Bikes, Plumbing, and Compost, oh my!

I have been blessed with plenty of opportunities to work with my hands lately. There are so many opportunities for me to do satisfying things, where the end result is something you can see, touch, and use. I hope my life is always full of tangible, touchable, dirty work, not just paper, and definitely not cubicles, offices, and electronic correspondence (although I like computers too, just not all the time!)

Morgan and Laura run a community bike shop on Saturdays out of our basement in the back of the Catholic Worker house. Nick and I talked to them, and we can each build our own bicycle, as long as we put in some work in return! (only work and time exchange accepted, money's no good there!) So, they left us with 4 bicycles, and said "Take 'em apart!"

So, that's what I did two days ago. Here are the frames and wheels...

...and here are all the salvaged parts. (some parts like de-railers, brakes, etc. were small and needed to stay together, so naturally I put them in some plastic, food service gloves we had)

Then my new friend Terry, a retired carpenter who worked for 45 years, and ardent supporter of unions (he almost always sports various red, International Workers of the World t-shirts and baseball caps), and I, replaced a leaky sink trap in one of the downstairs bathrooms.

Terry left to go to a wobblies (IWW) meeting in Berkeley, but he left me some tools, so that I could patch together this new compost bin! I still need to line the inside with some cardboard, and then choose its new home somewhere in our garden. The bin is more or less for neatness (and keeping the compost from drying out from the wind), so you can make them out of anything really! I chose to use some old pallets we had lying around.

It was a great day of work.