Friday, August 30, 2013

Moving blog to Vermont Birder

After several years of maintaining multiple blogs, I am consolidating all of them into www.vtbirder.com.  All the posts here are already integrated into that site.

Please sign up by RSS feed or via email to have future articles sent to you.  Hope to see you over there as I blog about our Airstream travails and travels.  Dick

Saturday, August 17, 2013

One-legged Polishing

My knee, injured on August 2nd, is bothersome but as I await surgery next week, I can do some polishing.  I pretty much have finished the top half of the Airstream and now can work, sitting in a chair, on the lower panels.  I take it 45 minutes at a time and rest a lot -- but it's good to see some continued progress.

I know I'll be disabled again after next Tuesday's arthroscopic procedure and lose a few weeks while I recover so I've been pecking away, keeping the weight and pressure off my bad leg.

It's still very slow going.  There is a lot of residual flecks of clearcoat that have to be removed, slowing the process a lot.  Some are really stubborn -- but I've learned to use solvent, even fine steel wool.  What I'm finding is that the lower sections are pretty dinged up -- lots of road rash -- but they polish up pretty well.  I have taken off the one protective panel on the front since the other is long gone on the roads outside Houston, and replacements are very pricey.

The squiggles are reflections in the morning sun -- it looks ok with just the first pass of polishing. 
I'll work on it a few hours more before surgery and then see how things go.  I can always head out this winter with work to do and polish the rest down south.  There are times where I question why I ever started this but all in all, it was a good move.  The injury has put a crimp in the schedule but the worst is over.

I have started to do some preliminary planning for our trip this year -- reviewing places we like and places we'll never visit again.  Now we have to get both of us tuned up and ready to travel.  We are keeping our doctors' cash flow flowing -- they'll likely all take great winter vacations.  Safe traveling.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Polishing Project Comes to a Crash Landing

I can look out my bedroom window and see the brightly polished side of the Airstream and exactly where I stopped work on Thursday.  I decided to take a break Friday and go birding and so I did.  I injured myself on the trail and am incapacitated for a while -- so the Airstream renovation is on hold.

You can read about it on my birding blog here:  http://www.vtbirder.com/birding-should-not-be-a-contact-sport/