Travel is a wonderful thing. As the miles roll by, your mind gets to roaming and telling stories about roadsigns and road warriors. The scenery is the catalyst as your mind makes up details to fill the time.
That's what happened when we passed the exit for Newfoundland on our biannual migration across Pennsylvania. Images from seeing Twelfth Night the night before and reading Martin Eden, transmuted the text of the road sign from Newfoundland to Newfoundlove. From there I imagined a place where people were sent when they diagnosed as being hopelessly in love. You see, in this fictional universe, being madly in love was found to be distracting to accomplishing productive work. So it is a condition to cure. So the town of Newfoundlove is something like a concentration camp where lovers come to have the condition of love mediated into something that is not disruptive to society.
Newfoundlove is an idea I think I'll noodle for a while. I think there is a story in there somewhere and it might be fun to find.
I have this perhaps familiar dilemma: I only have a limited amount of time, I can either use it to exercise or to write.
As a writer, my head is filled with ideas screaming to be made into electrons on my computer. But I have a full time business (not woodcarving) to run. So my time for the 'fun stuff' is limited. I need to exercise: exercise helps banish many ills, depression, for one. Writing helps banish others: insanity for one.
So what do I do with such a choice? Why nothing, of course. I'm overwhelmed with depression and craziness. I'm immobilized.
Well, one way or another, I've decided that I will write and exercise my way out of this. I'm not going to allow myself the opportunity to make a choice of an open slot of time. Rather, I will make these things that I must do for my health and sanity ongoing tasks that simply have to get done. This is going to be my summertime experiment. You'll get to see my progress here, as blogging more frequently is one of the ways I'll be writing more. It's also a matter of credibility. I've also signed up for an exercise program, so I'm committed to that as well. If I make public that I am going to do something, tell it to someone beyond myself, the commitment is all that much stronger. So that is what I am doing here.
Here I go!
For several years now, Jim has dabbled with the idea of getting a smoker. He has the stovetop model, which has worked great, but he was ready to move onto bigger things. So the weekend before Memorial Day, he got a new electric smoker and assembled it.
Being a woodturner, bits of scrap cherry is not a rare thing, and he's been saving cherry chips for years to use in smoking. So after a quick raid of the scrap barrel and a few minutes on the band saw, we had enough small pieces to fill an old box he'd saved just for this purpose.
Now, the box is a nice size, probably holds enough wood chips to feed the smoker at least four times and even has convenient handle-flaps cut into the sides. This is a great repurposing of a well-constructed box that once transported toilet bowl cleaner.
Well, the first place this box is placed is in the family room, on the shelf, just inside the door from where the smoker has it's home outside. A generally practical place, and I don't mind wood chips being kept there, indeed, the room is filled with bins of larger cut-offs meant to feed the fireplace. However, being what it was, with Lysol in bold lettering, it made the shelf look like household chemical inventory overflow. So, I painted it.
No one really wants or expects to get much snow in October. The leaves are still on the trees and the ground is still relatively warm. It happens, for sure, and it's always a mess, but not like this one. No matter where you look virtually every tree has at least one broken limb and many have simply split down the middle with the weight of 10+ inches of snow.
Life gets interesting with no internet, no electricity and melted snow to flush the toilets. But there is companionship, camaraderie and helpful neighbors. Somehow it doesn't seem so bad when you know that just about everyone else around is in the same situation. We joke about it, complain about the cold, and offer to share firewood.
ps: sorry about the picture formatting. As I said this site is a work in process, and there is still some template processing to do.
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