A find of not-so-epic proportions...

This past weekend, my wife and I visited my great Aunt Edy over in Illinois. She it truly an amazing woman; she doesn't know the meaning of the word "rest". She normally walks about five miles a day; pretty remarkable for someone in her late 70's. And if she knows she won't be able to walk her required five miles on a particular day, she'll make up for it on the day before!

She was concerned our visit would interfere with her routine, so before we showed up (at an early 8:30 a.m. on the dot, thank you very much), she'd already walked three miles, figuring she could get the other two in after we left.

At some point in time, I'll have to devote a whole entry (or two or three) to Great Aunt Edy...

The purpose of our trip, in addition to the visit, was to make our first (hopefully of many) sojourn to the Belleville Flea Market at the Belle Claire Expo Center. We'd heard a lot of good things about it, and from the way Aunt Edy talked to some of the dealers, she's been there many times before.

It wasn't really how I expected it to be - I guess my expectations of flea markets are disproportionately high... in any case, we had a lot of fun. My wife recently started getting into collecting cut glass and she had a great teacher in Aunt Edy (who has a china cabinet full of it!). She taught us what to look for and the easiest way to check for cracks and when a few minor chips doesn't reduce the value very much at all (when the piece is signed).

I enjoyed the discourse, but was slightly more interested in other wares - hand tools! To be honest with you, I thought the pickings were quite slim, as far as flea markets go. I did find a fairly nice Stanley #5 in good user condition. I chuckled as I disassembled the plane, checking the various parts out for defects - the blade was set bevel-side up!

When I assembled it again, I put it together properly; my OCD would not have it any other way. The handles were crisp and tight and the Victory blade had a lot of life left in it. It wasn't priced terribly high, at $27, and I was sure I could talk him down some, but I thought back to the pre-WWI #5 I have sitting at home, waiting for me to restore it, and I decided to pass. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have. I could have fixed it up and given it to my best friend or one of my woodworking friends... I probably won't pass up the next one I find like that.

I did not, however, pass on a nice little piece I thought I'd share with you. It was in the $1 box, so I didn't feel right trying to talk them down any. It is a hand tool, but not the usual kind one keeps an eye out for, I suppose. Here's a picture of it in the untouched state...















Not much to look at, is it? Give me a few minutes with some mineral spirits and a green scotchbrite pad, though, and see what you think after that.















Take a closer look at the handle. That isn't plastic, my dear big-box-shopping-friends! Looks like rosewood to me. And now check out the metal in this close-up.

The blade, the ferrule and the tang are all one piece of metal, riveted to the rosewood handle with brass pins. In this picture, you can also see a small band of sapwood on the end of the handle. It actually has a maker's mark on it, too! It says, " G. L. & CO. CHICAGO" on one side of the blade. Google didn't come up with anything on it, yet, but I'll keep an eye out.

The blade is really thick and hefty; I wonder if I might be able to file a nice clean flat edge on it and sharpen it up like a scraper. I could use it to clean up the insides of boxes or tight corners, maybe? It feels like it could really hold a hook, though.

I'll have to post something about it if and when I give it a try!

Aunt Edy kept apologizing to me; she felt badly that I didn't find anything other than an ordinary paint scraper! I don't know... a rosewood handled paint scraper with an integral tang? It might not be the find of the Century, but in our world of plastic and poor quality, I'd call that anything but ordinary...

Famous Last Words

What do the following things have in common?
- Hanging curtains in the living room and bedroom
- Caulking the baseboard and trim
- Cleaning out the garage
- Replacing the handrail on the stairway
- Assembling my contractor-style tablesaw
- Putting away the Christmas decorations
- Installing the bedroom ceiling fan

In each and every case, just as soon as I finished up the project, I turned to my wife and said, "Huh... that didn't take as long as I thought it would!"

And every time I say it, her response is something like, "You say that every time!"

I know I do! I can't stop myself! I've even realized I'm thinking it as I'm finishing up and I'll make a conscious effort to NOT say that line.

But it never fails. The last few times I've even made the dramatic gesture of slapping my hand over my mouth right as I finished the last word.

(I wouldn't recommend doing that, by the way. It just makes you look even more foolish.)

Unfortunately, that statement also opens me up for the "Why didn't you do it sooner, then?" conversation. I HATE that one - mostly because it highlights my amazing ability of procrastination. I can hit a deadline for someone else with no problem, but when it's a personal project, I can put it off like none other!

Well, that is excepting my mom and her taxes. From January through April, my mom is notoriously unavailable for any extraneous activities because she is busy "doing bookkeeping," whatever that means. I've come to the conclusion it mostly just means getting prepared to file her extension.

I'm happy to say that is one thing I am ALWAYS on top of every year. I like to have it completely done by the first of March. We're a little behind this year; we didn't get our Federal refund until just this past Monday. (Yeah, that's a gloat...)

I will relish these next five weeks. Every time I talk to my mom on the phone, I'll be sure to toss in an off-handed comment about how much easier life is when you aren't worrying about deadlines or what we're going to update in the house now that we have a little bit of expendable (spendable?) money.

I still hate walking down the stairs. It is a constant reminder I haven't replaced the cap board yet.

What really bugs me, though, is once I finally do get it done I know I'll say, "Huh... that didn't take as long as I thought it would!"

Deadlines (or lack thereof)

When I agree to a commissioned work, I give the customer hard date deadlines - it's the only way to keep myself on track and not let the project get pushed off.

I use a similar technique for my seasonal part-time proofreading/editing job with American City Business Journals. I tell my boss to give me definite, hard deadlines for editing jobs; otherwise, something more compelling will always come up.

Unfortunately, when I'm dealing with personal projects I don't do that same thing. So every time I walk down the stairs, I get a pang of guilt as I rest my hand on the 58" x 7 7/8" x 3/4" pine board (oh, I know it well...) capping a half wall that I need to replace with a mahogany board to match the hand rail I replaced last year. (Seriously, Ethan, it's just a board! It's not like painting trim! Fix it already!) I'd be less ashamed of myself if I didn't already have the replacement board in the basement.

Whenever I walk into our hearth room, the wimpy (again, pine) mantle on my prominent fireplace reminds me I promised my wife I'd replace it with something more fitting to the house and the room. And then I think about the mantle clock I said I'd make so she wouldn't have to continue her fruitless search for one in the nearby antique stores.

As I cast my eyes downward in shame, they rest upon the transition between floor and wall and I'm reminded of the yards and yards of trim I still need to paint...

Usually about that time, I feel compelled to run outside and stare at something a little less overwhelming, like the mess in the garage. But even then, my thoughts eventually turn to cedar siding and brown caulking and carpenter bee holes and unsealed driveways.

My wife has found me curled up in a ball on the floor more than once. I think I have her convinced it is a modified child's pose...

Random Word: eight

I've decided when I don't have anything to write about that I'll pull up a random word generator and use that for the topic.

What do you know - it works!

When is eight not eight? When it's eight P.M. on the eve of Daylight Savings Time, that's when. At 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, March 8th, 2008, it might as well be 9:00 P.M. because I know I have to go to bed an hour earlier because I have to get up an hour earlier to get to church on time.

Come to think of it, I believe I might have actually lost two hours today. Well, two if you count the number of minutes I've wasted today worrying about making sure I get up earlier tomorrow morning, that is.

I hate the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time. I understand the reason behind it, and I can even see when it was necessary... fifty years ago. But what's the point of it today? Like I don't have enough going on in my life - I need to worry about getting up an hour earlier on some seemingly random Sunday in the spring. (I know there is a method of determining what Sunday it will be - it still seems random, though... might as well be.)

Do they have Daylight Savings Time in Australia? If so, is it the opposite of ours? Are there Australians right now blogging about how they love gaining an extra hour? If so, I hate them.

Focus, Daniel-san!

(Please pardon these first few entries as I get my feet wet...)

I dreaded writing as a kid. Our sixth grade teacher made us keep journals for most of that year. I remember being graded on it, even! How can you grade someone on personal writings? She would give us a half hour or so every day. She would say, "Ok, class, time for some journal writing. Pull out your notebooks and write for the next 20 minutes."

I would sit there for 15 minutes, unable to think of something to write about, and finally end up with a few short paragraphs, usually about how much I hated writing in my journal.

I don't think I hated writing. I just hated writing without direction.

I certainly love it, now. I wonder if I would have picked up on writing earlier than college if she'd simply given us a topic to write about for each journal entry. It didn't have to be anything fancy - just a word; a starting point, really.

I'm still that way. If I were to sit here, in front of a blank screen, and try to write something funny or witty or intellectual, it just wouldn't happen. Not because I'm boring, dull, or stupid, but just because you can't force those things. So in order for this blog to work out, I'm going to need to figure out my shtick; I need to find my focus.

Eh... I guess I'll have to ponder that a little.

Aside from the focus, I do need to have a few guidelines. My first one is to keep my entries short. I have an unbelievable way of writing five page e-mails, full of useless, but completely accurate, crap.

If all this blog does is help me to write more focused and precisely, then I suppose it will have served a good purpose... at least my co-workers would think so.

What's in a name?

It's odd, really. Having been a professional writer for seven years you would think I'd have started a blog long before now.

Ah, well. Better late than never, right?

I'm sure you're wondering where "Grey Stone Green" comes from, right? That term first came up quite some time ago... probably my junior year in high school. A friend of mine, Chris, and I were talking one time, about life and such, and how sometimes it can be so hectic you feel like you're missing things.

We stumbled upon the phrase during that conversation; it was almost like a question and an answer all in one. What does the constantly moving stone look like? Grey. What happens when the constantly moving stone stops moving? It starts getting moss growing on it. Green.

After we came up with the phrase, we spent some time wondering how we'd be able to use it in the future. I think the best we came up with at the time was a great name for a band, but nothing really ever happened. After high school, we went our own ways, as many friends do, and though I've had that phrase pop up in my head several times since then, I've never really talked about it since.

This evening, I found myself creating a blog and I had to come up with a name for it. The very first thing that came to my mind was Grey Stone Green... it seems quite appropriate for a blog title, doesn't it?

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. I'm hoping I can write a bit about some of the key focuses of my life, like my marriage and woodworking and wearing kilts.

At the very least, you shouldn't have to worry about trying to read difficult ramblings. I tend to write clear, concise thoughts and I tend to use proper grammar and punctuation.

Ok, maybe I'll ramble a little every now and again. But it will still be clear. ;)