Chickens

I pulled one of the cars into the basement to change a tire and Lion panicked so much that he flew out of their enclosure. (He's quite good at flying but only uses it very occasionally.) I don't expect he'll be making many escapes — all our birds tend to learn that just because you can get out of the nice safe enclosure doesn't mean you want to. When they were all rowdy teenagers living in a 4'x4' box in our dining room, one day we came home and they were all out of the box and rightfully spooked. I suppose it's more obvious how to get out than how to get back in? Anyhow, for the remaining month or two they were inside, they escaped not once.

Well, except for the time we fed them bits of pork chop before dinner and one of the hens, Pig, realized that we were eating more and not sharing! So she flew out of the box, crash-landed onto my wife, hopped on the table, and attempted to abscond with a pork chop bigger than her.

Shop

I started cleaning the lathe while it was apart, and, well, you can't clean just a couple parts and expect them to stay clean, so at this point I have cleaned the parts I've taken off and most of the other parts of the lathe that I touch while operating it. The carriage will have to wait a bit for a thorough cleaning as there are quite a few moving bits in it that require care and a couple of repairs that make sense to make while it's apart.

I replaced a couple setscrews on it and weirdly enough they were metric thread? A while back I had to find some screws for a gear cover and those ended up being metric too. Nothing looks like it's been re-tapped, so I'm not sure why an American-made lathe from 1918 would be using metric hardware. It doesn't have the right gearbox for a from-the-factory metric lathe.

Life

Parents are coming to talk tomorrow. We'll see what they have to say.