cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fwd: A Functioning Workshop And now for the real entry about my weekend. On Saturday we went to a reunion thing for Trish's high school. It's a small private school so their reunions are multi-year, since when you have graduating classes of a dozen or so people, the gatherings would otherwise be very small. My sister went to the same school, as did Trish's sister, and her mother used to work in development there and now my mother is on their board of directors. So even though I was never actually a student at this school, I am socially part of the network and knew most everyone there. They are a lot bigger now, with graduating classes of seniors numbering in the 30's. But it's still a fairly intimate place. Anyhow, the first part of the reunion was at one of the family estates of one of Trish's best friends from school. This is the friend whose step father is literally a billionaire. In the 80's he was literally the richest man in America. Unlike the other children of billionaires I have been acquainted with (Trish went to school with a number of them), I've always loved how humble and un-spoiled Anna is. Her mother, Tussi, too. Tussi usually drives some old but serviceable car and dresses much like any other vaguely hippy-ish woman from Berlin would. The whole family is of that very, very rare breed of ridiculously wealthy people whose characters have not been completely ruined by it. Anna's biological father is Italian and she grew up in Italy for a while before coming to the states. Her mother and step-father are German and she lives in Germany now. The amusing result of this is that when Ida was playing hide and seek with her kids, I heard this 3 year old kid count to 10 using 3 different languages. It was the funniest thing. 'Eins, zwei, tre, four, cinque, six, seven, otto..." Ida seemed to have no trouble at all with conversing with Anna's 4 kids. They kept interchanging languages in the middle of sentences, but Ida speaks enough Spanish and French that I think she was able to follow the Italian pretty well. The German must have been lost on her, though. The shitty thing is that they've been visiting here for the past TWO MONTHS and we didn't know. Anna had tried to get in touch with Trish, didn't have our number so she called Trish's mother. Who just never bothered to pass on Anna's info to us, nor did she even mention to us that they were here. Now Ida is all disappointed that she can't play with Anna's kids any more, and they're going back to Germany tomorrow and Anna's kids have been bored silly for the last few weeks with no friends to play with. And this whole time they could have been playing together. Feh. Yesterday was nice. Trish and the kids went over to her parents house at around noon, while I stayed home and farted around. I decided to arrange the workshop as a prop work space and just accept the fact that I'm going to have tarps for a roof for a while. I put up some shelves and got more tools out of storage and got things nicely set up. We have a big, long pine trestle table that I wanted to set up but it was missing a bunch of parts on account of having been moved around and stored for so long that things went missing. So I was very pleased to find that the workshop is now sufficiently well equipped that I was able to fabricate all of the missing wooden parts, including pegs, etc. in the space of about 10 minutes. In fact, if I had the wood on hand, I realized that I could build a complete replica of that table in the space of about an hour (not including any stain or finish work). In all of this work to build the workshop, I'd totally forgotten about the whole reality of having a functioning workshop. It is so nice and so satisfying to be able to crank out useful objects, furniture, or whatever. I'm still nowhere near fully organized. I've got more hand tools, materials and even some power tools to dig out. Like my shop vac and the drill press that I bought 5 years ago (!) and have never even taken out of the box on account of never having had any space in which to set it up. I'm terribly pleased about this whole thing. I would have rather had a proper roofing job and some siding up before trying to turn this building into a functioning workshop, but i just have no idea when the money for the sheathing, fascia board, etc. will appear. So I might as well just forge on ahead. 11:44 - 2008-06-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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