Unexpected Things

Welcome back, gentle reader. I hope you’ve had a good week, full of joy and … um, yeah. Sorry. Wrong intro.

It’s a strange time. Recent news has included:

• The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which I know was totally expected.
• Putin threatening nuclear retaliation if anyone attacks Russia as a result of their actions. This did surprise me.
• Vancouver appearing on a list of cities that will be under water thanks to relatively near term climate change. To be honest I expected this. What I did not expect was how big a hit it would be in the news.
• COVID, Covid, covid. This will never end. Not a surprise anymore, sadly.
• I have no idea what else. There were probably other things that caught my attention, but I don’t remember them now.

So yeah, it’s been a week.

I’d planned to create more infrared images, but that didn’t happen. I’d hoped to start working on the staircase railing, but that is stuck, waiting on the arrival of a tool. More of almost any accomplishment would have been good, but that didn’t happen and the news took the wind out of my sails.

As I said, it was a week. So what can I share?

Well, the closet doors continue to get painted, but they are not yet done.

Continuing with the title as my theme, one semi-unexpected set of events was related to the community association. In addition to working on their website I also help with a monthly email bulletin. As we approach the beginning of March, that has become real work. I’ve been getting articles organized and inserting what I can into the template email. Most of a full day went into that. I knew it was coming, but I was not expecting it to hit as hard as it did.

Another batch of not particularly expected community association work relates to our social media campaigns. I write brief articles about the website for weekly posts on Instagram and Facebook, but a bunch of stuff shuffled around in this area, and I needed to clean up and rework things related to that. Another big chunk of time gone.

In some unexpected but very good news, my friend Heather — the artist who designed the public art piece we built in our public art class — contacted a local organization to see if they might be interested in giving the work a permanent home. Currently it resides on a building at Langara, but it will come down this summer, I think. They were interested enough to respond within a single day asking more questions, one of which was “What does it weigh?” It turns out we didn’t weigh it while we were creating it, and Heather had no immediate idea what to tell them. She got in touch with me to see if I could help, and I spent an afternoon doing very strange things to estimate it.

Here’s the work, as a reminder:

It’s about eight feet on a side, and it turns out that the painted pieces — the part we built in class —weigh in at about 335 pounds. The metal frame it’s bolted to adds another 87 pounds.

Computing those numbers was a challenge. I have many photos of the work in progress and the weight of 11 gauge sheet steel and the steel tubing is readily searchable, but how big (in square feet) are each of those painted pieces, and how many feet of tubing did we use?

For the tubing, I had notes taken during class and certain photos that showed me clearly how much we used, so that calculation was actually pretty easy. For the sheet metal pieces, I had this:

It’s an image I created based on Heather’s original work. Handily, I could count the tiny square tiles in each shape, and since the big square is eight feet on a side I could get the number of those tiles in a square foot. It took a while, but that information (along with the fact that 11 gauge sheet steel weighs five pounds per square foot) let me get estimated weights for the each sheet metal piece. Add 10% as a safety margin — since nothing about my method was exact — and there you go. I sent that off to Heather yesterday afternoon.

It will take some time for any decisions to be made, and I am not even sharing the name of the organization she is talking with. It could fall through, but I really hope this happens. The work is ideal for the place, and I would be thrilled for it to have a permanent, public home. Mostly, I want Heather to get the recognition she deserves for her hard work and great design.

Moving on, here’s something that was completely unexpected:

That was taken on Wednesday morning. It had been cold (it was about -2° C when that photo was taken, and it had been colder on previous days — the associated arctic outflow is just ending) but there was no chance of snow in the forecast. None. Nevertheless, Tuesday night around 9:00 PM it started to fall. I was very surprised when I let the dogs out.

It warmed up on Thursday a fair bit, but only in the sun. Anything in the shade didn’t really get much above freezing. This was the situation in the back yard that afternoon:

Can you tell where the shadow cast by the house stopped? It looks like someone used a laser to create that line in the snow.

Note that Cruzer and Tinkerbelle are unimpressed.

In other news, we got an estimated delivery date for our new windows: May 17th. The new side door for the garage is supposed to arrive on March 28th. So we won’t get new windows until we’re well into the spring. That’s fine.

That’s it for this week. All the best. Keep safe!