Delivering myself from famine

Friends! I am alive. At this exact moment I'm planning to start blogging here again as well as continue the new work blog I started a few weeks ago (at cordeliafernwood.com), but I know myself and I'm not... sure... how long this enthusiasm will last. Also I'm not sure if anyone who reads this blog isn't already my friend on Facebook, but if there is anyone who was waiting with bated breath for me to show up here again, hooray! I'm here again. 

So, at Cordelia Fernwood, I've made some stuff and I've sold some stuff, but I haven't sold very much stuff, which is to be expected at the beginning of a venture like this, but the upshot is that I shall be needing grocery money in the relatively near future, and luckily for me a fence-painting job is available for me to do and be paid for at this very moment. This is because my mother owns the building I live in, and she pays me to be her fixit human for my own house. Eventually I will run out of things to fix and at that point will either have to start selling more stuff or else find a real job, but for now the weather isn't heinous and it's a good time to be working outside.

The last time this fence was painted, the workmanship was, hm, how do I say, dubious. Without any apparent prep work whatsoever, such as sanding or even cleaning the surface to be painted, a high-gloss paint was sprayed on to the existing fence. For my part, after using progressively coarser sandpaper and considering driving an extra fifteen miles to pick up extra extra coarse sandpaper, I finally concluded that primer is my friend. (I also picked up a wire-bristle brush at Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, and it is FABULOSO at scuffing up hard-to-reach high-gloss fence parts that have no business being high-gloss.) Like this:

Also there is the top-end-of-the-fence-boards situation. Which is to say, none of the exposed end grain on the tops of the boards got painted during this high-gloss spray-painting job, but were left to weather naturally, which results in stuff like this:

In some cases, the ends don't have moss on them, but in some cases they do. I'm planning to paint the non-mossy ones, just to preserve them a tiny bit longer, but quite frankly the whole thing is going to have to be completely rebuilt within the next five to ten years, so I'm constantly wondering to myself which effort is worth it and which is not.

I did finally conclude that I should replace the most rotten boards on the gate, though. I use the gate every time I leave the house, and one of the boards on the front had rotted out so badly that only the screws that had held it in place were left at the top.

Behold the front of the gate, which already has three boards I've replaced (it's hard to tell, but they're a slightly different color from everything else because I primed them before I installed them ;)

Since I am a fan of whimsy and not a fan of regretting my decisions, I've decided that the crooked board on the far left on the front side is whimsical, and that I don't regret at all the fact that I totally forgot to sight down the long side of the board to make sure it was straight before I bought it. Really truly, though, I actually do think it kind of looks cute, and I'm also not kidding about the liking whimsy thing. 

You can see that the board on the far left on the inside of the gate is pretty ripped up on the bottom. I wasn't originally planning to replace it, but replacing the boards on the front of the gate went so well that I'm sort of thinking maybe I will after all. 

Aaand I'm out of time to write. Probably for the best. Check out cordeliafernwood.com if you're curious about what the first pages of the unfinished graphic novel look like, or what the mostly-finished paper Nativity or paper Easter Set look like, or if you want to read more ramblings about creative work and, like, stuff.