4 months, yikes

So the story hasn't really changed, but I have managed to squeeze in getting some things done over here, I swear. IPhoto still doesn't work, but this laptop is pretty old, I have to admit, and I can still get pictures off the camera. I just have to treat it as external storage space, and tell IPhoto to go screw every time I plug the camera in. The camera's even older than the laptop, and has been dropped, so it's also on its way out. Anyway, here's some interesting stuff in reverse chronological
order, so that I might not confuse myself.
Most recently, I was just able to come up with a few small things in my first ever attempt to make Christmas presents in the shop. Small slapped together projects, even the simplest kinds, actually take a lot longer than I'd have thought. And I was watching the other guys work on their own last minute gifts, so I know it's not just me being slow. Despite that, I still think it took longer to settle on ideas than to actually make some of these things, because most people I know don't truly need much stuff. Deciding on something is more difficult whether you're making or buying, but I didn't want to spend so many hours on things no one would use, so I spent a lot of time agonizing over what would actually be functional.


This is the only one I got a photo of. It's just a walnut butcher block cutting board with an arch cut out of the bottom, but to collect enough short walnut bits to make a decent sized board took a long time - I thought I had a ton, but in the end it was only enough to make something about 12" square.



I also had this really nice looking but not very functional cherry board I pulled out of the scrap pile earlier this year- it had a lot of sapwood and bark on both sides, and would have needed to be cut down a lot to make anything with 6 flat sides. I didn't want to do that, so it collected dust for a while, but I finally decided to make a small bench and used it for the top. I have a lot of similar bits of scrap that look great but aren't the right size or shape to use for much, unless I can leave the live edges/wane alone. Some people are really into furniture with natural edges like that, but it's not for everyone, I know.


Once upon a time, probably about 12 years ago, some garbage-picking animal - let's say starling- was slumming it on a Tuesday afternoon on Tyler street. Some slob had put out a badly tied trash bag the night before, and by the time the trucks came around, there were smelly, squished food bits all over the side of the road. Starling got his face into a half-eaten asian pear covered in fish sauce before taking off towards home up in Somerville. Somewhere over Leverett Circle, starling's guts decided they weren't gonna put up with that mess, and so he dropped a completely undigested pear seed (among other things) into a patch of weeds on MBTA property. Fast forward to fall 2008, when I'm riding around in that lot with a friend, just to see what we can find, in what is now a half finished public park. The weeds are tall, and include a lot of wild fruit trees, most likely thanks to city birds. The seed that grew into this tree is from an asian pear, but its fruit is very small, about the size of a golf ball. Fruit trees that grow from seed apparently have wildly varying characteristics, which is why most apple orchard trees are grafts on root stock, so the farmers won't have to wait years to find out whether the tree will even bear fruit, never mind how good it'll taste or how bug resistant it'll be. Who knows what this tree's parents looked like, but the small, gritty pears tasted much better than pears usually do. These ended up in more jars next to all the crabapple jelly in my closet. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it was definitely worth the trouble.