i’ve been away from my usual life for a couple of days to get some medical treatment i’ve been waiting for and all the time traveling to and from the hospital and lying there unable to do anything – really anything (it was vision-related and my eyes simply didn’t work… Read More »a simple bench

something that’s been on my mind lately is the practical side of hobbyist and student woodworking. i have the advantage of a significant amount of shop-time in a typical week. while i don’t spend as much time as i’d like building furniture, i do spend a lot of time designing… Read More »being without making

no, i don’t mean you should talk like a hick. or write like an uneducated fuck. i mean you should stop writing (or reading) formal poetry. formal poetry isn’t formal in the sense of “honorific” or “respectful”. it’s formal like “written in a form” — a sonnet, for example, or… Read More »an ode to informality

don’t do it yourself. seriously. buy ikea furniture. i know what you’re thinking. i’m a woodworker. for fuck’s sake, i’m a woodworking teacher with decades of experience. i can build anything. ok, i don’t do roofs and tend to avoid boats cause they’re a lot of effort and i don’t… Read More »diy is the enemy

english has the most unnecessarily-complex spelling system of any modern language. while spelling is not necessarily-simple in many european languages, it is usually complex for a reason — mostly because the words are actually that long or have that many phoneme-groups in them. the letters usually represent how the word… Read More »fake letters

if you cut a lot of dovetails, there is a tool you may be missing from your kit — a fishtail chisel. of course, this might be old news to you as most of the modern manufacturers make one. the problem is, as always, that they’re brutally-expense. but we’ll get… Read More »aquatic woodworking