Had lots of stuff to do today.. and it was making me a little ‘Mondayish’ on a Sunday.. no fair. I .. went for a longest run this morning to clear my head and downshift.. worked pretty well. I reframed my day to lower my expectations I ran up Dugway road and marveled at the springlike weather and the sound of spring birds.. Tomorrow is March.. wow.. 

Later in the morning, diane and I went in to buy our first mattress in nearly 20 years.
We had fun testing on all the beds Then on to home depot for some scrounging.

Gabe and I had wanted to build a forge for the last three months and this was the day to build it.   Gabe and I went scrounging through the garage for parts.. our only constraint was that the forge had to cost less than 10 bucks (I’d seen one that cost 10 bucks online.. had to do better than that)

We used an old steel wheel rim that phil had given me .. and an old brake disk from the Subaru… .. We took an old pumpkin can  through the hole between the two  and bent them back..

We stuck some hardware cloth over the can to hold the colas up..

We stuck an aluminum piece of duct work and a a dryer hose..

Gabe stuck the hair dryer into the other end of the hose.

We loaded up the charcoal and gabe torched it..

Pretty soon we had a white hot blast furnace.

We got a piece of stell yellow hot pretty quick.. Gabe pulled it out of the fire and started wailing on it with a hammer

Then.. back in the fire ! .. heat, beat and repeat..

We went through a half a bag of  of charcol shaping, bending and twisting stell. it was awesome.. and .. only about $9.20 .

Next project.. was to install our new energy monitor. It’s a TED5000 .. Gabe and I installed it in the junction box.. When I turned off power to the house, I managed to scramble the memory in our DSL modem. That took an hour to fix.. but soon.. we were back online and had a real time measure of every watt being used in our house.