Half a year of wood-working

Well, maybe 2/3. Or even 3/4. I'm not sure where/when I got a bug about working with wood. The first obvious notes I see in my journal are from August, 2020. The floor to my office had been cluttered up with books for long enough that Laura asked whether I was ever going to do anything about them. That made me decide that I want to. It also made me admit that it might take a while, because I had (and still have) a lot to learn. It's something that's been percolating in my mind since I was a little kid. My dad spent most of his spare time puttering around in our garage, building something.I've done little bits and pieces since then, but most of what he taught me never clicked. Last year was almost a black hole in terms of what I remember about my job. My relationship with Mal has grown exponentially since then, and that's far more important than anything about my career. But I was thinking about this thing that probably happened in February. But it couldn't have happened in Feb 2021. That was during the ice storm. During Feb 2020, I was still flipping over and starting to get used to being on a new team at the day job. So this conversation probably happened back around Feb, 2019. Our group at our day job decided to have its quarterly hype meeting at one office. We were based in another, at the same campus. There's a shuttle that circulates, but it starts at that one, picks up people at ours, cycles through at least a couple of others, and eventually works its way back to that starting point. We were young and arrogant. We wouldn't have waited even if it had been direct. We just decided to walk. We wound up walking our way around several gigantic holes in the ground. In hindsight, this was great fun. Actually, it seemed like good clean fun while we were wandering through all these holes in the ground. While we were working our way through these obstacles, my co-worker talked about his plans to build a new desk. That re-lit a fire inside me. I grew up with a father who was always building things. I spent a lot of my childhood resenting a lot of the details behind the way those things were build. I wasted a lot of emotional anguish over really basic facts. Like the fundamental idea that a rectilinear structure can possibly be strong, when it's easy to shave off edges and add support. Or that it's worth pre-drilling holes for the screws. I like to think that I've learned a lot and grown since then. I think that that conversation may have been a turning point in my life.