Industrial Blond console No. 3

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Finished this table up today, between breaks to climb up on the roof and blast out our old wooden gutters. The cleaning of the gutters was A's idea. But like Tom Sawyer, she got me to execute the idea. High above, roofs all around, the sound sparkling in the heat to the north. Dirty, grit all thru me, asphalt pebbles flying.The table is going to a woman who once lived in Seattle, now she's in LA.How we find ways to breathe through and keep open the avenues we've left behind. What we bring with us to a strange new place. What has taken a piece of us, we discover, once we've left it. How we decide to gauge our surroundings, how we find a beginning again, re-establish a datum, prospect and refuge.With this table, yet again, I was reminded how it seems like the better I get, craft-wise, the slower I go. Surely I get faster too, on some level. But with the router, to set (mortise) the legs, to give the super clean sight lines as in the photo - so that the steel rod just disappears, without a sound and without slowing, into the fir - these days I go slower in a way. Same thing with the sanding. For instance, I am endlessly pulled in by knots. The more you polish a knot, the deeper into the whorl you can go. Get deep. I love knots. I didn't always know that, or knots, so well.So the table done. The workshop peaceful today. Good light. Summer. Early afternoon. Tung oil on with gloves. Radio playing from the phone, balanced on a wiggly branch leaned between two studs.