7th July 2026
Yet another drama at the barn, last week we had the debacle with the keys, this week it was getting the machines to work.
It started when I asked John to turn on the extraction. Off he went to the breaker box, muttering as he went. Ten minutes had gone by and still it wasn’t working. I walked round and looked inside the box to see if I could make sense of it. Each breaker has an odd description, known only to him. In the end it was easier to turn all the breakers on and check if the extractor worked. This took about an hour to resolve, it was like he was learning it all over again. Finally he remembered he had to push another button that activated the system.
So now we had power, and could start to do stuff. I had many ideas, but decided to help John with some wooden platters for his church.
There was some panels left over from the massive elevator structure that he helped with last year, so I cut them up into strips. Then they had to be thickness down to a quarter inch.
This was tricky because if it was fed in against the grain it tore out. It was important to make fine cuts. I was careful to place the panels that I had just machined in a separate pile, but John somehow mixed them up, and introduced a much thicker piece into the sequence. As that went through the machine stuck tripping a circuit breaker. I had to back the adjustment a long way back to remove the panel. I then resumed taking small cuts to get back to the original thickness.
John then decided to help again by adjusting the cut, then the same thing happened again. By now I was a bit pissed off, we had made little progress, I was regretting even using this material, but once upon a time and running again we finished.
We had a guy round who wanted some timber, I agreed to message him with a quote, now I have to find out how to price lumber.
It had felt like a long day, although we had done very little, that included not being able to test the sawmill because John had forgotten to buy hydraulic fluid and a new battery even though it was in his book.
But that’s John, slowly descending into his small world, although he has memories of long ago everything else remains disjointed and lost.
Well it didn’t take long, Winnie decided to christen one of the sofa cushions. It is not common for her to wee in her sleep, but she’s done it in a few places. To try to reduce the seepage through the covers Kelli bought a waterproof blanket, but since we got rid of the old furniture we can’t find it. We now have to let Winnie out more frequently to hopefully not let it happen again.
Another Lifetime to go 