A busy day, slightly delayed...

A busy day, slightly delayed...  I got up this morning at 4 am, with every intention of putting a second coat of spar varnish on our grill cabinet.  The first step (a light sanding of the first coat, a blow-down with compressed air, and a rub-down with a tack cloth) went just fine, and I was finished with that at 5:45.  Then Mother Nature intervened: the varnish I'm using says that the minimum temperature for application is 60°F – and wouldn't you know it, it was only 55°F then.  I'll have to wait another hour or so for things to warm up.  The forecast calls for a high of 81°F, so eventually it will warm up.  The timing is a bit critical for me, as I need to get the second coat on this morning so that there's time for it to cure before I put a third coat on this afternoon.  Yesterday it took about 6 hours for the first coat to cure enough that I could have re-coated, though not quite enough for a sanding.  I'm not planning to sand between the second and third coats, so the second coat doesn't have to cure quite as thoroughly before I apply the third.

This evening we're going to the Hyrum Rodeo.  We went last year with our friend Aleck L.  Debbie and I quite enjoyed it.  I think Aleck mainly enjoyed it as a sort of anthropological investigation into white farmers. :)  That starts at 7:30 pm, and we need to get there early to get a good seat – which puts a hard stop on when I can put that third coat of varnish on.  I don't think they're likely to delay the rodeo to help me out!

Between the first and second coats I'm going to start catching up on nearly a month of backlog on my bookkeeping.  I have a dismayingly large pile of credit card receipts to deal with, as on our 18 day trip we were using the credit card far more frequently than we usually do...