Heavy-duty umbrella

"C'mon you guys, how long am I supposed to keep holding this thing up?"

Chalk drawings

I have not been doing much drawing of late. These are a couple that I did while sort of watching TV. The top one is white gel pen and chalk, the bottom one, just chalk.

Parking Is Such Sweet Sorrow

You don't get much paving for a hundred bucks.

That little grey patch of egg-carton-looking things in the middle of the photo? That's a hundred bucks worth of grass pavers sitting lonely out in our front lawn.

Eventually that little patch will expand to form a fully-operational parking bay, so that next winter I won't have to slosh through a quagmire of mud to get to and from my car, as I have this winter. I'll be needing roughly six times that many to cover the area I want to cover, but I'm putting them in piecemeal for two reasons: first, because I don't have six hundred spare bucks all in a lump, and second, because I only have a little car and can only transport so many at a time.

Once they're all in place, I intend to plant prostrate thymes and the like in amongst them.

New Toy

Just arrived by courier, this second-hand Stanley No.78 rebate (or, as our American cousins like to say, "rabbet") plane. It didn't come in its original box, but it obviously hasn't seen a lot of use; I suspect someone bought it, tried it once or twice and gave up in disgust. It might have helped if it had ever been sharpened.

People mostly use electric routers for this sort of work these days, and once they're set up they're certainly a lot easier, especially if you've got a lot of rebating to do. However, setting up a router for one piddly little job can be a real pain in the bum, and once you know what you're doing with a rebate plane, it can often be quicker just to do the job by hand. A lot less noisy too, which is a consideration since my workshop is cheek-by-jowl with the block of flats next door.

Cramped

Behold, my mighty garage workshop. It's a bit cramped in there; I really am going to have to find (or build) somewhere else to store all the timber and other not-immediately-useful crap.

Also, just FYI: the Ryobi table saw is really a piece of shit. The Makita compound-mitre saw, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty.