Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Writing Along

My writing is moving along nicely. I started out with a 500 words per day requirement to just get me into the chair and writing. As I hoped, getting my butt into the chair has resulted in more than the minimum the longer I keep up the streak. I think I'm ready to start making my minimum daily word count 1000, which should speed the process along even more, as I start to exceed that goal. 

It's funny; when I started focusing on the writing, 500 words was hard. I would write a bit, check my count and find I wasn't even halfway there. Tuesday morning, I wrote a bit, then did my check and found I'd already exceeded 500 words. 

I think I prefer writing the Hike with Me books after the end of the season in part because it allows me to relive the trips just when I'm really starting to miss backpacking. Though I did like having the write-up done earlier the one year that I did my ICT hike in May and finished the write-up before July. Of course, I did two other books that year, so I was still writing in October and November. 

It's so much fun to look back over all my pictures and recall the scents and the feel of the breezes. How hot it was in the afternoons, and how cold in the mornings. The trip went exactly according to plan, and that was such a relief after my last few attempts at the Frank. 

I'm hoping to finish my write-up of both this trip and the second ICT hike that I did later in August before November 19th, but it will all depend on how long each one ends up being. I expect the second one will be a lot shorter simply because I was only hiking for two days, due to fire closures, but I'm not sure how many more words I'll need for the first one. 

However many it takes :) 


Wednesday, October 20, 2021

No 'Poo, No Problem

It's been over a year since I put shampoo on my hair. I made it through a whole season of backpacking without using the stuff, which was, in my mind, the true test of whether this would be viable for me long term. I was concerned that the level of dirt acquired on a long trip might require shampoo to clear out, but that turned out not to be the case. 

Now, to be fair, after one trip I did use a bit of bodywash on my hair to try and get the dirt out. But no shampoo, and very little soap, has touched my hair over the last 13 months. For the most part, I've been using baking soda 1 to 3 times per week, as I felt my hair needed a bit of degreasing. Otherwise, it's just water and finger scrubbing. 

I have discovered that I can no longer use my hair to clean my nails like I did when I used shampoo. But I solved that one by moving my nail brush from its place next to the bathroom sink to a new home in the shower. I do have very short hair, which may contribute to this working as well as it is for me. I'm not sure if it would work nearly as well with longer hair - I'm growing mine out on top a little bit this winter, so I'll see if that makes a difference. 

The thing that amazed me so much I had to share it with my husband the other day is that hair care products are kind of a racket. 

I used to shampoo and condition my hair on a daily basis (at least doing the hair routine every time I showered, if I wasn't showering every day). And then I'd get frustrated because I couldn't style it. Nothing I could do to my hair would make it do anything other than flop down flat unless I used a lot of product on it. And I do NOT like the smell of most hair products, so I avoided them and ended up keeping my hair up a lot when it was long. 

Now that I'm not using shampoo and conditioner, I can shower, and then brush my hair into a style - and it stays! Not perfectly, but well enough to amaze me. I don't even have to use a blow dryer - though using one will help the style stay in place better. Or maybe I just like the warm air. 

At any rate, I'm glad to have figured out, however late, that my hair isn't unstylable - it just needed me not to cleanse it. 

I don't anticipate going back to using shampoo and conditioner now that I've tried living without it. It's an added expense that doesn't have any real benefits as far as I'm concerned. And it comes with one major drawback - that I need to shampoo every 4 days or I get headaches, even while backpacking. Until I find a benefit that outweighs that drawback, I'll be sticking with my current hair routine. 

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

It's the Time of the Season...

For writing!

The writing is underway. I'd say this is about an average start. I mean, technically, I did start this much earlier, but I haven't really started pushing myself on it until this past week. 

I know myself. When I have a daily word goal, I get writing done. When I don't, I don't. So I'm starting with an easy 500 words per day goal and as I get going, I'll probably up that to 1000 words per day. I'm hoping to finish the writing of both ICT trips before Thanksgiving, which should give me plenty of time to publish before Christmas. Or be close - it will depend on whether I order physical proofs or rely on the electronic. 

From past experience, no matter how much I review the electronic proofs, I will always miss typos that I'd catch on paper. But hope springs eternal, so I might go ahead and try electronic proofs again this year. It will really depend on how I'm feeling when I'm ready - and when I'm actually ready to make that choice. It's much easier to choose the physical proof when I'm ready in early December than when I'm ready in late February. 

I also submitted a story to the 4th quarter of Writers of the Future, with about three hours to spare before the 9/30 deadline. I actually had the story ready since July, but I was waiting to see if I wrote a better one. Of course, as soon as I submitted it, I thought of half a dozen ways to improve it, but there's always next quarter. (Writers of the Future allows you to submit the same story more than once.)

Backpacking season is over. Car camping season is over (for us). It's time to settle down to the off season pursuits and get these books written. Maybe a few stories while I'm at it. 

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Crafts! Guitar Strap

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to make myself a guitar strap. Sure, I could have bought one, but I enjoy crafting and I have a couple of options that I could use right here at home, so why not? The only question remaining was which method I would use. 

On the one hand, I could crochet a strap. I've got yarn and crochet needles and the know-how to knot out a strap. But I found the other option to be more attractive, perhaps, more rock-n-roll - leather. 

And it's been a while since I did any leathercrafting - too long, I say! 

I found a video on YouTube that detailed the kind of strap I wanted to make - one that doesn't require hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rhxPX9u12k 

I don't have all the tools that would be ideally used in constructing the strap, but I have enough tools to get the job done. I copied down the pattern and the general measurements onto a post-it note, and then I realized I needed some really long paper to make a pattern. 

I measured a piece of cardboard that was lying around the house, but it was only 16 inches and I needed 22 for my small piece and 36 for the large. There followed a brief scramble around the apartment while I tried to figure out what I could possibly use until I remembered that I bought wrapping paper for Christmas presents last year and hardly used any of it. 

The cool thing about using this wrapping paper was that the reverse side has a grid, which really helped with getting the straightedge lined up nicely for drawing my pattern. Once I drew the rough pattern out, I cut it - very carefully, because wrapping paper is pretty fragile. 

Wrapping paper patterns.

Yes, it was Frozen wrapping paper.

Then came the fun part - time to get the leather!

My husband and I have a bin full of leather that we've used over the years for various projects. At this point, most of it is undyed, shades of light brown mostly. But we do have one huge piece that's purple on one side, and that was the only piece big enough to cut my pattern out of, so purple it was. 

I placed the patterns on the leather in a couple different ways before I picked my spot and used scotch tape to affix the patterns to the leather. I didn't tape them all the way around, but instead did small strategic tapes and then used a permanent marker to draw the outline on the leather itself.  In the past, I've actually glued my pattern to the leather, but that was for patterns I could print out on a normal printer. I wasn't going to make my Frozen-wrapping-paper patterns unusable if I wanted to try again! 

Patterns taped down, thonging/chisel set next to the scissors and ready to go.

I also used the marker to punch through the paper at key points to mark where holes would need to be made. Probably would have been easier to cut those from the paper, but I had already taped the patterns down - poor planning on my part. Then I cut the pieces out of the main body of the leather and then cut them apart. Finally, I cut out the actual leather pieces. 

Now we're ready to chisel!

Now I had two long pieces of leather, and all that was left was the cutting of the holes. This part actually took the longest because I don't have a hole puncher at the moment, so I was using a thonging/chisel set to make little round holes and longer slots. That part was hard and finicky, because every hole required many cuts due to the size and shape of my chisel. I used a bigger chisel for the slots, but it still required multiple stabs and I had to finish it with the small chisel anyway. 

It fits together.

It fits the guitar.

But it worked! I think I might add some additional holes so I can adjust the length to be a bit shorter, but it really works. And sure, I could have bought one, but that wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. 

And it fits me!