Authentic Nautical Accessories, and Custom Furnishings
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
Thinking about the past? Or the future? The other day I saw a post with a quote saying that the present is all we have.
I believe the past is our foundation, the future is what we build, and today we plan and make. Therefore, it’s preposterous to overvalue a single time frame.
Without the past, there’s no guide to what worked or failed. Without the future no path forward. Today can bridge the two.
I’ve had a thing with boxes. So when I restarted the woodcarving business, boxes with a nautical theme were among the first product lines I developed. I made boxes with sailboats carved on them, compass roses, small chests with carved boats on the lid, dolphins, and so on. I had an entire line of them at boat shows.
But they sold inconsistently. They did sell, but sometimes they’d stay in stock longer than I’d like and travel from show to show without selling. Not an ideal circumstance since my business plan has always been a small inventory and custom work. So eventually, I was forced to think outside the box and stop making them.
Only one problem. I still really like boxes, and despite my internal objections, I have purchased several jigs and appliances for less labor and time. After all, the carving is my interest, not the joinery.
Several designs, box blanks, and templates sit in the shop, waiting for the mood to move me to make some more. And I fear that I am fated to never really get out of the box.
Four AM is the best time to catch me playing guitar these days. And I just remembered that it was around four AM that my “day” used to end when I was performing as a folksinger.
So, since August, I’ll have these waking periods while it’s still dark. Then, unable to get back to sleep, I’ll slip into my office, pick up my old guitar and start practicing.
I used to distinguish between practice, which I did daily for two or so hours, and rehearsal, which I did to prepare for a gig. When I lived in Boston, I liked to practice in the kitchen but rehearse on the apartment building’s roof. The two things are similar but different. Practice was playing the guitar. Rehearsal was that, but it was also planning how each set of a gig should be structured because warming up was a lot different than a more mellow set when many in the audience had heard the first set and were interested in what you had. The final set was for winding down, relaxing, and sending home. There were variables you planned for if the house you were playing had a lot of inter-set churn, was rowdy or drunk.
Then there was the patter, the amusing, sometimes dubious stories and anecdotes you told while tuning or just for fun between songs. One of the old goofy ones was the ancient ( among folksingers, anyway) monolog about there being three ways to remove peanut butter from the roof of your mouth. This one was golden if the house was in a goofy mood that evening. Don’t try it in a bar room.
When I traveled, practice and rehearsal happened wherever I was staying. I often stayed with married friends, so “Uncle Wes” was a source of merriment. Dave Van Ronks’ children’s song “Oh Mister Noah” was a hit with many, but I rarely performed it in a set unless there happened to be kids in the audience. Kids in the audience made my life hard because I had a lot of “adult” material in my repertoire.
So here I am, coming on like some Folkie guru of folk music. But that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ with it.
Exploration. That’s why I write. The keyboard is a sort of gateway to new and old experiences. A long time ago, I discovered a curious thing; I can verbalize something, and one stream of consciousness comes out, or I can write about it, and something divergent is the result. So writing is a sweet way of exploring my thought process, history, and world views.
This is not always without tears. Over the years, I have swept much out of sight and consideration. In lots of my writing, those things come oozing out of the dark corners, and I must come to terms with them. This is where driving comes in. I’ll be driving on a back road, and my mind is keying in on something I’ve written – say, my time on the road in the 1960s. Suddenly I’ll view an event differently as my understanding of that time shifts.
I also startle myself with how many idealistic views of youth remain intact. The abrasive nature of time has not been able to eradicate it – knock the corners off, perhaps – but not destroy it.
There’s a touch of surprise about what I write. It’s new to readers and new to me. So yes, I write to explore and a bit to wonder.
When we purchased our home in Central Massachusetts, we asked the previous owners to do a clean sweep before the sale. So the day we moved into the house was reasonably pristine. However, they left some things they were confident we’d need. In the basement was the giant bag of some “weed and feed” products.
Looking outside at what passed for the lawn, I realized that for many years the owners had been committed to creating a European-style lawn on the top of a hill that was ninety percent glacial till. As a result, there were barely three-quarters of an inch of soil before you hit gravel and sand. The lawn was a straggling bunch of grasses mixed with invasive weeds. Behind us was a wildlife sanctuary that shaded the rear third of the lot. That back section was choked with invasive vines.
Moving in late fall, just before Halloween, meant I had more immediate issues than dealing with the yard. So we started on wallpaper stripping, painting, and the usual stuff that needed to be done in a new old house.
It was March before I began to tackle the mess outside. I started by removing the weed and feed, removing all the vines, and clearing a sunny garden area. The rear of the lot needed significant work, but we weren’t exactly sure what type. It was so shaded and had been covered by vines for so long that almost nothing grew there. Beyond our property line was a typical New England “Old Field” succession that had filled in an old orchard and pastureland.
I did a lot of sitting on an old stump fretting about the future of this land.
It was a depauperated woodland border. Elsewhere a semi-shaded area like those would be full of a mixture of plants that thrived on the edge of the woods. On hiking trips with the Appalachian Mountain Club, I’d walked through thousands of small glades like that. So I decided to recreate a typical woodland border.
Local nurseries, the local conservation district, and mail-order plant providers have figured large in this effort. It can’t all be done in a year or a decade. Some plants don’t succeed, and others do too well. There is no font of knowledge readily available for data on this process, but if your community has a knowledgeable conservation agent, they might be able to guide you.
Although it’s January as I write this, and an ice storm is on its way, my mind is already turning to how I can repair the damage that last year’s severe drought did. I won’t know until April which plants merely went dormant early and which plants didn’t make it. As I said, there is no textbook available. But I have restored a more regional and natural woodland border where only invasives thrived before.
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
I am a gadget fan, but despite being a fair craftsman, I never inherited the mechanical skills for taking things apart and putting them together that my father possessed. But I love to watch them whirr, turn and do something on the tabletop. I am continuously tempted by mechanical toys meant for my cat or dog – it’s a toss-up as to who is most entertained by them.
The other night I was having a conversation with one of my sons. He’d found a website with numerous kits for gizmos. Whatchamacallits. and gadgets. We spent a half-hour touring the site and appreciating the goodies on sale there.
I recalled Tom Paxton’s song The Marvelous Toy this morning.
The song sums it up so well:
I can be brazen in putting down conspiracy theories. There is something about the repetition of themes that irritates me – the world is going to end because of :
Just enough fact is in the recipe that otherwise sane people get drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. At holiday gatherings, it can take courage to argue with uncle John who has generously purchased the high-tech equivalent of tinfoil hats for each family member. These cost eighty dollars on the same site that offers AR-15 rifles, doomsday shelters, survivalist supplies, and dehydrated food to see you through your choice of the apocalypse or the rapture.
These tactics offer simple but frequently expensive solutions to complex problems – You and your dear ones will retreat to your basement and wait out the Final Days – to emerge in two weeks and repopulate the earth. Noah didn’t have it this easy.
For people falling for this brand of fantasy, there should be some prize for magical thinking.
Most of us know by now that the problems facing our continued existence can’t be solved by stop-gap measures or mere hunkering down for a week or two. We’ve lost the treasure of pristine earth, and actual work, not magical BS, will be required to regain some semblance of what was lost – in a hundred years.
But instead of working to reduce our use of fossil fuels, plastic, or other things, it’s easier to seek an easy way out.
And considering our societal penchant for shopping, what could be better than buying a solution on our favorite online store?
I’ll never do it again. But it stands for the “get it done” philosophy I’ve had to adapt. It’s an eight-by-ten storage shed in the back of the property. Currently, it’s my wood storage for planks and assorted odds and ends.
I built the shed solo. We had just moved into the neighborhood, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask for help, so I did it all alone. I raised it by myself using pulleys and two-by-fours to shore up the walls. It was not enjoyable, but I needed the shed.
Years later, when the kids were older, I had a workforce who worked well for pizza, putting up my greenhouse/workshop. So for a change, I got an opportunity to watch.
As the house empties of children marching off to their own lives, I again find myself without help. My wife says I should wait until I get some help, but it wouldn’t get done today or even this week. So I begin to calculate ways to make one body do the work of two.
What are your biggest challenges?
Acronyms have a nasty way of creeping into our daily language, nestling in, and, poof; we forget the original meaning, and they are a word of their own – if they are pronounceable. This happened to radar and other terms. You’ll have to Google the meaning because I’ve forgotten. There see what I mean?
A university puts out an annual list of words that should be retired because of overuse. This year GOAT, the acronym for greatest of all time, is leading the list. They seem to think that we’ll all obey just because they say so. That’s not the way language operates.
Perhaps we should be more reserved in constructing these selections of letters, so they don’t trip so well off the English-speaking tongue. The inquisitive mind will find thousands of snappy acronyms popular in print but not easy to pronounce as a word in English: WYSIWYG( what you see is what you get) comes to mind. In English, it does not trip so smoothly across the tongue. Which raises the question, what about acronyms in other languages? would WYSIWYG fluidly flow from the tip of a tongue speaking another language?
Pursuing this a bit further, if WYSIWYG became an overused word, would it wind up on the banned word list? Or is there a rampant preference for banning only English words here? Prejudice?
OK, WYSIWYG is indeed just one measly little acronym from the Trans Voltaic Urdu family of languages. But dammit! the sheer ” English privilege” of this list bothers me. Can we sanction such linguistic exclusivity in a world seemingly growing smaller every year?
I say no and shall spend the year fighting it. It will be my biggest challenge of 2023, but I will persevere.
Justice and fairplay for all – JAFFA!
By my long-standing tradition, January is a month for working with the design book first and the workshop second. The book doesn’t look much like a designer’s book of sketches. Over the past few years, it’s become page upon page of post-it notes placed on the book’s blank pages throughout the year. As an idea or concept is suggested to me or pops up, the note gets put into the book for later consideration.
As concepts develop, notes get more elaborate – so much carving or finishing time or the cost of materials. Eighty percent of the ideas never go anywhere for one reason or another. Some I can’t develop at a reasonable production ratio of time, materials, and profit. Others have practical production problems that are waiting for a solution to be developed.
some notes will sit in the book for a few years, some forever. but I rarely discard any. Instead, I’ll go back over the older stuff periodically as a source of inspiration or to reinvestigate my thought processes on ideas.
At some point, an idea jells enough for a prototype. So some prototypes wind up in the project box waiting for further developments while I move on to other things. Some will eventually go to the scrap box, too.
Another part of this process is the project woodpile. The project woodpile is an undercover collection of assorted wood pieces that I’ve put aside specifically because something is appealing in them, and I want to use them in something. This is a boxed and shelved collection outside of my carving shop under cover. I root around in the contents frequently, looking for select pieces of Cherry, ash, oak, and other woods.
It’s a messy sort of creative process, I admit it. But from this constellation of sources, I eventually cook up ideas, prototypes, and projects. I’m under no pressure to create any specific amount of work in January, to follow this creative process, as sloppy as it may seem.
Since January is my most hated month, using it creatively is an essential strategy to avoid the winter blues.
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