Dusting Off The Blog…

Life.

To paraphrase LR Knost, it can be amazing and awful and ordinary at times. Sometimes it hits you hard and knocks you on your arse. And it can take a while to gather yourself. But that’s what you have to do – stand back up, dust yourself off, get back to it.

I won’t go into any sordid details, but I will say I’ve taken some solid body blows from Life the last eight months or so. It had me against the ropes for a while, but I think I’ve pulled through. That round, anyway.

Not unscathed, though. My marriage didn’t survive the ordeal. So… there was a lot of awful for a while, to be honest.

I’ve tried to spin as many positives out of the situation as I could, though. I picked up my yoga activities. I started exercising more (mostly for an outlet of stress). I even signed up for a 5k training program and ran my first 5k race in April – a kilted 5k, if you can imagine! It wasn’t a huge race – 33 participants in all – but I managed to come in 3^rd place overall and take 1^st in my particular age group. And I ran a personal best 5k time of 25:46, which is pretty good, considering I’d not run more than a total of 30 minutes in my entire life before January of 2016.

Celebratory pint of the good stuff!

I’ve been trying to do fun things with my Tiny Human to bring as much positive to him, as well. Last weekend we did some camping on the family farm with his cousin. And yeah, I have a beard now. Kind of weird seeing so much white, but it’s growing on me (both literally and figuratively speaking).

Tiny Human, his cousin, and an older-looking Kilted Woodworker.

In a weird twist of fate, I’m back in my old condo – the condo I sold to a friend of mine in 2007 – though I’m just renting it for the time being. It at least offers me some comfort of familiarity.

The other thing that took a hit was my woodworking. It might be noted I lost my workshop in the process of everything that has happened. Right now, it is all in boxes split between an attached garage and a walk-out basement. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I likely won’t be parking in the garage any time soon. Also, I apparently have a lumber gathering problem.

I have a 12’x10′ space to work with; but also a bathroom with utility sink!

So I’m trying to come up with a plan of action for the part of picking up my life that involves the kilted woodworker. I have no idea how long I will be in the condo, so I can’t count on using the walls for any sort of permanent storage. That means I’m brushing off my notes for tool storage options – saw tills, tool chests, and storage boxes. But also it means paring down my tools so I don’t build storage for tools I don’t need or use.

In the near future, you might see some postings of tools for sale before I put them up on the popular auction site. I won’t ever try to get anything out of them past what I have in them. In some cases, they have been cleaned up and used, but there might also be some tools I bought and never got around to cleaning up and using.

You should also see posts building up to and involving bench and tool storage builds. Oh, and remember that conference table I build last year? The people I made it for asked me if I was interested in making two more tables for them – a hall/console table and an end table – and that might be in the works, as well.

Anyway… apologies for the extended hiatus. I hope to get back in the groove of things shortly. Thanks for bearing with me.

TKW