Greetings, friends. (XXXI)

Greetings, friends! I hope this Wednesday finds you well. Today I have some updates on previous topics.

Today is Day 912 in my Duolingo streak. ¡Viva el Español!

I have also been keeping up with the running. I mean, at the pace I’m going it’s really more like jogging. But I’m still going to call it running. On Monday, I was in Oakland, and I was supposed to meet Erin at her place in the Castro at a reasonable dinner hour. Needless to say I had not done my training run on Sunday, because Super Bowl, so I somehow had to squeeze a 3½ mile run in between work and getting to the city. If I don’t do my long run every week, I know I’m going to fall behind.

I came up with the hare-brained idea to make getting to the Castro the subject of my run. So I ran to West Oakland station, got on BART, got off BART at Embarcadero, and ran down Market Street, past the commuters and the underhoused folks and actually not a few other people also running. I spent 12 years living in that city and every street corner on Market has some memory attached. I ran past The Mint where Besha and I kissed the first night we got together. I’m glad I wore a hat. That onshore wind never changes.

I did fine until I got to roughly Octavia where the hill starts. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were biking or running. I had to slow down and power walk part of the way. The run down Market took me 40 minutes. But I made it to 19th and Castro for a total of just about 3½ miles all-in at a 12’22” pace, which I’m going to declare as a success. Thank goodness Erin was happy to let me use her shower.

I discovered that Apple Fitness records cadence in steps-per-minute. Today I did a 2 mile training run in 23’23” at an average 137 SPM. If I do the math — 2 mi x 5280 ft / mi x 12 in / ft ÷ 23’23” ÷ 137 SPM — and I did do dimensional analysis to check my math — I come up with a stride of almost exactly 39 inches, which is about 8% longer than my original estimate of one yard. Which is kind of cool. But the cadence also tells me that either I’m slower than I thought, or I gotta pick up the pace!

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Anyway, I’m back in Portland. Tonight I finished work early enough to have some daylight in which to do some blacksmithing, or at least some metalworking. Before I left for the Bay Area, I had declared bankruptcy on the bookshelf bracket project, after the debacle with the concrete fasteners.

Oh, I didn’t even mention. Last week, I called my trusty father and asked him what to do about the heads of the concrete screws snapping off. He told me to drive them by hand. I decided to take another shot at mounting Besha’s boot scraper. I didn’t quite have the right tools. I got one of the screws most of the way in, but not quite, and totally rounded off the head. The other one I couldn’t drive past about an inch with the hand tools I had, so I got out the power drill and promised myself I’d go gentle on it.

Big mistake. The head of the other screw snapped off. I cursed a bunch. I thought about getting out the welder I’d recently gotten from Harbor Freight, which is another story. Besha gently suggested the welder might melt the plastic parts on the boot scraper and that I try epoxy instead. It was getting dark so again I gave up for the day.

But I really want to get those damn bookshelves up and finishing emptying my moving boxes and finish hanging up my decorations and generally finish moving into my apartment in Vancouver. And I’m too stubborn, after having bought a drill press, and having bought and cut the steel, and everything else to give up now.

I decided that mounting the forge stand in the driveway was not a prerequisite to finishing the bookshelf brackets. All I had to do was put one more right angle bend into each of the remaining brackets, and then drill a total of 36 holes in the set, and everything would be ready to mount. In theory, I have just enough time to do all of this, with Besha’s assistance, before I go back to New Hampshire on Sunday.

Friends, I am pleased to announce that something finally went right with the bookshelf project. This afternoon I was able to use the last hour of daylight to heat up the forge, and put the final bend into each of the brackets. I didn’t account for the radius in the vertical bend, so the vertical leg of the bracket is maybe ½” shorter than I intended, but I decided that consistency was more important than perfection, so I just did all of them the same way, and hopefully they will still have just as much structural integrity. Quarter inch steel is surprisingly strong stuff.

Basically I just heated each bracket about 5” from the end, and dipped the end in the quench bucket to cool the top of the bracket beyond the bend, to minimize the risk of distorting that end. Then I put the still-hot bracket into my post vise, and banged on the top end with a 3 lb. hammer until the bracket was more or less in an L-shape. Two of them wound up in a slightly more acute angle than I intended, and I had to reheat them, and kind of hit them from underneath to make them more oblique.

Tomorrow I’m going to line each one up on a square, and see just how close I got them. Then it’s four holes in each one, two in the top to attach to the wall, and two in the bottom to attach to the shelf. Chamfer each hole to make room for the fastener head. Then I think I’m going to heat them one last time and give them a hot bluing treatment so that my bookshelves don’t slowly rust on my wall.

And then Saturday, insh’allah, we will mount the brackets on the walls and the shelves on the brackets, and then I will have bookshelves. I will let you know how it goes.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See ya tomorrow!