I have one of the crock pots full of wax and heating on the stovetop right now. The candle molds are waiting next to it. I have the wick out and ready to be cut then primed. My ten-year-old is doing her schoolwork, then she will be joining me to learn how to mold the candles for use. It is a part of her Homestead Economics class lesson. When these are done, we have the option of selling them, or using them ourselves. It is the using them ourselves that has me tempted to get some lovely bright candle lanterns from Townsends. Getting enough of them to be really useful would be expensive. But I would like them that much, and that is a thing.
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I have not yet received any shipping confirmation on the sawmill. I still have not had any buyer’s remorse, either. I need to figure out where to put it, and I am working on ideas for that. If nothing else, I can put it on the other side of the street and have all the room I need to work all I want. I think if I had ordered an industrial mill, I would. But as a hobby mill, I think I would be more content with it on this side of the street, where I can use it with a bit more ease, and less of the officialness of leaving for work, as I would feel I would do if I were to cross the road.
A lot of my concern is the workflow of the mill. There will be logs to go in, lumber to come out, and off-cuts and sawdust to manage. I would prefer to use the tractor rather than a log deck to load the mill with. I want to stack the lumber straight into stickers, and onto bolsters. I think I have the flow worked out, and the position of things in relation to the mill itself. I guess I’ll have to go out with a measuring tape and confirm my ideas.
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It snowed last night. WE got maybe 2 and 1/2 inches of it! Things were looking like they would clear up, and suddenly we are back under it again. Despite that, it was not a cold night. I burned wood, but not a lot of it. The temperature out right now is 36F. It feels fairly nice. That should tell all about the winter we had, when I was outside a bit ago in a short sleeve T-shirt and feeling quite nice.
According to the forecast, we are in a similar, though gradually cooling state till Monday. After that, the weather will come back up again to what it has been over the last week or so. It looks like we are on track for plenty of spring snow. I have no complaints about that. The more water that gets relocated to our area, the better things like hay prices ought to be. Really, everything else, too.
& A Little More
So, what’s the point of the mill? Part of it is living independently. It’s about being able to make whatever we need here on the farm rather than having to buy everything online. My arthritis is too bad to let me build a saw pit and saw lumber with a big old hand saw, but I can buy a mill, and saw trees down to boards and cants and posts, and whatever else I want. The wood species are a bit limited around here, but since I started splitting my own firewood, I have never run into having none of any kind. I have often had access to rather large logs and even whole trees. So why wouldn’t I want to take advantage of that? Furthermore, there are a few things that Missus wants that I am better off trying to build myself than looking for to buy. A single weaving loom of a certain size would cost as much as the mill did. A few smaller ones would certainly pay for it, too. So why not build it and make several and she can sell some? I also would be happy to operate as a neighborhood mill, making lumber for folks close by who need it. Small neighborhood operations are how the world once worked, and what we want it to come back to. We are trying to get to that.