things to be thankful for

so, another thanksgiving ... the 41st for kit and i, and we have a lot to be thankful for ..
1. each other ... 40 years ... how could they go by so fast ??
2. our two kids and their girlfriends ..
2.5 our respective families of aunts, uncles and cousins ...
3. the fact that both our boys work here everyday and we get to have lunch with them, and then they go home to their own places ..
3.5. our 3 non family employees whose skill, happy attitudes and dedication we hugely appreciate.
4. a nice place to live and work, in a fantastic small town, with no traffic lights, in vermont
5. our furniture and metal clients and kits jewelry and gardening clients who make this all possible
6. the friends we have been hanging out with since the 1970s, and the new ones who have come to town since.
7. an incredible community of supportive and sharing artists around us
like someone who gets an oscar, i could go on and on but i feel like i should just stop with the highlights ... happy thanksgiving to you and yours ... dan
the traditional share the burner turkey day woodburning event ..
dinner ... just the six of us
the pre thanksgiving event at kits fathers house last saturday ... about 20 aunts, uncles and cousins ..
mini concert for grandpa

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four years of blogging

well, what to make of four years of sporadic writing? im not famous, im not richer, except in the experience of writing, at which i have gotten vastly more comfortable as a process, and i still dont really understand exactly why i do it. part of it is for my boys, sam and will, who if they want to continue this business will have a visual and verbal record of our processes: the processes of design, visualization, method discovery and a written record of how we built stuff to go with it. i also enjoy the comments and interactions with my readers, and the surprising amount of new work that we get that is a direct result of our blog and website. for the first time this year, slightly more than half of our new work came from the internet rather than from our existing client base. i think its the stories and the visual depiction of the pieces, from drawing to completion, that validate what we do. click the stuff below to see the statistics ...
and, people read the thing ... people i dont know ... (395,000 page views? hard to imagine)
from places ill never visit ... ( 168 countries? who knew? ) spreading the word ... make something .... wood, metal, pottery, art, jewelry ... the process is the same and the rewards are the same. a psychological bonus we dont often get from paying bills, shuffling papers or raking the yard. its been great ! thanks for reading; feel free to comment or question ... 500+ posts down (wow, if i do say so myself) more to come ... enjoy ... for other anniversary posts, visit this one from last year with links to the others ... check it out ..

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Busy Week Lots going on except blogging

Its been a very busy week here at the Penultimate Woodshop. The laundry list of activities which have been taking up all my time include milling four new kitchen door saddles from scratch, flattening the sole of the Stanley #4 I recently picked up, mounting a dehumidifier to permanently drain into the houses plumbing, buying the rights to my sites name (now to learn to use it), beginning to track down babysitting for while Im at WIA and designing some Penultimate Woodshop T-shirts.
With the notable exception of the dehumidifier none of those tasks are 100% complete, but I have taken heart in pushing all of them forward quite a bit.
As Im doing my best to post regularly (trying for once a week) Im sorry if there is the occasional post such as this one that serves more as a status update than actual blog post. I will do my share to fill the intrawebs with woodworking errata, just not this week.
Whats been taking up all your time lately?
Written with blogachoice on android.

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