Welcome to autumn!

Some people love the holidays (don't include me with that bunch!) and some people love Spring, when the dreary days of winter end.

 Me? 

I've always loved Fall - with its cooler temps, football season, leaves changing color, and well... Hatch chilis roasting over flames. My local grocery store set up a roaster, 

and I bought a case of chilis for them to roast. Medium hots, thank you!

The smell is unbelievable, 

and the crackling of the charred skins is music to my ears. 

The garden does weird things at the end of the summer - the tomato plants start growing like weeds! These almost doubled in size, 

 but stopped producing fruit. The taste of a home grown tomato will soon be just a memory. That's OK, there are other fish to fry. 

 The shop is a mess, and it's time to gear up for classes that start this week.  The dust collectors are over flowing, 

and some of our chisels are a disaster. WTF? Who leaves a chisel like this? 

We're expecting some huge deliveries of wood,

 and even added a chainsaw to our arsenal. This bad boy with its 20" bar will handle logs that we previously struggled with, and officially makes me a bad-ass. 

Fueled by sugar, 

most of these tasks are completed in no time. 

Re-filling the glue bottles, 

cutting up material, and finishing up our projects was the goal for this past weekend. 

Here's Eddie's dining room table - the first piece of furniture that he ever built.  It's based on Jory Brigham's design, and he nailed it! (well, not literally.) 

Some times - the littlest things make the biggest difference!

A HUGE thank-you to Eric and Ken of Legacy Woodworking for gifting this Festool imperial thickness gauge to the school. 

It’s not that we don’t like metric measuring devices in the shop. To the contrary - going all metric would make life easier… but jumping back and forth between metric and imperial measurements is tricky with all of the students using the Domino in the shop.  So this new thickness gauge just makes life easier for all of us.

Seneca manufactures some great accessories for Festool’s arsenal of tools… thanks Eric and Ken! My students will thank you, as well, the next time they use this tool. As one reviewer stated - “less strain on my imperial brain” 

Finally - as we settle into Fall, I'd like to congratulate everyone who has handled the strain of Covid and politics and fires in the west - it's been an extremely stressful time for all of us. 

Owning a business during this time is downright challenging. For those of us who have followed safe guidelines and believed in science, I salute you. 

I'll toast you when I have a shot of this.