Tag: RDP

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Clean

In the light of a January first morning, the shop looks particularly grody. Just two weeks ago, I put the wrap on end-of-season production. I emptied the trash barrel and walked away for two weeks of non-shop activities. If it wasn’t done, it was going to wait. I do this because I found through hard experience that taking orders much past Thanksgiving resulted in profits but too much stress at home during the holidays. Trying to get that last item finished and shipped in time for Christmas delivery is not worth the sour looks from the family because I was in a bad mood. So I lose a bit of money but enjoy the holidays more.
I should have known that it would be a harbinger of a lousy cleanup at the beginning of the year. All that dust, wood shavings, wood chips, old paint, and old varnish was waiting for me to walk in on January one. Traditionally I’ve spent time on the first day of the year straightening the shop. But, being this had been a busy fall, and I was hurried, the shops needed more than routine cleaning.

The only dissent to this was from H.I.M Xenia ( empress of all she surveys). My running the shop vacs disturbed her New Year’s nap. She was up late, having a good nip toot, and stated that she needed rest, and would I please go away…far away.

Undeterred, I laid into the job. I got the new dust collector attached to the bandsaw, swept up, and began organizing supplies.

That’s when I came across the full Stop Loss Bag and the unused one. If you run a woodshop, you may have partial cans of finish hanging around. They gradually go bad, skim over, thicken up, and become unusable. It’s a waste of good finish, expensive, and a disposal problem. Contact with air is the most common culprit. No matter how tightly you seal the can, enough air remains to react with the contents. The stop loss bag eliminates most of the air. As a result, the finish stays usable for much longer. In the case of one pint of varnish, as long as a year.

Using the bags has reduced the spoilage of cans of finish and saved me money, despite the cost of the bag. And getting this post back to cleaning – it means less hazardous materials that I have to dispose of in my early January cleaning.

And now that I’ve had a break, I should get back to scraping off the bench. This year I’ll work on reminding myself to cover the benchtop with some plywood while finishing.

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Resolved

There was a time when I would ring in the New Year with drinks, hugs, toasts, and of course, Resolutions. Would it be Auld Lang Syne without the midnight resolutions? Promises that we’d drink less, exercise more, be more observant, or go to church more often? After a while, I resolved not to resolve. Instead, I decided that I’d think about things a bit more.
I’ve had better luck with this sidewise approach. Comes the end of February, there was less of a grand finale of guilt when I failed to match the brilliant and bright promises of an early New Year’s Day.

So in January, I think about new products for the shop, I don’t create a rigid schedule. I start thinking about the garden while looking through the catalogs. And I think about increased physical activity.

I’ve found that I have a better achievement level with this sidling up alongside goals and objectives. Getting pally with resolutions generates a guilt trip when your overly ambitious plans don’t work out.

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January

New England weather coheres to only one guide: inconsistency. Mind you, we used to consistently depend upon pretty much only one rule about January around here, and that was at some point we’d get a day, maybe two, of January Thaw. January Thaw was an almost sacred event. We’d go from temperatures in the single digits or worse and find ourselves tossed into a near-tropical weather pattern. OK, I do exaggerate. But the temps would generally soar into the 50’s or even the 60’s. The temptation was to shed layers of clothing, take off the LL Bean boots, and sunbathe. Then, of course, for repentance, we’d plunge back into the freezer.

Not so anymore. The temperatures in December have fluctuated between the teens and the forties much of the month. As a result, I fear that my maples suspect that tapping season is here early and expect me to sneak up on them with drill, hammer, taps, and tubing.

Typically, it’s a month in which I read seed catalogs, fill my shop time with new designs and prototypes, and look longingly out the window at my dreary garden. Oh, yes, I start a countdown to when I start the tomatoes, lettuce, and kale seedlings inside. I fill my time with sundry things designed to take my mind off the realities of winter. Yes, it’s bad enough that I begin to yearn for February. Now you know how desperately I dislike January.
At least in February, I can observe the days lengthening, tap the trees, and boil maple syrup. Admittedly, it sounds rather desperate, too. But for all that I hear from New England expatriates who ask after how deep the snow was around the maples when I tapped, how much syrup I got, and when the buds finally broke open in.

Yes, it’s true. There are days that I’d grab a reticule string bag, stuff it full of summer clothes, and head of for the Caribean. But being my friends already left for nicer weather, who’d I email for what day the sugaring started in the sugarbush. How’d I learn when the first sugar snap peas went into the garden? And on what date in April did the last snow in the mall parking lot disappear?

Yes, I know that my colleagues in Canada are sneering at these complaints. But come on, admit it. You hate January too!

Maybe this is the year I’ll do some of those early in the water boat shows in Florida. Then, I’ll return in time to tap the maples and just snowbird January away. Reading the catalogs can wait.

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Rules

When I taught media and television production to seventh and eighth graders, I always insisted that being a bit juvenile was OK. Rather than being a curriculum and text-based course, I taught the subject as an enrichment. Every couple of weeks, there was a new project. Included was a scriptwriting workshop, storyboarding, planning the shots, and walk-throughs of the action. Along the way, technical aspects of editing or camera work got addressed. To make this work, because there was a lot of work involved, it also had to be play.
We did many silly videos while learning essential technical skills that made them good television. There was no magical zap and, it’s done. My goal was to maintain the freshness of a “beginner’s mind” while instilling the technical skills needed to produce polished work. Over a school year, the objective was to give students the necessary skills to make them successful and creative.
The goal was to give them skills in service to creativity instead of creativity hobbled by didactic skills.

OK, I had trouble in school with teachers insisting that there was only one way to do things. It took years to remove the shackles. That is why I am adamant about maintaining a bit of childishness in creating. It acts as a check on goading people into doing things one way. It helps encourage people to blow rules out of the water and learn to skate on the edge of the abyss. Yes, you create some lousy work. But you learn from the poor work and do something else. Next time you get it right.
I carve for fun and profit. The skills I’ve gained are in my service. The rendering I begin a carving with is just that, the beginning. After I start, my child sees what fun can be had with the tools and the wood.

Don’t let rules hobble you. As an old saying goes – they are made to be broken.

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Trash

As a child, you learn that having parts left over after reassembling something is not good. Among your spares lies something integral to the function of the whole, and gone are the days when you could sweep up all the parts and take them to some neighborhood fix-it shop. At the fix-it shop, you could defer the tasks of making something work onto the shoulders of someone who was mechanically talented. Not so anymore.

Tried to find a cobbler recently? There may be one five towns over, but the question will be, is it repairable? Many shoes and boots are made to be disposable. The shoe repair person looks at them and offers to dispose of them for you. One place I went to last year carried a line of repairable, well-made shoes. They were about twice the cost of what you have on your feet now.

In a twist on the repairability of new products, my new bandsaw is made in China by an American company. It is pretty much entirely rebuildable by the owner with relatively modest mechanical skills. So a repairable product is possible.

I hear so many complain bitterly about the poor quality of imported goods. But many of the things I own are made abroad and are well made.

I worked for many years for UPS. One of our frequently used statements about quality control was, “what you accept is what you’ll get.” If your company manufactures goods and has low-quality control standards, then that’s what you’ll always get; shoddy goods. Please note that I didn’t specify where the goods get made; shoddy “made in America” is still shoddy.

I don’t blame the foreign worker or factory when quality control is absent. I blame the company that contracted for the goods and wasn’t concerned about quality. They were more interested in a year-end bonus’ that could be generated by cutting costs by two percent. The executives may be motivated more by the bubbly they drink at the holiday party and less about the goods they sell or the service they offer.

I suggest that we pay less attention to where an item was made, but I spend lots of attention on product reviews. And there are reviews of almost anything you want to buy in multiples. Although you have to be careful of paid-for-play reviews, you can gather lots of information by looking at percentages and the minor caveats in even the best reviews. Just start by typing ” best__________” and start throwing out those that are apparent advertisements—buying a durable good? Some sites review washers, dryers, and such.

We don’t have to be victims of companies that sell trash. More poorly manufactured stuff is out there, but reciprocally it’s easier to research products now than it ever was before.

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Character

Working for someone whose sense of humor is caustic, if it exists, eventually wears. Even the most cheerful good morning gets met by a humph, and a cloud of smoke from the Camel cigarettes he smokes. Ultimately, you wish to coil a rope around his neck and kick him off a high building – “it was a self-defense officer. I was sure to die either from smoke poisoning or malice.”

That’s what it was like to work for the “gentleman” I call Joltin’ Joe. Meeting his wife and son in the parking lot one day, I tried to make polite conversation. But, unfortunately, Joe came up in the discussion, and they asked that I not try to be polite – they hated him too.

Joe was the sort who liked to put obstacles out for you to stumble over. Then, he’d determine that you were incompetent, a slacker, or both. If you failed to meet his expectations, the obstacles got made harder; how dare you foil him? Be persistent in your obstinant obstructionism, and he’d start fuming. OK, now you need to understand that I am literal about the fuming bit. He’d chain-smoke the Camels so that he became enclosed in a foul cloud of smoke. The angrier he became, the fouler the cloud.

The small city we worked in was famous for its several universities and colleges. So it was not unusual that if the library decided to have a local authors series, they’d get truly prominent authors. Margery, the assistant director, loved to host these series, and she ran at least on a year – no repeats on authors either. One year she landed a prominent author who had just published a fictional work on coastal Maine. Rather than another dull presentation by the author, he suggested an informal colloquium of people to discuss the book. Margery thought this would be interesting and started planning it.
In Massachusetts, you find any number of people who spend summers in Maine, have a cottage and regularly descend on the locals for a week or two. Margery’s problem was that the author requested that she find someone to add to the mix with an academic background in writing or studying the coast. But, of course, this needed to be done without fulminating academics. After all, this was a “patty cake” presentation, not an academic brawl.

Margery recalled that I had done fieldwork in coastal Maine, had written on the subject but was not an academic. Perfect.

The event went smoothly and was very enjoyable. The author “summered” just two towns away from where I had been and kept his boat at Spinney’s yard. As a result, we formed a sort of insiders bond. As things were wrapping up, someone in the audience posed the question, “Where do you find the source material for your characters?” The author smiled and thought about the answer. “Well, bad actors are easy. Remember, if you’re nasty and rude to a writer, they have the means to immortalize your idiot behavior for a much larger audience than you ever imagined. So be careful what you say or do.”

Through this presentation, Joe had been using his eyes to toss daggers at me. He was unhappy that I had gotten included in the program and angrier still that the author had acknowledged me. Smoking was not allowed in the meeting room, but you could still smell the stench of stale tobacco smoke about him.

I decided to take the advice seriously that had been casually offered. So, scrambling for a pen and paper, I began a character sketch of Joltin’ Joe in all his smoke-wreathed glory. It was going to be stupendous!

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Transposition

I’ve frequently been accused of being less than jovial, but not quite irascible. One friend from Brooklyn has advised me that it derives from being a New Yorker. Mindful that this is a trait he seems to share with me, he distracts the conversation before it descends into an unfair comparison of Manhattenite versus Brooklynite.
Manhattan, or Brooklyn against any other borough of the City, is always a fun game. But fun game or not, the game of comparing one borough against the other eventually becomes an argument.
Of course, Staten Island almost always loses out. Habitues of both Manhatten and Brooklyn agree that Staten Island is a part of Jersey.

The mystery of this conversation is that the two of us put our membership in the New York City collaborative behind us well over half a century ago. We both shot out of the cannon’s mouth on our way to New England. In the passing years, we’ve grown, and the “New York” in us has settled into the background.
But the two halves of a critical mass meet when we get together, on the phone or in person, and the chain reaction starts.
We only met and became friends in the nineties. However, despite growing up in a vast city and not knowing each other, we occupied Greenwich Village simultaneously, knew the same people, had similar experiences, and haunted identical places like the Minetta Tavern and Cafe Rienzi.
So during one of our Christmas conversations, don’t stand too close, or you could find yourself shivering on the corner of MacDougall and Bleeker on a cold winter evening while the two of us yammer on about associates who were making it.
Be kind. If you happen upon this temporal/spatial transposition cranking up like Doctor Who’s Tardis in need of a tune-up, separate us. To us, it might seem like a big elaborate present all tied up with a bow – we would be home. But if you get caught in the backdraft and find yourself with us in the Village, I advise that you stay close, follow us, and after the last gig is over and the bars close, we’ll drop you off on our way to the all-night deli with the best bagels in the City.

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A Christmas Caper

The snowshoes are parked in front of the cabin for the photo. It’s a memento of a previous Christmas spent on the coast of Maine. Inside the house sat the perfect little Christmas tree the family had hunted throughout the woodlot for; hours spent tracking through the snow. The snowshoes were finally getting good use in the deep show of a cold Maine winter.

The family decorated the tree. Then, as each ornament emerged from the box, a story unfolded about a past Christmas. The bells bought at a church Christmas Fair, and the little Santa hanging from the lowest bough. The tree was decorated, at last, with gifts around the base. Finally, the family headed to bed.

It was quiet. No din of family chatter. Just the peace of an eve ending and a Christmas Morning preparing to dawn.

What was that rustling in the corner? a Christmas elf? Santa?
Why was it attired from tufted ear tip to tip of the beringed tail in gray? Wait, was it? Could it be? Heigh-ho hey, it was the gray marauder! Yes, it was the gray destroyer creeping up on the tree. His objective? The fat furry one swinging temptingly from the lowest bough and saucily daring the Grey Menace to carry him away in captivity to the dark recesses under his father’s bed. The slinking progress along the floor did not alert the fat one in red to his imminent danger. The hunt itself should be facile. It had to be achieved without disturbing those tattletale bells above.
A fast jump, a grab, a single abortive jingle, and Santa was his! Now away to the lair with his captive. Another Christmas Eve Caper pulled off with perfection!

“Georgia? didn’t you put Santa on the lowest bough last night?”, “Yes, Daddy, I did.”, “Are you sure? He’s not there now.” The Grey Menace watches the fun from under the couch as the grim search for Santa ensues. Then he notices his dad, the one these people call Wes, looking at him with suspicion. Was the jig up? The Gray Menace lashes his tail in frustration. No! dad pulls Santa from under the bed, walks into the living room, and secretly drops him into the empty box of ornaments.

“Hey, Georgia? Here he is! You must have just thought you put him up.” Georgia starts to protest but stops and places Santa back in his place. The Menace decides that the look of confusion that crossed her face was almost as good as an hour-long search for Santa.

Well, maybe better. The bows, ribbons, paper, and boxes of Christmas morning are a lot of fun. And it beats being put in the bedroom while the presents get unwrapped, like last year. Baby Jesus hadn’t minded getting stolen from the nativity scene.

Humans take this stuff way too seriously.

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Sympathy

The Devil walks around primarily ignored and doesn’t care. Go ahead. Disparage, deprecate, dismiss or vilipend all you wish. He, or she, shrugs the shoulders and carries on. It’s even doubtful that you’d recognize the Devil. Those cloven hoofs, horns, and tails are so right out of the middle ages anyway.
Nope, remember that old saying that the Devil quotes scripture to his own needs? Well, these days, all the Devil needs to do is type on his cell phone, and Twitter or Facebook does the rest.

It’s gotten so bad that the head of Hades is thinking of making the Devils take some of that “use or lose” vacation time. It’s been accumulating since the Fall. So what do you do if you are a sixty-hour-a-week demon? You have no social skills; all you do all week is ruin other people’s lives. So what the hell do you put on your profile at a dating site? Enjoys the company of sociopathic individuals? Objective: having a wonderful time spreading misery?

So you see the problem? So they finally get some time off and spend it all in therapy because of some weird Pax Satanica with social media?

Who would have ever suspected! The Devil rendered redundant, made obsolescent, and unemployable because of Hi-Tech?

Please. Can we get a little sympathy for the Devil?

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Illicit

The word illicit implies something more than a bit dodgy. Something that is definitely not wrapped in holy unction and available only at church. The illicit in life lurks on a dark street corner and whispers, “pssst, hey you. Over here.”

Everyone should at least toy with the illicit once in a while. It gives you perspective in life, makes you a more interesting conversationalist at gatherings, and allows you to say to those who are innocent of original sin -“hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

Danger lurks for those too eager or enthusiastic in adopting alternatives to the staid. In specific nomadic communities, guideposts are set out to indicate the presence of watering spots in the desert. Eventually, you come to one that is specially marked. It’s the final one; no water beyond this point. You travel beyond the guideposts at your own risk. Will you have enough water to last through the long passage to the other side?

I joke about toying with the illicit only because I nibbled about its edges. I encourage cautious experimentation, not overindulgence. How do I know? I’ve been shot at, experimented with substances I should not have, and run for my life. To use an expression popular with the old Mountain Men – “I’ve gone to see the varmint.”

Allow your toes to become dampened by the wild sides’ tide. It can be an enriching experience. But remember, there are no lifeguards at this particular beach, and swimming here is risky business.