You’ll not only save money, you can keep the rodent and bird population under control and maybe even provide a home for a lonely, unwanted pet.

Are you a He-man or “Metrosexual” Woodworker?

By Walter Woodward

You may have heard the term “metrosexual”. These are urban men who are comfortable with their “feminine” or “X” chromosome. Ten years ago, they were “sensitive nineties guys” working to develop relationships with other men. Now they are out shopping with female friends for trendy clothes, applying eyeliner, having pedicures, exfoliations, and air brushed tans. They should be spending their money on good stuff like lumber, tools, and woodworking magazines.

Where do you fall on the macho/metro woodworking scale? As a psychological consultant for Garreson Lumber Company’s Tally Sheet, I’ve prepared a test to quantify your macho/metro quotient (MMQ). You can take this confidential exam in the privacy of your home. Answer the questions, and add up the score. As an added bonus, we’ve included tips on how to purchase lumber here in rural upstate New York, based on your score.

1. Do you work primarily with masculine or feminine woods?

5 Red Elm, red and white oak, hickory

3 Red maple, poplar

1 Black cherry, curly maple, walnut

2. What kind of tools do you prefer?

5 Big old industrial power tools with babbet bearings that spray oil all over you and your work.

3 New shiny tools with Asian sounding names.

1 Precision power tools imported from Europe.

3. You work in:

1 An insulated shop with hot water heat and use an air filter to eliminate dust.

3 You work in an uninsulated shop and wear a dust mask and ear protectors.

5 Your shop has three walls. You shovel the planer shavings right into the adjacent horse stall. What are ear protectors and dust masks?”

4. You make:

5 gun cabinets and racks, plaques for mounting antlers, fish, and deer heads, boats or ultra light airplanes.

3 kitchen cabinets, computer furniture, picture frames.

1 abstract sculpture, contemporary furniture, jewelry boxes

5. You carve:

5 gun stocks, cowboy caricatures, fish, ducks, bears, Indians with rugged chisled faces, scantily clad women with large bosoms

3 religious scenes, birds, modestly clad women with medium bosoms

1 flowers, dolphins, whales, wood and tree spirits, nude figures.

6. You are missing:

5 points for each missing finger

3 points for each missing fingernail

1 point for each scar

Scoring:

25-30 points: You are a real He-man. Grab your gun, hop in your pickup, and bring your big haired woman. You’ll fit right in here in upstate New York. Buy yourself an old trailer and set it down on a chunk of ground. Get a heavy duty extension cord, a blue tarp and some duct tape and build yourself a shop, then come buy some lumber.

15-25 points: You are a sensitive nineties guy. It’s ok to be a little out of style. You might be more comfortable in a garage or basement workshop in town. Let your beard grow for a day or two before venturing out into lumber country.

5-15 points: You are a metrosexual woodworker. You know how to touch up a scratch in the finish with eyeliner. Call ahead. You can pick up your order after dark. Bring a cell phone in case of a breakdown. We’ll come help you out.

Note: For women taking this test, just reverse the numbers.

The Woodworking Season

The woodworking season starts in mid September. The garden goes dormant, mice start moving into bee hives, the furnace clicks on and men and women descend into their basement workshops. The last minute high school technology instructors put in their orders. Every year, Garreson Lumber Company tries to fill the warehouse before that time. Every year we fall behind and this year is no different. If you don’t get our free newsletter, the Tally Sheet, call and order a copy at 607-566-8558. We have some hardwood lumber species with sale prices you won’t find on the website (www.garresonlumber.com).

The August issue of Popular Woodworking featured a story about Garreson Lumber’s kiln snakes. Unfortunately our snakes failed to return this year. Instead we have one cat and two toads, so please if you visit, don’t raise your feet more than half an inch when you walk or there may be a sad squishing sound.

The November Popular Woodworking issure will have information never before printed—The human moisture meter—how to measure moisture content by feel. Hint: it helps to practice on several hundred thousand board feet before trying this in public.

Half the fun of a blog is to see what ads google pastes on your site. I wrote a nearly true story about my son falling into a centrifuge and got ads for nitrogen gas generation and milk shakes. Nitrogen is a very important part of our atmosphere and I encourage all readers: Please support Nitrogen generation! Did you know that the ozone hole plug is composed of 80% Nitrogen? It just makes sense and helps preserve the environment. As for milkshakes, you can make your own and home and save $!

How Gary Sieling got that Way

<> A lot of people ask me about my son, Gary, our web designer and computer consultant. First, he’s okay and basically harmless, unless…
<>
As a child Gary always colored inside the lines. He colored the sky blue, the grass green and people flesh, until Crayola changed “flesh” to “peach” in response to charges of racism. Then Gary quit coloring people and only colored peaches. If I sat little Gary at the table with a coloring book, I could wait on two customers and come back an hour later assured Gary would still be sitting at the table coloring.

Then Gary graduated and went to RIT. That’s the year Tom Galisano got the school an Army surplus centrifuge for their Bioethics, Bioinformatics and Stem Cell research classes. According to the directions, you could also use it for milkshakes and cappuccino. They decided to set it up in the dining hall. It arrived in a crate with writing in six different languages, and a three inch thick manual.

RIT hired two CS students to assemble the centrifuge. They, like all CS students around the world didn’t consult the assembly directions. It went pretty well except they accidentally reversed the motor pulley and the main spinner pulley. One was four times the diameter of the other.

Gary wandered in just after the students had plugged it in and left for their Go club meeting. Always curious, Gary looked it over the centrifuge and noticed the rotary switch. The variable speeds looked like this: chop-grate-julienne-puree-frappe-blend-liquify-chromatogrofy-vaporize-photonize-
quantomize- followed by five unidentified positions marked “danger” in red. Gary, not realizing the centrifuge hadn’t yet been tested, poured in some milk, sugar and some strawberry syrup. He turned the switch to frappe and waited for a delicious New England style milk shake.

The problem with a centrifuge running four times faster than specified is related to the controversial theory of “centrifugal force” something Gary learned didn’t exist in high school. Gary did learn something about air pressure and its relationship to a very real centrifugal force. The centrifuge created a power high pressure region at Gary’s feet which tended to push them out from under him. At the same time an area of extremely low pressure above the centrifuge tended to pull Gary into the spinning basket of the centrifuge. Thinking quickly as the machine sucked him in, Gary hooked the rotary switch with his foot, attempting to turn it off. Unfortunately Gary is left handed and footed. He used the wrong foot and spun the dial up into the red zone, only two clicks from the top speed.

In an instant, Gary as we knew him disappeared, reduced from flesh and bone into first a homogenous pulp, then amino acids, to carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and some trace elements. Those split into the very fundamental particles of the Universe-peons, I think.

When a person dies quickly, they still have four minutes of consciousness left. Usually that doesn’t help but Gary made good use of the time. At first he thought he was at some new ride at Six Flags Darien Lake and was about to “womit” as the professors pronounce it at RIT. Then he remembered a short conversation with his Dad earlier in the week. His father told Gary he didn’t think computer technology could ever replicate life because it was based on a binominal system: 0 and one, open or closed, on/off, yes/no. Life, according to Gary’s dad was most likely a quadrinomial system: 0, one, ½ and -1/2: yes, no, maybe and maybe not. If you wanted to understand the fundamental Truth of Life, start with base 4.

By this time Gary had 3 minutes and 45 seconds of consciousness left. Gary started thinking very hard exactly backward from his current state: yes, yes, yes, no, maybe, no, yesnomaybenotmaybenot... He had no mouth so he could think much more quickly than you can say them. Starting from the four building blocks of existence, yes, no, maybe and maybe not, Gary reassembled his muons, peons, and quarks into hydrogen atoms. With three minutes left, he thought the hydrogen atoms into heavier elements. By two minutes and 23 seconds he had some amino acids and calcium oxides. He tried not to think about what the centrifuge was doing. Fortunately the slo-blo fuses had burned out in the circuit box and the spinner slowed to about the speed of a washer on the spin cycle when a reassembled Gary staggered out. He did pretty well, getting only his feet and head on backwards and with 14 spare seconds.

Gary’s father was only partly correct—there are binomial creatures—beings made up only of yes/no. In science, they’re determinists. In religion: Calvinists.

Gary now faced a far more serious problem than reassembling himself: he couldn’t reassemble his clothes. Not wanting to slink across the campus in this state (he wasn’t at Berkeley), he looked around for a solution. A computer hummed to itself at the cash register, sleeping peacefully.

Now that Gary had experience with the code of human life, he decided to upload himself as a dat file and download into his room. You need a high speed connection to do this.

Ben was playing a Japanese game on his computer when, looking over briefly, he noticed Gary working his way out of the printer. By the time he finished his game, Gary had freshly showered and put on his trench coat and knit hat.

Unfortunately in his panic, Gary hadn’t installed virus protection and a personal firewall that first time he went online. He picked up a virus while in the wires. AVG, the free version, could only quarantine the virus so Gary sometimes loses data or freezes up and has to be rebooted. Occasionally he garbles his speech.

Now by day Gary seems mostly normal, a fourth or fifth year (who can keep track?) RIT student who crochets and designs bankruptcy forms. But by night, he works for the CIA, FBI, and the Freemasons uploading himself and crawling the net, searching for and destroying cyber crime wherever he finds it—for Truth, Justice and a nice government pension!

World’s Simplest Lumber Kiln

Too many kiln plans are designed by engineers long on theory and short on experience. I think I could kiln dry lumber using the simplest kiln ever designed. Materials required are:

<>

1. one roll of polyethylene plastic

2. one window fan

3. one roll of duct tape

4. one wet bulb/dry bulb hygrometer(plans for making one are in the booklet described below)

<>For those unfamiliar with drying lumber, Garreson Publishing offers a booklet: Drying Lumber without a Kiln. This covers standard air drying, plus ways to bring the lumber down to kiln dry level without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars.

With the simplest kiln, sticker the lumber and allow it to air dry until it reaches 20-30% moisture content or less. You have to know how to measure the moisture content, and you have to know how severe conditions the particular species of lumber can tolerate. Some woods, such as pine or poplar can dry quickly without drying defects. Others, like oak, hickory, or beech must air dry more first.

After air drying, the kiln is built around the air dried pile. I’d guess it would take about 30 minutes to assemble. Keep track of the moisture content until it reaches an acceptable level. Like other solar kilns, the slower drying rate minimizes drying stress.

Will this work? I think so, at least in sunny areas. I won’t have time to try it until I retire. If anyone has a small stack of lumber and wants to experiment, I suggest getting the booklet which covers how to pile lumber for a minumum of drying defects and warping. I’ll provide the plans for the kiln plus free consulting and we can see how it works.

Mr. Mom’s ChildcareTips for Guys

Girls like men who can handle babies. They see a man bouncing a kid and think there is a tender sensitive gentleman under that rough masculine exterior. So if you want to get babes, you got to learn to handle babies without damaging them.

First, some general information: Babies come in two main types: male and female. It’s important to know the difference or you can offend women. Girl babies generally have a bit of pink somewhere on their clothing or a pink headband if they are bald. You may see some lacey stuff lining the leg holes of their diaper covers (I’m not sure what they call them but you’ll know what I mean). Boy babies have blue in their clothes and often are dressed in little bib overall things.

Second, babies come in three main sizes: I call them small, medium and large but if you’re new to babies, small is about the size of a plucked chicken or duck. Medium resembles a woodchuck, and large is about the size of a turkey.

Be careful with small babies. Their head can flop back and forth, possibly causing metal fatigue over time and falling off. Always hold the head in your hand. Use rubber gloves if possible. Babies drip their weight in various fluids every 24 hours and half of that comes out their mouth and nose. These fluids aren’t like motor oil or transmission fluid that can be removed with ordinary solvents. They are crawling with deadly germs and require disinfectants. When holding a child’s head, remember that on the top—the part where hair eventually grows—there are a series of tectonic plates that haven’t fused: the soft spot. Don’t exert too much pressure there. For example, if you accidentally drop a child, don’t grab and squeeze by the head. Your thumb could go right through. It’s better to just let the child go. They are rubbery and usually recover from a fall.

Medium babies can crawl around on the floor. When walking in a room with one or more babies in it, never lift your feet more than an inch off the floor to avoid stepping on one. You will not get a babe by accidentally stepping on babies, and they have an effective alarm system. When you step on one, every woman within three miles will hear the piercing siren-like wail. You may think it’s better to just stand in one place, but it’s not. A medium sized baby will eventually find your shoe and “teeth” (pronounced teethth) on it, covering the shoe tip with a slime-like substance. Once a shoe has been teethed on, you may as well give it to the baby to work the rest of his teeth out.

Large babies can be the most interesting. They have evolved to a higher level, from a quadruped to a biped. They are about the size of Australopithecus or Pithecanthropus fossils. Mothers think their baby is the smartest little thing ever born, and it’s usually true. They are more intelligent than both their parents. Large babies understand the Law of the Jungle, which their parents forgot years ago. The best part about big babies is while they are on an equal intellectual level with men and share similar interests (building Lego towers and knocking them down), men are bigger and stronger. Big babies understand who is Boss. Too bad women don’t. Then they’d be as much fun as big babies.