Caitlin and I visited our homestead on Cape Breton Island this morning, under the blessing of the good omen of a fresh snowfall making it absolutely dreamlike — as if stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia…
The property itself, located about ten minutes from Sydney, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island and just off the Mira River, is about thirty acres with a large clearing at the northern end. Covered in smaller clearings with well-defined trails connecting them, it is fully treed with mature pine and birch (as well as an abundance of moss, lichen, and rabbits), and a trout-filled brook flows through the southern section. It has significant road frontage on an all-season maintained road and is on grid (including cell phone coverage)… and we got it for pennies via Dignam.
Some photos from our walk:
Our home will surely contain a good supply of rubber boots for guests who want to explore (the property is high and mostly dry but like I said, a brook flows through the lower section at the southern end). We can’t wait to see it in the summer, and over the winter will explore our requirements for building permits and so on.
Finally, a few more pictures from the surrounding landscape:
Oh yeah, and we need to come up with a name… Maybe one of my winter projects back in Toronto will be carving an entry gate, piece by piece in small sections, that I can reassemble on location this upcoming summer.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The real photos come tomorrow evening, but here’s a wholly inadequate taste of the beautiful landscape. We drove here through a snowstorm but it didn’t really slow us down. As always, click to zoom in on the pictures…
Friday, November 30, 2007
I have a new project I’m working on, thanks to the speedy delivery of parts from K&J Magnetics who sent me some strong neodymium magnets, and Nick’s Equipment Sales who sent me some high-torque clock movements. The plan is to build a clock something like the mockup on the right, where the clock has no visible moving parts (no hands) and steel balls glide over the surface with nothing apparently holding them in place. The way it’ll work is that the hands will actually move behind the face of the clock (I haven’t decided on a surface yet), and those hands will have magnetic neodymium discs affixed to them which will bond without touching to matched neodymium spheres which will indicate the time…
Hopefully it’ll look neat. I have a much cooler clock that I’m building with Caitlin that’s a pair of crocheted robots that point out the time that maybe I can post next week…
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Whew! One more to go… We’re going on a secret mission this weekend (don’t worry, we’ll share afterwards) so I probably won’t have time to complete the last one, the fly (which is being done in a nice iridescent pearl glaze for the wings and a green or blue interference paint for the body), which is the most involved of the set I think.
Oh, and I’ve been asked a couple times where I got my blank Russian nesting dolls — they came from Russian Legacy, who have a number of styles available.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
My eyes are so going to fall out of their head! Continued work on my “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly“ nesting dolls — from left to right (click to zoom), the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, the goat, the cow, the horse… and… she’s dead, of course! I may get ambitious and try and finish the painting tomorrow and then give them a nice topcoat to seal and protect them.
They really look a lot better in person I think… I haven’t decided yet if these are going to be for sale…
