So long 2017

Yeah, turns out even a holiday week is not enough time for me to wrap up a big project. Not having time off of work didn't really help though, so I don't feel too bad. Still, I'm happy with where things are at. If I don't look too closely at the glued up desktop things looked pretty good. But I need something I can set a PC on and work off of without noticing bumps or rough sections, so there's a lot of finishing work to be done here.

I can move it all as one big piece, so that's probably a good sign.

Which is why I picked up the power planer. My in-laws did something very nice for me the other week; on top of a pizza steel for Christmas they also bought me a saw as a "thank you" for helping with the kitchen over the summer. Unfortunately, they bought me a saw I already had, which is how I ended up with a $98 store credit at HD. After some internal debate, I ended up realizing a hand plane would really help if I wanted to try a desktop build, but store credit can't be used online, and they don't have any hand planes in store anymore. So I went with the power option, which was cheaper so I could grab some extra clamps to help with this too. Not my first choice, but it turned out to be a real time saver. Some of those glue joints were WAY off.

Hooray, new tool un-boxing.

Like anything other project, I want things to look as nice as possible, but I also realize I don't know what I'm doing so I'm used to fixing mistakes. The planer was really easy to figure out though, and as much of a pain it was to constantly have to empty the collection bag, it did a good job cleaning up some of the bigger bumps. My block plane was enough to really clean things up, plus get rid of some mistakes I made with the power tool, and after an hour or so the first side was looking good. 

If you squint it looks pretty good.

Quite a collection of shavings.

The other side went pretty much the same way, and after sanding that side too I was feeling pretty good about where I was at. When I flipped things over to sand what I considered the top, I realized some of my gaps probably had to get filled just to make things a little more presentable. So after one more trip to the store, the gaps were filled and I was waiting to sand again. 

Whoops. Thankfully nothing like this to fix in the middle of the block.

The more I filled the more I found to fix.

Wood filler dried, things are looking pretty good at this point. It might not be counter top quality butcher block, but for $30 in materials I'm thinking I've got a nice desk coming together.

I was thinking about how to finish this, and at this point I'm kind of stumped. I've got some natural stain and enough poly left that would probably work, but the idea of spending night after night getting this finished doesn't really appeal to me right now. At least not as much as having a few drinks and saying goodbye to this weird, strange year.

I don't believe what I just saw

Turns out, the people in the community surrounding my community college thought it might be a bad idea to lay off half the administrative staff before the fall semester started. So my layoff is cancelled. For now. Doesn't mean I'm not still looking, and it doesn't mean I feel any more secure about my job than I did three weeks ago. It's been a rough couple of weeks. So that's why I felt so good about a recent string of good luck I've had.

Despite getting the reprieve from getting laid off, I've still got a lot of resumes out there and I'm anxiously awaiting some responses. The last time I was looking for work I averaged a call-back for 1 out of about 10 applications. Well I hit 20 applications the other day and I haven't heard back from anyone yet. So I thought why not check my spam to see if I've missed anything, even though it's probably a waste of time.

Turns out it wasn't a waste. I didn't have any job responses in there, but I did have a note about winning some ryobi power tools, and when I opened it it actually looked like it was real, with a link to a blog post with me as the winner there at the bottom. Well holy shit. The email was a couple of days old, so I fired off a response and tried to patiently wait for a response.

Which turned into waiting patiently for confirmation of shipping on my choices, which seemed to last forever. But I eventually did get two new tools showing up on my porch this week! Say hello to my new table saw and router.

I've had a fair share of luck good and bad in my life, but this one came around at just the right time. Part of me thinks karma has a little to do with it, with this happening just when I was starting to panic about a job. Plus, I had just posted our landscaping pond as a freebie on craigslist after pulling it out of the ground. That's a good time to win a contest.

A half-finished media stand made for a decent extra shelf but also made it just about impossible to actually reach any tools I needed to finish putting this together. My own fault for making it so damn big. Whoops.

These probably would have really helped with the media stand build, but what can you do. It's clearly coming along pretty well without one and the shop is kind of a mess right now. Kind of like my brain. B/c there have been a couple of ideas rattling around in there lately where I'd wondered if a table saw or router would be needed, so I think my to-do list just got quite a bit longer. There's a bench at the in-laws that needs refurbishing, a painter's canvas that would be easy to put together now, and who knows what else I'm going to come up with. I just have to figure out where this is going to fit. Good problem to have though. This has definitely put a much-needed spring in my step this week.