I finally made it to the lumberyard today. My official excuse was that I was waiting until I fitted the roof rack to my car. I did that last weekend, and then today, I decided that since I don’t have any fancy needs right now, that I’d just have it chopped into 5-foot lengths, which do fit into my car. That’s a hell of a lot easier than strapping boards to the rack.

This was pretty much my first experience at a place that actually has a lot of hardwood. The English spoken there was kind of spotty, but they were nice enough, and after a lot of back-and-forth, I’d selected a few FAS roughsawn yellow-poplar boards, and one nice roughsawn piece of cherry.

Roughsawn wood is not exciting for most people to behold.

That’s the cherry on the left, and one of the pieces of poplar on the right. However dull this looks to most people, though, it’s thrilling to me. And somehow I feel like I’m on some sort of slippery slope now, because my downstairs storage now contains a bunch of boards, just waiting for me to take a whack at them.

So now I’m ready. The only excuses I have for not seriously practicing joinery are either that I’m being lazy or I’m doing something stupid, like playing a video game or doing laundry.

In other news, I finally got a low-angle block plane. I had a prepaid visa gift card to blow, so I blew it on the offering from Lee Valley/Veritas. It was not a trivial expense.

Some people complain that it “doesn’t look traditional.” Traditional compared to what? The cast iron planes that looked all non-traditional in the 19th century? Yeah… okay… right.

Anyway, that plane is freakin’ awesome. Those guys do not monkey around when making a tool.

Oh, yeah, and I have my 8000x waterstone now. Yippee.