Unboxing day
After more than three years, I’ve finally unpacked the last boxes leftover from our move. And there were a few surprises.
I never bothered to open the last five boxes from our move. All were marked “wood” or “misc. wood,” and I knew that’s exactly what they were and with that in mind, there was no hurry. But because I had some free time, and because I wanted to open up some more space in the storage room, I dragged them all out.
Three of them held just what I thought, all the better scraps and cutoffs from my previous shop. There was, as expected, some exotics, a bit of figured stuff, and some sentimental stuff – the last pieces of cherry and oak I harvested with my dad several years ago that I’d been hoarding. All of it is on the smallish side, but just right for boxes, clocks and other small projects.
One box was pure junk. Seriously, it was filled with ordinary cutoffs, the kind I usually throw out. My guess is that I taped that box up with the intent of disposing of it, and loaded it on the moving truck by mistake.
Ah, but the fifth box was real gold. It had all my bowl and pen turning stock. Two-dozen pieces of ebony, about the same of rosewood, some pink ivory, a bunch of cocobolo and good quantity of miscellaneous exotic hardwoods.
Best of all, this box also had some turning supplies I’d wondered what happened to, like my Nova chuck, sharpening stuff and some other lathe accessories. It must have made sense at the time to put those together, but as you must all realize by now, “sense” is a word applied very loosely to the way I think.
