Load Dropped

I feel like I got my life back today.

My family has been sued. It has to do with a small lot sold by an LLC related to my family. The buyers sued the realtor, and now they’re suing the LLC and all the members. The plaintiffs attempted (unsuccessfully) to serve me this week. Really annoying. It seems fairly clear that the case will die a quick death, and even if we lose, no one will have a large loss, but it has to be tended to, and it has caused no end of strife and division. My dad offered to handle it for nothing, with me as his dashing sidekick, but the family turned that down. I thought I would still have to represent myself as an individual defendant, but yesterday I learned that the family had voted to hire someone, and I decided to cast my lot with the new guy.

Today I had to prepare a document and fax crap to the lawyer, and I’m finished, so I feel like I can relax. There is still some anger and dissatisfaction, to put it mildly, but the person experiencing that is not me. Finally, I can get back to studying machining, fixing up my woodworking stuff, and preparing for the lathe to arrive.

While Mike was here, he got all excited about a mahogany board I had made from scratch, and he wanted to check out the tools. We BSed our way through a mahogany mousepad for his desk. The piece of wood we used was really garbage; it was warped, and the sides were far from parallel. I had saved it, figuring I might be able to use a small piece of it. We put it on the planing sled and took it down from over an inch in thickness to about 0.33″. That’s how much wood had to be removed to get two flat, parallel sides. Mike sanded it with the Dynabrade, and then he used the table saw to bevel the upper edges. He did the sawing while I was in the house, with no safety training. Scary. He put both Danish oil and stain on it. Weird. I suggested he get five rubber feet for it, with adhesive backing. That will keep it from sliding around his desk.

We tried to use the router, but it became obvious that my lack of a real router fence was an impenetrable obstacle. So I am making a router fence. I figure I’ll make a long bottomless box about six inches wide and clamp it to the back side of the table saw fence. I’ll be able to use the table saw measuring scale (or a table saw DRO) for both the table saw and the router. I’ll put a hole in it for the shop-vac.

I’ll need about eight feet of wood, a little over an inch in thickness and five inches in width. I’m not sure what to use. Something stable. I’ll have to buy it. Scrap has its limits.

Day before yesterday I saw a gorgeous pile of logs, beckoning to me from the side of the road. If they still exist, I may get them tonight. Some of them. How am I supposed to resist? The local mahogany seems wonderful. It’s too bad the tree people cut it in such short pieces.

I have to get a few router bits. The collection I have is sad.

It’s wonderful, knowing I won’t have to do this litigation, and it’s great having the fighting over with, even if not everyone is happy. You can’t always please people. When you please everyone, it often means you’ve done something you’ll really regret. Sometimes you have to settle for the knowledge that if you trust God, you’ll get peace eventually.