Eating outside sometimes means no table and holding up the plate you eat from with one hand, trying to eat with the other hand.
The Adirondack chairs function as a table too; my plate is on the left arm rest and my beer on the right, and I can still put my arms on the arm rests.
All the good things in life in one chair 🤠
Not sure if I disturbed them, but they seemed to be enjoying the hot tub deck 😊
Although currently, I don’t rent out Ozuye to more than two people, in October I hope to get a visit from three friends. So instead of two, I made 4 Adirondack chairs.
I also ran into pillows at Target, so now they are comfortable. The brown one is stained, matching the logs. The other three will be grey, like one already is.
They all have 4 wheels at the back legs, so you can move them easily by lifting the front and then rolling them. The two wheels per leg prevents a wheel going into the gap between the deck boards.
Once painted, I will move two to the hot tub deck, and keep two on the main deck.
The logs that were cut for windows and doors are held together by 9″ bolts, sunken into a 1.5″ hole. Those did not look very pretty;
Frank helped me in Schagerbrug (Holland) to make wooden plugs on his turning lathe that cover these up, so afterwards it looks like this;
I took 100 of them through customs in my hand luggage and now am plugging all holes.
Only 10 minutes from Ozuye is Canyon Lake, a large lake for recreation and a source for drinking water. Canyon Lake has gone viral on TikTok, where someone shows that the water is crystal clear. Click on the image to see the video
Reinforced with 16 3” screws and the support beams now routed into the legs, this is now a coffee table fit for elephants. (No, this is not a challenge to see if someone can break it). I can literally jump up and down on it. Of course I don’t way 200 pounds, but even if I did, I could stand on it easily. So it should be good, even for Texas coffee cups.
Texans must be heavy coffee drinkers. Very heavy. My coffee table again was broken 😞. Normal use, like putting coffee mugs, plates or anything like that on it would not break it. The only thing that would is jumping on the table. It could be a Texan custom I’m not familiar with to do that, but hey, if that’s what is customary, I will rebuild it in a way that can be done. 🤷
After 3 years of running flawlessly, I noticed I wasn’t greeted by the smart mirror as I entered Ozuye. Technical analyses showed that the power supply for the raspberry Pi inside had failed. So I ordered a new one, and a soldering iron, so now the Smart Mirror is fully functional again.
The picture above shows the guts of the Smart Mirror with the new soldered in power supply in the top left corner.
The weather has been wonderful. Here’s a picture of Canyon Lake at sunset yesterday, taken from the dam.
Life without gadgets is simply less fun. Today my brother Karel surprised me with a new gadget; Tempest. It’s a state of the art weather station. Wireless and solar powered. As Ozuye faces north north-east, most of the possible locations for mounting are shady. So I used a pole to make it stick out above the tree line;
Next time I’m over I may mount it to the home to make it catch sun all the time, but for now this works.
This station of course comes with an app. Here’s a screenshot of the data it collects;
It also includes notifications, so I can get a warning when there’s a storm or cold front coming. But that won’t be this year, as the weather will remain nice.
I do think the pole is asking for something like a flag, but this is a pretty flexible pole and when it does storm, the wind usually comes from that direction, so I’m not sure the pole would hold. Next time I might get an official flag pole and raise the US flag when I’m there 🤠