Four Years

Well, the end of the year has caused me to start looking back at a lot of different things, thinking about the upcoming tax season and all of the fun that comes with it.  Interesting.  Even as I wrote the words 'tax season,' a wave of memories flooded through me.  After my father died, the part of the legal practice that mom was able to keep was the "J Leo Martin Tax Service."  This was the family business that really got me through college and launched on this ride called "being an adult."  Tax season at the Martin household was a real ride, probably much like that for any of you that had or have a tax professional in your life.  I remember Christmas as the lull before the storm. You could just tell that mom was thinking about what was coming at her.  In later years, when I was in college, I even helped by setting up all of the accounting pages that she used to run the business.  It was all part of the preparation that happened around the holidays.  Quiet times but pensive, thinking about the immediate future.

Then, after the first of the year, all hell broke lose. Mom almost immediately started working the bulk of every day, 18-20 hours. Her office was in our basement, but it's not like we saw very much of her.  We also needed to remember that when we got home at the end of the day there were still a couple of hours that she would have clients. We always had to remember to be quiet.  Additionally, there was work that came with the business. I was responsible for making sure all of the snow was off the drive before I went to school. This required some really early mornings. and of course, as we all remember, we had a lot more snow in those days than we do now. I had to empty the trash cans out of the office every night and burn all of the contents, as nothing from the business could accidentally show up somewhere else. Since so many more people smoked then, it was always possible that someone had flipped a butt into a trash can and it would turn into a fire overnight.  More than once Mom or Saundra carried a burning trash can outside. This was the reason Mom only used metal trashcans.

January 2011 - Not much there yet.

Anyway, lots of instant memories about the tax business, but it provided us a good life and it allowed mom to be free in the summer when we were off school.  Okay, back to the real topic of this week. As I was thinking through all of the end of the year stuff it struck me that as of December 2014, I'd been in the Toybox for four years.  Wow.  That time rolled right by. A nice thing about this though, is that in just one more year, the interest rate on the loan for the Toybox drops significantly. That is a great thing. But - probably just me being way too pragmatic. On the more personal side, the place helps to keep me sane. Whether I am working on a big project for family or friends, or just messing around sharpening a chisel and figuring out how to organize the place, I love my time in that space. It is my true point of balance.

Four years ago, when I started out there, it was nothing but a shell and through hard work, and some disposable income, it came to the point that it is today. But that isn't the end of the story. It will continue to change, evolve, and recreate itself based upon the kind of woodworking that I do. Or, and this could happen, whatever size flat screen gets handed down out there and ends up on the wall. Entertainment and work really need to go hand in hand, at least I think so.

January 2015 - Big changes. Kind of exciting!

As for the Toybox and its current happenings, I have just taken on the biggest project in my life. I am helping YESS equip their new library with shelves. Today was the serious start to the work. I cut up 38 sheets of Roseburg D-3 maple plywood and turned it into several hundred pieces that will come together in the next month to be shelf units. Also, for any of you who are woodworkers, that product is beautiful for what it is. The face is a whole piece face (no splices) and the back, although showing more dark wood, is still really good. So, if you have any maple projects coming up, consider it. I even took the time today to give the Roseburg Forrest Products rep a call to tell him how good it looked. I figure that they receive enough bad calls, once in a while they should get a good one.

Enough rambling. Four years down, a whole bunch left, I hope. And believe it or not, I am approaching 100 blogs. Bet some of you never thought that I actually had this many words in me, right?

Brilliance

I was looking through a list of items today that I keep to help me think about "stuff."  I was actually looking for an idea for this blog, and something must have tripped my thought process, because I came up with something that is worth more than a moment's notice.  The word brilliance - not like a light bulb, but a person, because I've been fortunate enough to know a few of these people throughout my life.

First, it only seems right to tell you about my grandfather. He was truly a brilliant man, even though he barely had a sixth grade education.  He could read and write his name, but I remember the time he lost his driver's license because he'd forgotten to look at the expiration date. We both figured out very quickly that he wouldn't to be able to take on the test to get re-qualified, so instead, he drove for the next ten years without a license.  But in so many ways, he was brilliant.  He had an incredibly wide knowledge of mechanical things and how they worked, and he had an incredible ability to pull people into the conversation and interest them in that knowledge,  I remember one summer when we went to Fort Belmont in Minnesota. When Grandpa was done, he had a regular herd of kids with him, learning about cider presses and grist mills.  He was able to share the things he had learned in a lifetime with the rest of the people around him.  For me, he instilled a fascination with the tools and machines that make the world work in me and taught me all of the basic concepts to let me know how things work.  He was brilliant.

The second person I know who is brilliant is my sister.  She was the one that always made me feel as though I was just a step or two behind.  Just that much smarter.  She was valedictorian of her high school class and years later when she graduated from law school, she got snapped up by a firm that only hired top 10, ivy league attorneys.  They told her they discovered that those people were good with the books and the research, but unable to talk to clients. With my sister, they got both - brilliance in the technical arena and an ability to talk with their clients.  I think both of my children came from this stock of the family, because we just keep uncovering how smart they really are.

Finally, I want to tell you about Bravo.  He was brilliant, but not necessarily in the way that one might want to be known.  Bravo lived on my street while I was growing up - in a dilapidated old home with a bunch of trashed vehicles and other stuff around it.  It was one of those places that kids made up stories about, mostly about the horribly frightening person that lived there and what he would do if he caught you on his property. The truth was very far from that.  Bravo was actually very nice and always spoke to both my sister and I if he was outside when we came home from school. His brilliance came from the manner in which he lived.  Bravo never showed that he had anything.  As was typically the case in small town Iowa, the locals took care of Bravo. The local restaurants fed him and everyone worked to do what they could. Now, the interesting thing is that during WWII, Bravo had made a fortune in scrap. He made the money, but never spent any of it, and never let anyone know that he had it.  The community took care of him, and only found out the truth after he passed away.  I'm sure you've known someone like this.  You may call them shrewd rather than brilliant, though.

We are surrounded by brilliant people.  We know those that are book smart, and those that are street smart, and those that are even a little bit "crooked" smart.  It takes all kinds, just like the rest of the world that we live in. It is all of those differences that make the fabric of our lives so very interesting.  I've said it so many times and in so many ways, but this is what keeps me young at heart.  I love looking at all of the ways people approach the lives they live.  Ways that they can be proud of, and so can their family; ways that they may not be so proud of but that gets them through.  And, one of the most interesting things of all is that on any given day, some people can slide back and forth between the various approaches - almost chameleon-like.  It really does take all kinds, doesn't it?

Okay, so what is up in the Toybox these days?  Well, I've had a nice influx of project come in as the new year begins. One major project is for a non-profit.  I'm very excited (and a little nervious) about this. The nervous part is just like with anything else - I truly want to do a good job for them. The second project two Adirondack chairs for a friend.  Not only will I get to build them, but there is probably a time that I will be able to sit in them and have a glass of wine.  Wow, I love woodworking.

New Eyes

I remember hearing a comedian once talk about having kids and seeing the world through new eyes. A sunset was now "pink ink" in the sky and when your foot went to sleep, it got "all squiggly." At that time, we had children who were young and it was so very true. Rarely did we go through a week, and often not even through a day without having the opportunity to see something in a way that we'd never seen it before. This was truly a gift that I never realized even existed and it came with having children around.

Typically these moments of enlightenment were around things that were very loud, or very bright, but you never really knew where the next one would come from.  For instance, I remember that Megan had decided, based upon conversation that she had listened to between adults, that the little piece of grass in the middle of a boulevard was called a "cricket."  It took years for us to find this out. She'd overheard us talking about a metal cricket sculpture in the median near a friend's home and just assumed that was the word described the boulevard. We will never forget it. In the same vein, I remember Andrew believing that a car we had rented had the ability to adjust the radio volume to the "ambient sound level" of the car. Really it was just dad messing with the volume when Andrew could not see me doing it.

Fast forward about twenty years.  As of December 1, I have a new job.  And by the way, I love it. And by the way #2, I'm seeing the world through new eyes, or maybe just eyes that I had forgotten I had.  I've taken on the challenge of Operations at a distribution company in a line that I know absolutely nothing about.  Or do I?  It's amazing to me that the further and further I dive into it, the more it is like the lumber history that I knew so well.  Every time I turn around, we are working on something that I remember working on in the early days in lumber.  The difference is that now I am in the petroleum business.  But, interestingly enough, it is about buying inventory, protecting that inventory, selling it and getting it delivered to the customer, all the time making sure that we take good care of the employees and keep them all safe.

Just today the snow started to fly and I was transported back to a time when we worried mostly about getting our people to work safely, getting product to our customers and making sure that we could be ready to do it all over again.  By the end of the day, I think that we actually were able to accomplish all of that.

Of course, today I hadn't been home ten minutes when I got a call that one of the company owned trucks had been in a wreck.  Again, I found the old training drop into place, making sure that first and foremost, all of the people were okay and then making sure that everyone knew that it was only a wreck and we would take care of it all tomorrow.

So, even though I get to look at a whole new industry, and all new people, doing things that I didn't even begin to understand a month ago, much of all of this is so familiar that it takes me back to when I got to see the world through the new eyes of my children.  Now I get to see the world through the new eyes of the employees that I am managing, working to make the way they do their job easier and more profitable.  What fun this is going to be.

For those few of you that have asked if I am nearing the end of my career, ready to retire and do something easier, I tell you not just no, but hell no. I love what I do and I love seeing all of the ways that people figure out to accomplish things they need to accomplish on a daily basis.  I know there is probably a best way, and I look forward to figuring that out, but there so many different ways to get from point A to B that I love discovering them all. Come with me on this ride, and take the challenge yourself in the things you do every day. Find the joy in looking at everything around you as though you were seeing it for the first time - through new eyes.