Monday, April 17, 2017

Happy Spring !

I write this report looking out over the beautiful waters of Lake Winnipeasukee. The ice disappeared a a couple of days ago. The sun is shining and yesterday, it was 75 degrees. A few days ago, there were eight beautiful deer in our front yard. Eating our plantings, the evil creatures.

Barbara is still at Fox Hill Village. She claims it is not because she prefers to be cooped up in our small apartment with her cats. (I hope she doesn't read this!)  She says that there is still more to see and do there than here. Especially for people who play Mah Jongg.

After four months, she is still recovering from her broken knee. She does physical therapy and the knee gets a little better every day. It hurts if she walks long distances, but she finally got her handicapped parking tag. With the various bureaucratic screw-ups, this took only 2 1/2 months, but she has it now and it is very handy. Sometimes I am tempted to go shopping with her just for the convenience of parking in a handicapped place.

I know you are all wondering if I did any "sugaring" this year. I did not. I was up for 10 days in February and we got a couple feet of snow. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the PassePartout working reliably and without it, it would have been difficult to bring back the sap through all the snow. Also, the weather forecast was for really warm weather for the next week and I figured that would stop the sap flow. So I decided not to bother tapping the trees. Of course, it turned out that March was a great sugaring month. Maybe next year.

Since February, I have spent most of my time working on two aspects of bowl making. I did one bowl with a complex feature ring:



People tell me they like it, but I was disappointed in the overall shape of the bowl. I decided I needed a better way to visualize the bowl before I built it, so I have been working on a program to visualize the bowls. That has taken a lot of time. It is not yet complete, but I can already look at a proposed bowl from any perspective:
Oh -yeah - and my health. Well, the numbers continue to look good. I do have a little bit of back pain, but so far, it is not bothering me very much and I am hoping that it is something that will pass. They did my annual "Skeletal Survey" last week. This is where I get to put on one of those cute little "johnny" things and they x-ray every part of my body. We are waiting to hear what they have to say about that. I will let you know in the next report.