Steph's Reality Blend

April 7: The beginning stages of a custom ride for a local client. It's a "reverse trike," meaning there are 2 wheels in front and one in back. Tandem (2 people). Randy started with a plan he bought from one of his favorite sites for inspiration, but altered some things. April 17: Working out the seat spacing and placement... April 18: Also during this time, Randy had another local client ask if he could figure out how to modify her recumbent trike so that she could also pedal with her arms to help out her bad knees. He's no artist, but it works to figure out how something might go together... April 24: You can now see pedal assemblies and gear sets... April 27: With chain and handle bars, it's getting close to its maiden test-ride. No brakes or gear shifters yet, but we don't have much for hills here. May 2: Randy and the tractor and I moved this beastly oven from the pole barn garage into the "powder coat room," which we had planned to be its perma...

I apparently didn't take a whole lot of pictures in June, but this is a snapshot of the first "summer" month that FLEW BY. (By the way, I learned that the link for the counter top video in the last post went to the wrong site. It has now been fixed, so go to the last post to watch!) My bro Tim made some sweet "magic marble towel holders" that I may have written about already. I still really like them. The mountain biking trails in Crosby (about 45 minutes from home) are a great family fun day. Andrew can handle the easier trails on his balance bike. But NOW he can ride a pedal bike pretty well, and he's been asking to take his bike to go mountain biking sometime. This is great strides, from a kid that we had to coerce into practicing his pedal biking just to the mailbox and back (mostly flat, paved road, about 1/6 mile round trip). One day, Randy and Tedster built a treehouse out of scraps from home-building! You can't see the part IN the tree much, but ...

I was pleasantly surprised by a return of some mini grape hyacinths I had planted the spring before, and then didn't really help them at all. Randy has weed-whipped the area a couple of times since, so we'll see what they do next year! CoViD-19 Affected everyone's life, but our lives were only really changed because church was different. The first 2-3 Sundays, church was only live-streamed. Then we set up a trailer on the side of the church with framed up tarps to block the wind (it's always windy  there, and it was March in Minnesota, so it was cooooold ). The tarps lasted a couple weeks and the guy who owned the trailer needed it back. Then someone lent a smaller trailer but for as long as we needed it, and we built a more substantial "stage" under the church entry awning. We still had to strategically position that thing every week, depending on which direction the wind was blowing. Sometimes it would blow from behind and make a wind-tunnel in the roof of t...

Before diving in to the actual kitchen counter, I HAD to familiarize myself with the epoxy material.  Below is the first sample. It turned out WAY darker and gray-er than what we wanted, but I tried my hand at a number of techniques I had seen on Stone Coat Countertop's YouTube channel just to play around. You can't see the effects of chrome and metallic spray paints in the picture, but they're very neat! Randy's going to cut it in half and use it for shelving in his shop. 😁 Below are 2 separate square feet or so of the second round of samples. The bottom one was closER to what we were aiming for the countertop, so we went for it, bearing in mind a couple changes to make for the real thing (still too much color, especially the copper-orange). You can watch a sweet video that our friend Brent put together of the "color pour" here.  It's about 16 minutes long, but you can also skip through and get an idea of it. The island was the second of the 3 "stag...