Slapshot

For those of you who know me, not just here but in the real world, you know I have a tendency to repeat myself. Well, here I go again. Back in January 2015, I wrote about seeing the world through "New Eyes" and I seem to have landed there all over again. It could be the time of the year, but as all of this crossed my mind again, I knew I needed to share it.

These thoughts started for me during the Christmas season as I watched children open Christmas gifts. The genuine unbridled joy of watching someone open a gift they had never considered getting is great for the soul. Although this happens with people later in our lives, the experience with children is incomparable. The most enjoyable gift for me to watch being opened was a small oil tanker we gave to my grandson. It wasn't a big gift at all, but at that moment in time, it grabbed his attention and all of his thoughts. And, for a few moments, as I watched him, there was nothing else in the world more important to him or to me.

I hope you have all experienced the joy of Christmas through the eyes of a child. Although I would say there is nothing like it, I discovered Saturday night before last there might be an experience which rivals the feeling. That evening, I had the opportunity to go to a hockey game with my company and we had really good seats. In fact, we were in one of the suites on the ice. We were extremely well cared for, with food and beverage, but the joy for me was watching people who had either rarely been or never attended a hockey game. They saw the game in a way you rarely get to watch, from just on the other side of the glass. When somebody gets body checked into the ice in front of you, it is literally right there, inches, not even feet away.

While watching this, I found myself thinking of moments in life that have this type of affect on all of us. As we go through our day-in, day-out experiences, what really takes our breath away? There are times these pass by and I tend to discount them as no big deal, rather than recognizing them for what they are. As I think about the last year, the kind of things come to mind are: Watching my daughter graduate from the University of Iowa, holding my granddaughter, Daisy, for the first time, running errands one day with my son, listening to the joy of my daughter's voice when she announced she'd been admitted to law school, watching Sara at the hockey game, and lately, for me, when I finished a quilt top, and laid down my first welding bead.

All of these things are special, once in a lifetime events, but for myself, I know I don't always recognize and celebrate them as they come by. To make it even more confusing for those around me, I tend to "celebrate" events like this very quietly, often times by myself. For many of the moments I listed above, nobody even knew were important to me until they read that last paragraph.

I guess I come to the question - what will I do with this? If this causes a moment of thought for you, what will you do with this? As I start the year, I think I need to acknowledge more of the truly wonderful things happening to me, and learn to share them out loud. I've actually become more comfortable in some ways talking to you about these things. I need to make a change there.

Okay, on the shop front. I am having a ball with the new CNC router. The accuracy it adds to the work I do is amazing. Things I have struggled with in the past are so much easier. I will admit to being surprised by the amount of time things take to be produced, but I'm even finding ways to speed up this process. I am also learning that when a project feels like a failure, it isn't. It is just a step toward success. While this isn't new for any of us, it is really good to remember it once in a while. The nice thing about what I am doing with the CNC right now is I can run something, look at how it worked and then go back and adjust the inputs and the results. There is already more success than challenge and over time this will only get better.

I already see that in the future this CNC will be for sale as I move to a more high capacity unit. Not today, but soon I'll have pictures of some of the successes I've already experienced.

Enough for today. We are facing bitter cold in the next few days. If you are in any area with challenging weather, be safe and be careful.