Woodworking, Cooking, & Promotions

Well, since everyone has been pestering me to hear updates about that table I’m building, I’ll provide an update. Today I finished the sanding and moved on to the finishing of the base. I hate sanding. These boards were very grainy and no matter how much I sanded they never seemed to get very smooth. So eventually I just said “good enough” and put on the wood conditioner, followed by several coats of a dark stain. I haven’t stained anything since my TV Guide collection shelf from 7th grade Ag class. I accidentally dropped the bucket of stain and it splattered all over the garage, but other than that it went on just fine. It doesn’t look great in my opinion, but I think that was due to some poor sanding in spots rather than the stain application. Lesson learned, I guess. Tomorrow it is off to Home Depot to pick up the lumber for the surface of the table and the two benches.

That TV Guide collection shelf, by the way, really is one hell of a shelf. I remember building that thing in Tonak’s Ag class and cutting a few corners, only to have him chew me out and make me tear it apart and do it right. I didn’t much like him at the time but I guess he knew what he was talking about, because 18 years later that shelf is still standing, albeit 1100 miles away and no longer used to display a collection of worthless magazines. (Those TV Guides, by the way, were in fact worthless. You can find the entire decade of the 90s [520+ issues] for $200 on eBay with zero bids.)

In other woodworking news, our faithful poochie Baxter has been slowly chipping away at that wooden crate I built several months back. For nine hours a day, three days a week, that hound sits inside that box and scratches away at the bars on the door, hoping someday to break free. Well, he did so once, but I boarded it back up even stronger than before. Here’s a look at the damage he’s done.

In non-woodworking news, dear wife Lauren spent all of the past two weeks battling several other candidates for an opening at her office for a recently vacated position. This meant a ton of long hours at the office to prepare. For me, this meant getting home two full hours before Lauren, getting hungry, and preparing dinner for like ten straight work days! Amongst the entrees I prepared included goulash, French onion soup, shrimp fajita tacos, and chicken marsala. There are leftovers aplenty. We usually do a weekly meal-planning trip to Whole Foods on Sundays so we have all the ingredients for dinner for the following week, so I had all the items on hand. Nevertheless, I feel good about my cooking skills of late.

To celebrate Lauren’s promotion, which she eventually got, we met up with a random assortment of her co-workers and people she knows through work for a night of fun Friday. To my absolute delight, her friends introduced us to a karaoke place I never knew existed. It was an Asian karaoke joint with private rooms and BYOB. I did six songs, bringing my 2013 public karaoke performance total to a whopping 120 songs! (Yes, I have kept track. E-mail me for any details you’d like to know.)