Wood Zealot's Workshop

Trees are people too.

When I saw this magnificent piece of buckeye burl on eBay I knew had to have it. For the life of me, I can’t explain why this piece of wood spoke to me. Maybe it’s just my cockeyed perspective on life, but it seemed that it could hold great potential in my hands if worked properly. Ok, ok… I’ll drop the ridiculously thin veneer of sincerity. I’m guessing you know me better than that by now.

I obviously only bought this piece of lumber because it looks like frank and beans and as such would yield me great comical amusement (if you can’t see this at first, squint your good eye and smack yourself in the head repeatedly until it’s obvious). I did laugh for quite a while, but now I find myself stuck with a piece of male-genitalia shaped lumber.

I was thinking that it I could slap it on a lazy Susan to be placed on the kitchen table where condomints could be put atop. This was the only idea I had that wasn’t tacky. Maybe a bookstand to hold books erect? An oddly shaped table-tennis paddle? Thoughts?

No, I’m not proud of myself but I felt compelled to share. I have boundary issues.

As a complete non sequitur, if you don’t mind, would you fill out the following poll to help me better serve you in a subsequent post about being a digital woodworker.

[polldaddy poll=1397792]

Here’s a block of spalted Maple. The spalting is the result of fungi invading the wood and taking up occupation. Or rather… the fungi are spreading democracy to the wood. The dark lines or “zone lines” are where different colonies of fungi are fighting for territory with one another. From what I understand, it all started over some holy grain that each side claims is theirs…. then of course fungi extremism developed and terrorism ensued. I’m still not sure which side was right, but I do know that fungi terrorism must be rooted out at all costs! (get it…. fungi terrorism… rooted out… wait, does fungi even have roots? crap, back to Wikipedia)

To answer your question… No, I really don’t know why I kept going with that analogy/metaphor long after it had served it’s purpose… yes, it was kind of interesting to see that highly sophisticated organisms such as ourselves behave similarly as fungi on the macroscopic level, but did I really need to take it as far I did… not really… It probably was not very fair to the fungi. My apologies to all the fungi out there…. especially the fungi-Americans.

You know I just noticed that the word analogy has anal in it… what’s up with that? Just another example of how you can go through your whole life and can miss the little meaningful details. I think I’m just noticing it because it phonetically sounds different from Anal. It has that ‘a’, with the two dots above it, sound… like in canal… hey there’s an anal in canal! For some reason that one seems more appropriate.

And to answer your latest question: No, I don’t do drugs… I do insomnia. Same net effect minus the fun part… and less track marks.

Please stop asking questions.

Yup, it’s finally happening. For the first time in my life I’m getting wood from eBay (though, to be fair, it has given me a semi several times in the past). Below are various pictures of my newly purchased lumber. All are Black Walnut which is a relatively easy species to work with and finishes well. Several pieces are “book-matched” which simply means that were cut in succession allowing for certain design patterning options such as creating mirror image type effects.