Local Flavor: Moonrise, Sunset

This moonrise was tonight, snapped on the "big camera." I kind-of like that hand-holding something like this at max zoom gives you that "intro to photography" effect that sucks one back to '80s family snapshots...

Have you been having freakish weather, too? People are talking about another Irene-sized storm headed this way but I'm thinking we'll have a near miss while the folks south of us are going to get the deluge. Meanwhile, the west burns. Unholy times, folks.

It's been raining all week again, but it's that sickly rain where the temperature is still in the '70s and the humidity feels purpose-made to grow mushrooms on any dead wood it can find.

Enough about weather, though!

I've been keeping just as busy as usual -- or more busy? Maybe it just feels like that? I've been cranking-out repairs nonstop and at the same time handling all sorts of random in-store clinic work while juggling the antiques circuit a bit. It's an odd mix that, when it turns to long conversations, can have one disappear the day right-quick.

It's all left me with no mental space to take care of the small niceties of online courtesy (sorry, everyone) and no time for shutterbugging or picking guitars, but at least I'm managing to make a small dent in some of my backlog. That means some of it. I still have absolutely no clue about how long it will really take to get any serious projects done. Time just keeps slipping! I apologize.

On Tuesday I did a deep clean of my workshop area and reorganized my layout. Can I tell you how much of a difference that made? It's enormous. I feel far less crazy. Stuff was coming in and going out at such a pace that I was (literally) standing among piles of disorganized cases, refuse from repairs, and drill-press "routing" shavings while trying to get work done. It'd stopped working for me and I was growing more irritable every day with the situation.

I also got the bandsaw and belt sander back in the day-to-day shop which is a huge relief -- I hated having to travel through another room and into my packing area to whip-out bridges and whatnot. I'm going to figure-out a nicer dust-collecting vacuum setup shortly, though. The old shop vac is getting tired. The saw and sander are tucked right next to one another in a compact corner in such a way that I can swing the saw out easily to cut long lengths, too. It just begs to be used, now.

Here's a sunset from the iPhone from a few days ago.

It's funny but there's such a proliferation of gorgeous instruments awaiting repair in the shop that, before my deep clean, I was starting to feel heavily jaded about guitars-n-things. With the rut in the shop cleared-out, I'm back to feeling a bit more excited to see projects to their finish lines and a heck of a lot more relaxed while working on them.

It's hard not to get distracted by the national air of malaise, though. I've been warding-off that demon of introspection and existential crisis as much as possible. It's easy to get sucked into the hole of wishing you could cut a wide swath of change in the world. It's sometimes hard to sell myself on the fact that plunking-along making smaller good changes actually is making a bigger change for the better.

Compared to how so many people around the world live, my life and our family life is amazing and I get to work a job that genuinely makes people happy with its end results and live in a beautiful place besides. 

That means a lot in our uncertain reality. It means a lot in mine.

So, thank you all for the opportunity. It's back to sleep with the moon for me, now...