Action… the path to success!

“The path to success is to take massive, determined actions.” -Tony Robbins

When things stall out or feel like they need shaking up, I seem to be programmed to action. Perhaps it’s my nature, something born into me that was passed through long genetic lines that led my ancestors to find themselves on the shores of a particularly beautiful but stark bit of rock in the North Atlantic questioning the decisions that had led them there. Maybe it’s nurture, something inspired from my mother’s story of leaving America behind to seek her own adventure in Nova Scotia or the same fuel that impelled my father to chainsaw the window out of the side of our livingroom in the name of “redecoration” and “well, it needed to be done” moments before his parents arrived for an evening meal. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it’s always well intended.

“Be content to act and leave the talking to others." -Baltasar Gracian

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as inclined to the trap of inaction as the next person. Sometimes there’s just so many things that need to be done that the circuit board gets overwhelmed and the only solution seems to be a bit of staring at the wall, perhaps reading a few paragraphs from a book randomly pulled from a shelf whilst standing on the way to…somewhere? Surely it’s time I properly folded all of my underpants and arranged them alphabetically by colour? Procrastination is real but I also love work and sometimes simple tangible tasks can really help to blow the smoke out of the bigger, overarching things that we have less power to control.

“People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.” -Lewis Cass

I’m not at all stalled out on my workshop, or art projects, or commissions… but the ground can feel uneven these days and with so much on the plate it can feel hard to find footing to really push against. But today was a day that demanded blowing out the smoke. Today was Monday, we began the day an hour early to our daily session at the gym and lifted heavy and left feeling on top of things, with the day stretching before us and lots of opportunity to really get after it. With a new commission in the pipeline that I’m feeling excited about, I felt determined to get the materials needed to assemble the bench that I will use for both drafting and glueups. This meant borrowing Chris’ truck and trailer but they had been loaded with old particle board furniture and bits and bobs from the barn destined for the dump a few days ago. No problem! A dump run is absolutely the type of gift I give my sweetheart. That way he doesn’t have to do it. I can drive a trailer pretty well and can heft things about very handily and knew that Chris was looking forward to having the house quiet so he could work. So I got the truck, hitched up the trailer, and off I went.

“Let your performance do the thinking.” -Charlotte Brontë

So, a little history. Long ago, in a relationship far far away, I was married to someone who I knew hated doing lathe and plaster demolition. We were in the process of buying a very old (on the razors edge of being condemned) building which we had agreed to live in and renovate together as a bid for a brighter financial future. While he was on the west coast visiting family, I thought it would be an incredibly sweet gesture if I did all of the lathe and plaster demolition before he got back. And I did. I rented a drop box, hired a few palookas from Craigslist to help me swing the flat bar, and led them in a full assault. I demolished two floors of this building down to the studs. When my husband returned to his exhausted and dusty wife standing proudly in the rubble of the house that we had not yet actually officially purchased… ahem. Well… the gesture was a bit rash on my part.

“Well done is better than well said.” - Benjamin Franklin

I returned to the house late this afternoon having done two trips to the dump, purchased my bench materials and loaded them into the barn, addressed a few irritating beurocratic tediums like changing my cell phone service and drivers license over to Nova Scotia and was delighted to find my sweetheart pleased with his own afternoon and with my actions. In sharing the account of my comings and goings whilst cuddled on the couch, he asked where I had put the sails that had been at the back of the trailer.

“God provides the wind but man must raise the sails.” -Saint Augustine

If you’ve ever dated a Round-the-World sailor, you might start to notice that they have lots of very specific stuff. Stuff that may all look alike to you, say, if they had shown you a sail that was garbage to be thrown out, you might not have thought much of the difference between that and something called a Code Zero… the difference between trash and a sail worth 21 thousand dollars. You might even have found yourself innocently tossing said bundle costing 21k bananas into a dumpster at a local transfer station with a light heart. You also may have had the conversation with yourself about how extraordinary and brave this person must be to have faced the months at sea and the dangers entailed… but you’re never going to be more impressed than I was today at the epic self restraint I witnessed as my sweet, fiery, ginger contained himself through emotional convolutions that have given me an entirely new respect for the energy one suit of human skin is able to contain.

“Action is the antidote to despair” -Joan Baez

Tomorrow morning you will find me praying to all available deities. Tomorrow morning you will find me at the dump with heart in mouth ready to dive into whatever pile is necessary. Tomorrow morning you will find me ready to exert whatever forces needed. But for now, I think there has been enough action for one day.

Antiques Roadshow Meets SpaceX

Kitting out my woodworking studio is a bit of a collision of worlds. Certainly not every woodworker will encounter this exact sensation as folks tend to toggle themselves further to the left or right of the center lines that represent technology and tradition. If you go into a modern cabinetry shop or a large scale furniture operation these days you’re going to encounter a lot of computers. Design programs, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Machines, etc… it’s a high tech world that creates so much of the materials that we fill our homes with and there are incredible benefits to having this technology… which I don’t need to tell you. We all enjoy the benefits of the technological world we live in. But when it comes to creating pieces that are intended to be unique pieces of art and carefully considered demonstrations of craftsmanship we can see and feel very quickly the difference, even in a high quality piece. There is perfection in a piece that has been mapped out on software in several axis and cut with inhuman precision… a perfection that is sometimes just a little bit… too perfect? I can only speak for myself but I miss the chaos. I miss the tiny imperfections or variances that come from something having been cut by hand with a tool that was sharpened by hand. Also the beautiful mistakes! The slip that forced you to problem solve a practical fix that led to an aesthetic choice you would not have otherwise discovered and which, sometimes, are your favourite designs (they often are for me). On the flip side, there are certainly purists who believe in the craft to the point of rebelling against any technological leverage, using only hand tools for every step of their process. I can appreciate the sentiment and have certainly gone through processes that many would consider exercises in futility or simply foolish but I am awfully fond of the miracle of a helical head jointer and the glory of seeing a rough and unremarkable piece of lumber turn into a thing of beauty, revealing her grain like a geode cracked open. Balance in all things, I suppose.

Sourcing all the various elements needed and desired for my studio here has involved a lot of back and forth (see last post “Jointers are like Epsom Salts”). The last several weeks have been focused on machines. Jointers with just the right helical heads, tablesaws that will stop themselves the instant they sense human skin and leave a scratch rather than a gaping wound (a subject close to my heart and my 7 remaining unscathed fingers… a story for another time, perhaps). In an energetic 180, this week I had the pleasure of shopping in my brother’s barn. Nova Scotia is an old place and barns are either junkyards or caves of wonder depending only upon the eyes which you use to see them through. The man who had lived in my brother’s home previously was a woodworker as so many folks are to one degree or another and so the promise of clamps (simple but expensive tools which any woodworker knows you need lots of) had me excited to dig about and see what else we could find. My brother is a very skilled man and knows a hell of a lot more than I do about many things but, lucky for me, he’s not into fine woodworking… he’s a Marine Engineer. So where I fall short on welding (or, really, any metal work at all) and the mechanical side of things, I have the market cornered in our family for doing pretty things with wood and, therefore, any tools that fall under that header.

We began our shed tour with a peek into the seized up parts of the tractor which he had disassembled for entertainment on his time home from sea but then began to dig deeper into old shelves and drawers. He would pull out bits and pieces and casually shrug saying things to the effect of “I don’t know what this thing is but if you want it…” Tag lines of this sort accompanied beautifully crafted mortising gauges, finish nail drivers, a shoulder (rabbetting) plane, a router plane… piece after piece of slightly dirty and entirely quality useable handtools. Things I had hummed and hawed over at various moments in time considering what I needed most and what I should prioritize to the “later down the road” wishlist. It was the best Christmas I’ve ever had in February (topped off with being fed a damn fine meal)… you can’t buy that at Lee Valley.

Being the dichotic creature that I am, this swinging pendulum form of balance did feel awfully nice. I’m not a luddite but I’m feeling very excited to get out some stones and spend some hours in meditation bringing a shine and a burr back to these blades. It’s a soothing break from the roar of the machines.

Jointers are Like Epsom Salts

I was raised to be a person of action. This was then reinforced by a career where you were either entirely responsible for motivating your own training or needed to be on top of and on time for rehearsals, shows, set ups, tear downs, planes, trains, and automobiles… so I’m pretty ready to get my hands dirty whenever needed/ appropriate. Fast forward to this new beginning where I need to take my clunky old tool set and get it tuned in and tuned up to produce art that is both beautiful and functional. This is no small feat and there’s no question that many dirty jobs stand between myself and getting to put blade to hardwood once more. But before I can do any of it… computers. Website. Research. Books. Budget. What tools do I have and what do I need? What can I get by with and what can’t I live without? Can I even get these things in Nova Scotia? Funny thing that I’ve found in my years of living between countries is that everything is possible but sometimes the things you take for granted are not as obvious as you would have thought. I held off on buying some tools which I favoured while still stateside because traveling around with 180kg of jointer seemed unnecessary if I planned to buy it new anyways. Not that you cannot buy jointers in Canada but many of the machines I have known and am familiar with are simply not available up here. Powermatic doesn’t exist. I got a nice fellow on the phone at Powermatic in Halifax asking about where I could purchase a helical head jointer and he asked me sweetly what that was… turns out “Powrmatic” up here is a company that sells HVAC systems. Now I know.

This funnily takes me back to living in Paris. I wasn’t trying to buy a jointer at the time but, rather, Epsom salts. We were running our show at Theatre Bobino in the 14th Arrondisement and were often sharing the stage with 3 other shows. This meant that we had some pretty high pressure set changes, especially on Saturdays where the day would begin with a rather full-on production of Peter Pan. We would stand at the ready as Fée Clochette (Tinkerbell) and Capitaine Crochet were singing their hearts out until the curtain was dropped and everything upstage became a beehive of technicians and acrobats readying the next show. We had 30 minutes before the curtain went up on our own show and once it was done we had to immediately strike it to allow the Polish MozART string quartet to take the stage and once they were done? We set up for our second run of the day. Each set up and strike required me to rig the Chinese Pole (an acrobatic act you should check out sometime if you’re unfamiliar) and attach/ detach it from the truss it was connected to. I could climb the pole no problem but to actually manipulate tools I needed to be in harness. The only way to pull this off quickly was for me to be suspended from a lighting bar and lifted to the top of the truss. Any individual go round wasn’t the end of the world but several times a day for months on end in harness with the weight of my legs just hanging unsupported on top of everything else I was asking of my body was making for some very unhappy hips. Thus begins the seemingly innocent quest for epsom salts. Innocuous and ordinary in North America we’re accustomed to filling our baths with epsom salts to ease strained muscles but in France this was completely unheard of. I enjoyed a tour of several districts worth of Parisian Pharmacies, groceries, and cosmetic shops until I had to admit defeat. The solution was, of course, that I had to just take up a few kilos of a friend’s suitcase when she came to visit me from America with bags of Epsom Salts. I’m certain that customs would have raised an eyebrow but there’s nothing explicitly wrong with carrying kilos of magnesium salts around… it just looks kindof weird.

So here I am. See previous comment regarding the weight of a jointer to remind yourself why none of my friends are going to be bringing me one in their luggage (although I have pretty epic folks in my life so it’s not entirely out of the question). In the meantime, reality says I must revise my searches and my mindset to unfamiliar products. Stay tuned for a review of my Canadian jointer as this all comes down the pipeline! We’ll see what I end up with and certainly it never hurts to open one’s mind to new options.

A Fresh Start on an Old Frontier

Beginning a blog feels like beginning a new life with a new relationship and a new career… where does one begin? As no place is actually any better than any other, let’s start… here.

There’s temptation to try to fill in the backstory that leaves me standing in an old barn on the South Shore of Nova Scotia in February, after unloading a 26’ Uhaul truck that I’ve just driven over a 24 hour period across an international border in one hell of a winter storm during a global pandemic… but it seems like that might be making it too easy. Clearly, all signs indicate that I’m someone with an appreciation for doing things the hard way.

This is to be my studio, my workshop, my space of creation. And it’s a damn fine one, to be honest. Okay, she looks like she could use some love but that’s coming and the space that is transforming into a furniture studio is evocative of my formative years here in Nova Scotia. The old silvered wood reminds me of feeding our goats as a child, the hay loft with it’s tiny floating dust particles reminds me of the way cigarette smoke curls through undisturbed air when you’re enjoying the thrill of the forbidden as a teenager, and the view of the North Atlantic and, at night, the blink of Ironbound’s lighthouse in the distance, 3 seconds on 3 seconds off, is the beacon that calls you home. My family is from the island of East Ironbound, named for the iron pyrite (fool’s gold) that glitters in every dark stone on the shore and reddens the water in the wells. This is a full circle moment. It’s been almost 20 years since I left Nova Scotia to pursue adventure in the form of a rather exciting life as a circus performer. I’ve lived all over the world and have loved so many places and cultures that I have had the fortune to experience but it does feel like perhaps all that iron I consumed growing up has magnetized me back to this place. I write this sitting some 7km down the road from the place of my birth, my Mom is just an hour inland, my brother just down the coast, and I’m a short drive from the stone where my father lies, along with the older generation of Ironbounders.

I have so much work to do but the foundation is already built and it’s a solid one. Stay tuned. One could grow tall with roots like this.