It's hard to trawl back through the past wihout feeling like a politician as you use well-trusted phrases to deal with it. They never really make sense because we move on.
I had a workshop in my 80acre forest. It was set up to use the kind of timber that the forest could afford to lose. I supplied remote & sophisticated outlets in the south-east of England, but once even sent stuff to Japan & Sweden. I regarded it I think as a self-financing research project that got out of hand.

A generator fed us power for nail-guns and sawbenches and the like.
I explored polygonal cutting. That meant I cut the round of logs to hexagons, pentagons etc. Applying these geometries, and then 10+12 sided timber fed me with ideas for years.
But I was getting bored, as every day seemed to be checking other peoples' work at one end, and working out how to sell it at the other. Then there were the attendant procedures and penalties that go with employing people and having to behave as a business.
I never seemed to have either the time or the money to go on from there.

The workshop burnt down.
We had left the stove too hot, but even though it wasn't intentional, even as I hopped over hot sheets of zinc seeing melted tools and blackened nails I sensed an enormous and dangerous freedom.

My main saw, the hexer, had survived. Like a horse out of harness.

more to come...
- posted by John @ 10:37 PM

 
When things happen, events seem to pile in on top of each other. Last year was like that.
Then of course it takes a long time to assimilate new circumstances as a chance for new beginnings.

So in the first post here, I will have to try and describe the setting before, during, and after what a more public figure than you or me described as an 'annus horabilis'...
- posted by John @ 10:56 PM