Day 16: Carving Out a Future.

I woke up this morning at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep until 5. Then I got up for real at 7. I let the boys in and gave them food and had a nice breakfast of grapes, a banana, and an apple. Then I let George in for good before I left. Bodhi stays or not.

Val tells me the boys are fine at home. They both enjoy sitting on the sill. Every time I call and Val puts me on speaker phone or we Skype Andre hears my voice and comes over to say hello. He's a good boy.

We were both a bit quiet at breakfast, but once we got warmed up we talked about--you guessed it--love and life and time and its convolution and authors and poems. You know, breakfast talk.

Dwain told me to look up In Flanders Field by John McCrae, a Canadian physician and Colonel in their army.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

      Between the crosses, row on row,

   That mark our place; and in the sky

   The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

   Loved and were loved, and now we lie

         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

   The torch; be yours to hold it high.

   If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

         In Flanders fields.

The legend says that he wrote it and threw it away, and that some others retrieved it. Maybe he discarded it because of its romanticism towards war. McCrae was promoted and named Consulting Physician to the British Armies in France. By 1918 he was said to have been worn down by the war and died of meningitis while in France. 

He wrote this to his mom: "For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds.... And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way."

I doubt they used these lines on any propaganda posters to get people to support war!

War sucks.

And then we went to work.

I did a two more book matched ends, and I prepared two more sets for Dwain to do tonight because he is going to be working late. He didn't like a couple of things on the Grand that he just varnished, so he took the varnish off of the top and is redoing that. The work that goes into these is amazing and inspiring.

Then I got to go into the secret room below! I'd seen the handle and mentioned it once, but Dwain was not forthcoming about the secrets that lived below. And the monster turned out to be a drum sander that Walt and his son built from a kit. Walt stopped building in the early 90s, so that tells you about how old it is. But it works like a charm.

There have been times where Dwain would use a tool and say that this is from Walt. We are only in week 3, and I don't want to rush through my life or push Dwain through his, but my little heart went a twitter thinking that someday I'll be doing the same thing.

Today I asked Dwain how he numbered each instrument. Aside here: he marks each piece of the instrument with its number. So Dwain told me that he started with 1001 because Walt stopped at 1000. That led us to talk about my system, and what was decided is that I will start with 1. And then when Dwain is done building I'll switch to whatever he stops at plus 1 because I'll keep the tradition going. A twitter my heart went again!

So I had to feed my stack of redwood through the beast. There is a process. I had to sand the least flat side of the wood through three times, and then I had to turn it over and sand the other side until the boards were at 1.00, or 1/100 of an inch. I had no more than a .10 variance on each board! WooHoo! So they are ready to be planed down further.

Once I finished that we had our watermelon break without any watermelon, though. Instead we had mango with cottage cheese and wheat crackers. I love all three of these things! And Dwain makes a great iced tea, where he cooks up the water and puts it in a pot with some tea to steep. Then he pours it all over a glass filled with ice and sprinkled with sugar. I don't have a picture of any of that because I was too excited!

Then I went back to work making enough scrapers to fin in my newly constructed scraper holder. I was having trouble shaping the flexible one, and Dwain spent some time helping me with that. I get the concept, but the practice was a bit tougher.

Okay, so it is always safe to take a picture with one hand while grinding metal on a grinding stone. Really. It's so safe.

Dwain has three orders at various stages of done. The Grand should be ready to finish putting together tomorrow, and he is just starting to carve the scroll head for another machine. This is really interesting and exciting for me because I've never done anything like this. Ever. I don't think I get to on my first machine, either, but I'll get to sooner rather than later!