Doing new things today. I changed my morning routine (being a hermit at home) to going out for coffee before class (I can't believe I got up early enough for it before an 8:30am class). I did mortise and tenon joinery for the first time.

Joinery is tricky. I still don't have my mortise and tenon after spending the majority of today working on it. I'd like to say "the Festool domino cutter made things trivially easy," but that isn't true. Keeping everything square and straight and even is difficult regardless.

I'm still in the process of learning to distinguish between "I can fudge this," and "I have to get this critical thing exactly right." It's hard to tell unless I've gone through it manually a couple of times (my spatial reasoning isn't so strong, so I need things to go awry or okay and dissect post-mortem).

For example: I can't fudge the friction fit of the tenon to the mortise.

Another: I can't fudge the fact that I'm 30% smaller than everyone else. I'm always looking for additional mechanical advantage. Whenever I think "oh, I can muscle through it," my work gets sloppy. I need a riser to get in a good position to bear weight down on any surface; my hands are too small to hold comfortably around standard jigs.

It's probably the same phenomenon of children not thinking of themselves as children (like adults do). I don't think of myself as short/light/weak (neither in absolute nor relative terms). It's hard for me to see myself (I went 27 years without knowing that I have a long torso relative to the rest of my body, what a strange revelation that was, when my yoga teacher told me). So I've been delightfully surprised by how helpful the suggestions and feedback from my instructors have been in this regard. (Jim and Todd are both really tall.)

I asked David about the Japanese maple. The story is Sarah Marriage built a desk out of Japanese maple while she was a student at C/R. He liked it so much, he bought it. The desk needed a chair and David was able to find some Japanese maple to make one to match. The little block he gave me for my spokeshave is a remnant from that project. Not that it wasn't before, but now the little unfinished spokeshave is very dear to me.

Catching up on note-taking backlog over breakfast

jess ouyang

day 7