Windy Day

With the forecast with rain for Saturday and a warm but windy day for Sunday I put together an off the books ride for Sunday. I originally had 4 people but ended up with only 2 others beside myself. 

Since it was going to be blowing at 15-20 mile from the west I planned to go into the wind from MCP towards Princeton so we would have a tail wind on the way back. We did this route which had a couple of my unusual features. We started out on the Trolley line path for a little while before heading through Plainsboro and through College park to get to Kingston. The goal was to get to the Blawenburg Bistro since Jim likes that place and wants it to stay open I figured I would give them some business. I thought about trying some how to hook up with Jim's ride but it would have been hard to time since we started an hour earlier than his ride and our routes were a lot different. 

We stopped at the Bistro which does have a good selection of baked goods. Jim asked me to make sure I left his group some. I can assure you that there was plenty left when we departed so I hope he had a good stop. 

It is spring which means I need to start getting in shape for the season ahead. Although I tried to keep the route relatively easy I did add a couple of hills to try and get my hill legs working. 

The wind grew stronger as we were riding so when we turned back towards home we had a good tail wind to push us home. At the end I felt better than last week so I hope the trend continues.

On a completely different subject because of the rain on Saturday I was able to finish my latest project. As I reported in this post I got some live edge walnut a couple of months ago. I finally used some of it for a plant stand. When we moved we didn't need my wife's old desk as the office in the new house had a built in one.

So I repurposed it as a plant stand by an empty spot we had by a window. 

I built a frame and then pieced the walnut into the frame. The wood I got was really rough so it took a lot of sanding to get it looking good enough to use. 

To bring out the beauty of the wood and protect it from the water that will drip off the plants and be spilled on them I put some deep coat epoxy on it. 

I filled to spaces between the different pieces of walnut with blue sand and glass beads. This was to reduce the amount of epoxy I needed to fill the gaps and coat the wood because epoxy is expensive. The sand and beads actually look pretty good with the wood in the epoxy. This it the first time I tried to create a piece like this. I'm happy with the way it came out but it was a lot of work. There is a lot more to creating an epoxy table then mixing the epoxy and pouring it in. I learned a lot from this project that I will apply to the next one I do. I have 3 more piece of walnut so now I just have to decide what I will do for my next project.