I got the hard copies of colgaffneyis newsletter printed after work yesterday, and I stuffed the envelopes and mailed them this morning. I did this at the Post Office on University avenue, where Clann has a P.O. Box, since I was really overdue for checking the mail there.

In fact, I was way overdue. My key would not work. With a sinking feeling I realized that the box rent had not been paid. So I had to pay the rent and ask the staff for Clann’s mail. If I had come in any later they would have tossed it. In fact, there was nothing of importance–the only First Class mail was the bill for the box itself. There was also a catalog from Smoke & Fire. Great fun, but in no way critical.

Back home I mounted the towel rack in the upstairs bathroom, marking another step back to normalcy. I also drove into St. Paul and picked up the new light fixture that mia_mcdavid had chosen for the bathroom. After that I tried to sand off the spackle and paint marks on the step stool that I made a few months ago. It had served mia_mcdavid well during the bathroom remodeling, but had been marked up in the process. Sanding and brushing did not do much. I thought about leaving all the blotches on it (honorable battle scars), but seeing a set of fingerprints in paint was too much. I repainted it.

I have a couple old Yankee push drills. Nice tools, but they require bits with a special shank that are no longer made. Lee Valley sells cheap adapters that allow Yankee screwdrivers to use modern hex bits. At least other one company sells functionally comparable adapters, but Lee Valley’s are the cheapest (and the best looking). Unfortunately, even the smallest size anybody sells is too big for my small drills. However, I have a couple grinders and am not afraid to use them, at least on something this cheap. I ground the shank of a Lee Valley adapter down on all sides. This was tedious but straightforward. The reground adapter is now fitted to one of my Yankee drills. There is something deeply satisfying about being able to reshape steel to my purposes in my home.

I also worked with a drill more than twice the length, and many times the weight of the Yankee. This is an old breast drill, 21″ long, generally similar to this. Think of it as an eggbeater drill (I have several), but for dinosaur eggs :-)> A wonderful object, but I don’t have a lot of use for it in the way it was intended. I had an old drill stand meant for electric drills, but with some work I was able to fit the breast drill to it. So now I have a muscle-powered drill press :-)> (I think the traditional term is “post drill”).