Thursday, January 29, 2015

Back To Work

It has been a month since my last entry.  Shortly after I wrote that message, I began a long bout with the flu which turned into bronchial pneumonia.

 I took a couple of weeks off the job at Walmart, but continued to go in very early to do the work on the Bread Wall.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally gave up and went to the doctor.  After listening to my chest, she declared I sounded like an aging asthmatic.  She prescribed $150 of medications and sent me back to bed.  I asked whether it started as the flu, but she couldn't tell without doing some tests.  I wasn't coughing up anything gross enough to use as a lab sample, so I am only presuming how it started.

Lately, I have been strong enough to go back to work in Produce.  I have been laid off from the Bread Wall due to the company's restructuring, so I am only doing Produce.

In the boat shop, I have made some progress.

In the previous episode, I had stitched up the seams, filled the gaps between stitches with epoxy and rigged a tent to help the epoxy cure.  That worked marvellously!

Days later,



I removed the wire stitches and filled the gaps in the epoxy with more of the mixture.  Once everything was cured, I used a cabinet scraper to remove most of the stuff then followed with a big sander to remove the rest.

Further applications of epoxy and subsequent sandings have made the boat nearly ready for applying strips of fibreglass cloth on all the joins, plus a full layer of cloth and epoxy on the bottom panel.  A sanding this morning followed by laying out the cloth.  It will be a long day of applying epoxy, so I am waiting until I have a long uninterrupted day.  Also coincidental that tomorrow will be warm enough in the unheated shop.

All very exciting.