Suddenly I am easier to shop for...

My wife has always said that it is impossible (or at least improbable) to shop for me. I am pretty happy with my lot in life, and there are not many things that I look at and say "Hey, I would like someone to buy that for me". If I can afford it, I would rather get it for myself than burden someone else with the cost, and if I cannot afford it, well, I am not about to ask someone else to try to pay for it!

I married someone who is imbued with the true holiday spirit, however, so every time a gift-giving occasion comes along, she asks if there is anything that I want. Last winter, the answer was suddenly easy: I wanted a mini-lathe, like the one that I worked on in the ornament class. Any gift (or even no gift) would be fine, but if she was asking...

Then came the day (an annual tradition, as I am sure it is with many couples) when we went our own ways in an effort to find things to buy for each other. My wife went off to do this while I was still at work (I work in a home office in our basement). We had agreed that she would have the use of a downstairs closet in which to store things that I was not allowed to see, so I kept my office door closed when she came home so that I would not see what she was bringing in.

Whatever it was, it was pretty big. I heard her fighting with something that she was sliding across the floor of the basement, and I called out to her to see if I could help. She told me to keep my office door closed and not to pay attention to the noises. After a while, I heard the closet door close, and it was safe for me to come out of my office. I had my suspicions, but I had been fooled before, so I was not sure what awaited me as a holiday gift.

It turned out to be the lathe I wanted, and a set of woodturning tools! I was (I thought) ready to set up shop and start turning ornaments! I still basically had no idea what was still needed to get to the point where I could put something meaningful onto the lathe. For one thing, I still did not have a spot to put the lathe...which leads us to:

Next: Setting up the woodshop