In Santa’s workshop, I’m the elf

Have spent some nights and weekends happily making sawdust and shavings in recent weeks. Last year, T made knit gifts for many of our friends and family—this year, it’s my turn, and everyone’s getting wood!

As a result, I feel like an elf, the workshop piled with projects in various states of completion, and me facing the occasional tension between what I should be working on (the gifts!) and my itch to finish older projects. (The loophole here is to declare an older, unfinished project as a “Christmas gift to self”. I wonder if that Dutch tool chest will fit under the tree!)

Speaking of elves, Shannon Rogers did a hilarious episode of his Lumber Update podcast a few years back, “North Pole Lumber Sourcing”. It goes deep into the what, how, and where of lumber supplies for a North Pole workshop—an absolute delight (maybe even if you’re not that into wood?).

The time in the shop has been satisfying. I’ve gotten quicker and more confident in approaching the work. Part of that comes from my getting everything tuned up and in order down there this past year. It’s also from getting to better know the tools:

• I was resawing on the bandsaw last night (a finicky operation)—despite using a blade not quite made for the task, the machine was set-up well, and I increasingly know what to look, listen, and feel for to slice the wood well enough for my purposes.
• I feel this with hand tools, too—I’m noticing much more quickly the sound and feel of the tool on the wood, knowing I’m working the wrong way or so on.

Time in the shop also broadens my horizons outside the shop.

Walking to work, I recently noticed how the branches grew from the trees around me (I didn’t just look at the trees, but saw)—almost all point up (duh, trees reach for the sun! and yet, I hadn’t intuited this!). This unlocked something in my brain, and suddenly I better understood how to tell the grain direction in a board (though there are many ways): if there’s a knot or indications of one (a knot being the leftover parts of a branch inside a tree), and we can tell the inside of the board from the outside (check the end grain!), then we can find the direction of the board’s grain by orienting the knot on the inside of the board below the knot on the outside, since the tree’s branch would’ve been growing up and away from its centre.

There, paying attention to trees helped me transfer knowledge to woodworking. But woodworking has also helped me transfer knowledge to cooking.

We have a sad bread knife, with dull, scalloped edges. T’s been making some delicious bread recently, but the knife struggled mightily with the crust. Instinctively, I’d push down on the knife while also gripping the bread harder—squishing the bread in the process, and resulting in wandering, jagged cuts with crumbs everywhere. One day, the mantras of sawing wood popped into my head as I did this: hold the saw like a baby bird, angle slightly on the return stroke to clear the sawdust, and, most importantly, let the tool do the work. I applied this to the bread, and suddenly I could slice a loaf that posed no end of grief into straight, even slices of whatever size I wanted—with no crushing, and even less mess.

Anyhow—it’s wonderful to engage with the world, to really pay attention, to wonder and learn in the process. Hobbies are a good vehicle for this, but so is the work of everyday life, the cooking and cleaning and other chores that fill our hours. Isn’t it great, to live and have infinite depths to explore?

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Enough of me. Enjoy the words of others:

• Though increasingly removed from the post-secondary experience (wah!), I still follow some humanities academics, and am particularly interested in how they’re addressing LLMs. Alan Jacobs and Shawn Graham have both written recently about this. Graham, for his part, has first-year students complete research memos by hand, in-class. I can imagine the nervousness such an assignment brings, but also totally get the very real learning that comes from giving up your hope that a thing be easy, and instead leaning into the parts that’re hard. Still, glad I didn’t go to school with the temptation of LLMs around.
• A “Requiem for Early Blogging”? Catnip for this blogger. Speaking of “early blogging”, xkcd feels solidly of that era, and Randall Munroe just released a lovely comic “Fifteen Years”, on his now-wife’s diagnosis with cancer that many years ago.
• Ben Werdmuller has a vision for how he’d lead the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s a good example of a strategic vision—one that states concrete examples of what an organization would start and stop doing.
• Dave Rupert muses on how church communities tend to be really good at offering “skill ladders”, welcoming all comers and finding a place for them. Lessons for community-building more generally.
• It feels like I should write, “I never thought I’d want to see a one-man show about competition policy”, but, who am I kidding, that’s precisely the kind of play I’d love to go see. (I love that a bunch of Competition Bureau folks are going to be in the audience for one show.)
• Canada has a new weather warning system! Colours instead of words alone. I like the combination of confidence and impact in deciding which to pick, and it’s especially great to see Environment Canada actually including those upfront, at the start of their alerts. (Ottawa has none right now, as the fine folks at Environment Canada understand that we’re used to gobs of slow-falling snow.)
• Progress continues on the Centre Block renovation, so we get our yearly batch of behind-the-scenes photos. Christmas comes early for parliamentary × construction nerds!!

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas