Greetings, friends. (XXIII)

Greetings, friends. You ever have one of those days that just felt off for some reason? Today has been one of those days.

I did however get to discover the marvel that is the North Portland Tool Library. Hosted in an old firehouse in Kenton, it’s… a basement full of tools. Hand tools, power tools, you name it. You just need to be a resident of North Portland to sign up for a borrower’s account. “North Portland,” says the website, “Not NE, not NW.”

Their hours are strictly limited to 10am to 2pm on Saturday. You pick out the tools you want to borrow until next Saturday. They note down on your account the four-digit codes that have been marked on the tools in paint pen. And… that’s it.

Today Besha and I borrowed two hammer drills, a post hole digger, and a bench grinder. Yeah, a bench grinder. That was by far not the most exotic tool they had to lend.

The hammer drill was for the anchors I intend to use to chain the anvil stand to the concrete surface of the driveway under Besha’s carport. But perhaps I am jumping ahead.

Well, I mentioned previously that I took up blacksmithing back in San Francisco during the pandemic.

Besha has been gracious enough to allow me to store all my tools and whatnot in her workshop. Over the past few months, we’ve arranged her workshop to be usable for projects. We got all the lumber up off the floor and on to storage racks. We cleared off the workbench and set up the power tool chargers. We took the full size mattress that had been lurking in there along with a 4Runner’s worth of junk and hauled it off to the dump. I unpacked all of my tools and organized them for easy access. I even mounted a pretty nice TV that I pulled from Craigslist Free Stuff and mounted it on the wall.

Meanwhile, I’ve been steadily trying to get my apartment into a fit state for a grown adult to live in. I finally got all the furniture I needed and so on back in December, and unpacked all my clothing and nearly everything else… except my books. My little apartment in Vancouver has a lovely view of the river, but what it does not have is room for bookcases.

The obvious solution is hanging bookshelves, but store-bought bookshelves are ordinarily ugly and expensive. So, back in December, I went to the local lumber yard, bought three 8’ 2x10s, and then for my birthday Besha sanded and finished them to a nice polish. She found some nice looking black steel shelf brackets on a big-box hardware store website, and I went round and bought 9 of them.

But wouldn’t you know, I got to thinking about the brackets and realized I could probably recreate them myself, using my forge and power tools. They’re literally like 1½” steel flat bar bent in an L shape. They cost about $10 each, but the hardware store has a 90 day return policy on this kind of item. So I decided to try it. The worst that could happen is I waste a bunch of time and wind up using the store-bought brackets.

Friends, have you ever heard of yak shaving?

Oh, and I still haven’t told you what the hammer drill is for, have I?

Unfortunately I have a steak in the oven that I intend to reverse sear. Hopefully I haven’t overcooked it already.

If you’re reading this, come back tomorrow for the next thrilling installment in your correspondent’s yak shaving adventures. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est, which Neil assures me is not grammatical Latin. Oh well! More tomorrow.