Me and Monty

And so, I have retuned.

Chicago kept me longer than I intended, but it was good to work and see my old friends.  Gregarious as I am, I feel pleased to be back in the shop (tentatively going by the title Armadillo Design Werks).  There is something to the ballance between solitude and congregation which I find hard to manage.  Still, I am back and I have a new companion.  

Meet Monty.  Monty Ward.  He's the lathe, the skull lamp is unexplained.

Yesterday I got the bench built, making use of some old 4X4 posts and a rejected countertop I have had since my days in apartment maintenance (ten years at least).  It needed a good cleaning, and all the wiring was shot, but I have gotten it going.  There are parts missing, but I have managed to manufacture or adapt other equipment to serve.  

It's all making me anxious though.  I seem to be spending a lot of time in the ancillary tasks and it is not forward progress on what is the true task.  I have little time, so I need to push harder and move faster.  This will require a greater sense of organization.

During the last two weeks I was working with some very talented designers on a project which had a solid deadline and was moving forward.  However, as is often the case on big projects, we were beset by problems.  The details are unimportant, but we moved through and got it done (there were no other options which helps keep things moving).  What I remembered from this experience was that one deadline is not enough.

The tasks involved in making require multiple deadlines.  Parts need subdivision from the whole.  The boat, in this example, is a hull and the mechanicals.  But each part of the mechanicals is a collection of more parts.  Follow this thinking too far and you are faced with a classical paradox which will cripple you.  In the proper perspective, each deadline is a milestone for the ultimate goal.  If you focus on the milestones, you will eventually reach the goal.  

An example:

My friend Joe and I were once headed up to my family's cabin in Northwestern Ontario.  It was the first time we had been there, and in our particular style, we had agreed to go early and cary half the gear in addition to an eighteen foot open bow boat.  We misjudged our ability slightly, and aided by one of the worst maps ever drawn (lovingly penned by my brother Sam over coffee at the Chicken Shack) we got lost and were pretty screwed.  However, as things would turn out we made our goal (again, there was no other option).  We did this by carrying the boat down a trail in short sections: get to that tree by the rock and then rest, and then on to the next goal.  Eventually we got there.  And so did the boat.  

It's time to implement that thinking on this boat.  I drew my own map, have my deadline, and now all I have to do is progress.  

Me and Monty have work to do.

What choice is there?