I'm Melting, Melting...

Hot. Humid. Still as the grave. I had been confident that there'd be a cool breeze blowing up the bluff to cool us off, after all there's all that cool water right there at the base of the cliff. Wrong. Oh, so wrong. The only thing that saved me was the workshop is air-conditioned so at the end of a hot walk there was a cool room. It was hard not to prop the lock so we could sneak back after dark and sleep in there, but I resisted. Then I thought that since I know the door code for the Jensen Center where there's carpeting, I'd drive over with my sheet and pillow and sleep in the office. I didn't do that either. I thought about all those years growing up with only a fan to cool us and decided to just deal. I took a lot of cool showers, drank lots of water, and complained. (I'm sure it was the latter that kept me the coolest.) We did go down to The Clearing's beach for a swim a couple times but the climb back up the bluff steps and the hike back to the cabin really undid all the cooling, plus we were working nearly non-stop from 9-5:45 every day to get our chairs cut out, drilled, sanded, turned, and glued together. I had 5 classmates (all male) and 2 teachers (also male) and I changed the design of my chair (naturally. when have you ever known me to follow the crowd?). Herb, the 85-year-old teacher was patient and helped me all the while scolding me (in a friendly way) if I whined too much about how hard it was since he told me it'd be way harder than following his suggestion (hey, no one can resist a little "I told you so" every once in a while). I was certain that I had some natural woodworking talent since Grandpa Stephan was a carpenter, as was his brother, but turns out I don't, or at least it's not as much of an "instinct" as I had hoped. I wasn't the worst in class but you get out of practice as an adult learning totally new things. I needed to take along my kindergarten self and didn't always manage it but I toughed it out and triumphed in the end.



I stopped at a yarn shop on my way up and shopped the 40% off bins...










Lala and I went to the kite store on Sunday and I bought me a new kite...














We tried to fly it and my "old" Ironman kite on Thursday but the wind was too light and variable. She got Ironman to fly for about a minute so I grabbed a picture. I'll be flying my frog as soon as it's windy enough.













In the workshop, we cut out the chair pieces...






















glued them together...
















turned the legs...



























sanded and sanded and sanded...

















glued and clamped...



















and ended up with chairs. Mine's the Shaker one. It still needs stain and varnish or some sort of finish, but for now I'm happy that it's 3-D instead of 2-D.