I’ve had an exceedingly frustrating week trying to submit a grant proposal for an SBIR. I say “trying” not because I had trouble writing the proposal, but because I’ve been fighting a series of technical problems, with sites taken offline randomly, cryptic error messages, and wait times for support reps of over an hour for every call. It’s a mess, and unfortunately, it’ll be a couple days more at least before it’s totally resolved.

In the midst of all of this, I’ve found myself longing for things that I can actually accomplish. The other day, I took Dina’s car to have the emissions inspected, because I knew it was something I could check off my list. Woodworking definitely falls into the category of things I can do, and so I started in on one of the projects I wrote about recently, the benches for Faye and Nick.

Whoever took down the trees in their backyard included the center of the trunk in one of the slabs. The wood is cherry, and because the ends of the log weren’t sealed when it was cut, because of the way it dried, because the center was included, the middle section of the log was a bit rotted out. Happily, it is wide enough that the middle can be removed and the two outside parts glued together to make a bench, but all that depends on sawing. Which is what I did tonight.

It didn’t actually take too long, to make these two rip cuts down the 6 feet of board — maybe 45 minutes or an hour? And it worked, on both levels — I got rid of the rotten part of the log, and I did something today.