The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of you radical leftists out here tonight maybe remember the good old days when the Owl Party ran candidates for public office every year.  Weird policy statements in the voter pamphlet, strange photos, a real hoot, no pun intended.  I’ve been spending some quality time reading our local Island County pamphlet.  Gotta say, I miss those Owl Party chuckleheads … but … we got plenty of humor anyway if you bother to read these.

I’d like to say the funnier ones are always the Independents, The America First Party Republicans, The Maga Republican Party, The Trump Republican Party, my favorite the JFK Republican Party, but we got plenty of Democratic howlers too.  One fellow, running for U.S. Senator, claims that bitcoin will fix our broken monetary system and quote provide relief from the failing US dollar.  He advocates privacy, individual sovereignty, and private property.  ‘In summary,’ he wrote, ‘Bitcoin’.  Kinda like that scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman gets a one word tip on the future.  Plastic.  Bitcoin?  I suspect that was written before cryptocurrencies’ bottoms dropped out and the US dollar reached parity with the euro.

But I’m not here to disparage folks running for public office.  We got plenty of Americans who do that every day — and I’m not just talking about Fox News.  All of these folks in politics, even the certifiably crazy ones, are willing to throw their hats in the ring out of some sense of patriotic obligation.  And sure, some are there to protect their own self interests, maybe help the rich get a little richer, but some are genuinely wanting to make government work better, lift up the underprivileged, advocate for the homeless, make our health care system work for all of us, provide social services along with better roads and adequate police departments.  Their political statements won’t make you laugh, but they do provide food for thought.  Janet St. Clair’s reiterates what she’s been doing the past four years and what she’d like to keep doing the next four years.  Personally, I’m glad to hear someone speak up for the homeless and the underprivileged, the poor and the sick.   I think maybe the rich will do okay, they’ll do just fine.

Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House for ten years in the 70’s and 80’s, famously said all politics are local.  I guess Tip never dreamed of the Internet, never imagined Facebook and Twitter, never heard Hot Talk Radio or watched Fox News and the likes of Tucker Carlson.  In the time since he was Speaker the world has shrunk to the size of the South End, all local politics are nationalized, globalized and shrink wrapped to fit in an Amazon drone delivery.

When Karla Jacks was running for commissioner, her opponent and his trolls accused her of planning to shut down the Navy Base on Whidbey.  That opponent is still running to save Alt Field from you radical leftists.  Commissioners in Island County are powerful people apparently.  But not even Janet has managed to override the Navy and the U.S. government.  Probably just needs another term in office.  I say we give it to her.  Like the rich, I think NAS Whidbey will do okay.

Janet St. Clair, ladies and gentlemen, and you antifa too….

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Lately there’s been a lot of breast beating, fist slamming, head slapping outrage over Joe Manchin pulling the plug on the latest attempt to address climate change.  Big surprise considering he has business ties to the coal industry, gets a small fortune in donations from the oil and gas industry, and basically is a supposed Democrat in a state that voted Trump by a huge margin.  Poor Joe.  He gets to be the scapegoat for us radical leftists.

But c’mon, Joe isn’t really the problem, is he?  Every single member of the Republican Party votes against any bill that addresses global warming.  Even some in the Democratic Party vote against Cap and Trade, emissions reductions, solar and wind subsidies, all those bills that really don’t have a ghost of a chance against a block vote in the Senate by all those GOP ostriches who see obstruction as their best tactic to win back the White House.

Maybe they really don’t believe global warming is a reality, just another antifa myth to throw a curveball at the gullible public.  Or, like Covid mask mandates and vaccinations, just big government telling us what to do.  You know, like save lives.  Course, to be fair, they argue that it’s better to lose a few old geezers to the virus than it is to harm the economy.  Money talks, in case you live under a rock, and big money talks loud.  You could argue that millions of hospitalizations and deaths would hurt the economy but … seriously, you still think logic works on a party of science deniers?

England just broke its all time high temperature yesterday.  By a whopping 3 plus degrees.  India is setting records.  America is setting records.  Let’s pretend it isn’t man made, just nature doing its natural thing.  But I think most of the Ostrich Party knows it is man made, they just don’t want to cut into profits, they don’t see sacrifice as a national good.  Pretty clearly, they’ve made it clear that it’s every man for himself in the Yew Ess Aye, good luck to the women, the trans, the gays and lesbians.  The Titanic might be sinking but they’ll be the first to elbow their way to the lifeboats.

Good old American independence, Marlboro Men all, captains of their destiny, Ayn Randians to the end.  Existential Threat?  Not for them.  Their kids maybe, their grandkids for sure.  But meanwhile, there’s still money to be made.  The cost for their progeny, well, let’s just worry about the quarterly earnings and let them fend for themselves.  History will not be kind.  And when the sand they got their heads tucked into reaches Sizzle, it may be too late for these birds, just an underground shish-kabob, tastes exactly like chicken.

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Let me state at the outset, I am no real woodworker.  This is not false modesty, trust me.  My real woodworking friends will tell you I’m a screw and glue carpenter, a 90-10 guy, the sort who possibly tries to be better but loses interest part way through and figures 90% is close enough.  Really more like 80%.  I could make excuses, lack of good tools, insufficient training, a shop that’s a shack on its way out, but the truth is I’m too lazy to learn joinery techniques, good finishing skills or more exotic methods of the trade.

What I figure, see, is the design is the thing.  The design, if it’s artsy fartsy enough, will more than compensate for primitive building strategies.  Plus, use interesting woods, laminate them, draw the viewer’s eye to those rather than give a close inspection to the slightly off joints or the rough finish.  More than likely I’ll attempt a difficult design, get in over my head, then have to adjust on the fly.  Real woodworkers proceed with a set of plans.  Me, well, not so much.  Let me give you a case in point, my latest project.

I have an old colonial maple hutch that’s a little too wide for where we have it so I thought maybe I would make a replacement, one that would actually fit the space.  But naturally I wasn’t going to duplicate the old one in miniature.  I am, if not a woodworker, supposedly an artist.  Hence, I needed to make an art piece.  What I did was, first off, laminate these narrow strips of wood I had laying around the shop, maple and walnut lengths until I had a pretty sizeable pile of 2×3 lengths, some with a maple strip in the middle, some the reverse.  Lots of them, enough to make a skeleton framework, no plywood carcass, no plywood back, no doors in the lower cabinet.  My goal was to create a sort of intricate ghost cabinet, bones but no skin, everything visible.

Naturally I didn’t have a finished design in mind, just figured I’d build it piece by piece and hope for the best.  Sometimes this actually works.  Sometimes not.  I have 5 acoustic guitars I could show you that would illustrate both.  This, though, I wanted a lower cabinet and an upper bookcase with shelves, the bookcase resting on top of the bottom, slightly narrower.  The shelves, since I’d laminated everything in the bodies of both, got made from strips of maple and walnut and some left over bubinga from the guitars.  A ton of glue went into this hutch, let me tell you.  Clamps by the dozens squeezed glue out of joints that had to be cleaned up when it dried.  There was lots of sanding, 60 grit to 100 to 150 and on and on.  A real woodworker would have taken it to 350 to 400 and even to 600 grit.  Me, I quit at 220, figuring further sanding would be wasted on my finish techniques.  Plus, think about a framework of so many pieces of laminate and imagine nice finish work in those hard to reach spaces.  I couldn’t either….

Yesterday I put the final shelves on the bookcase and oiled the entire hutch.  There’s a joy in watching plain sanded wood come to life as the Danish seeps in and gives it color and depth.  And a small sense of accomplishment … despite the limitations of my woodworking skills.  What I think, and what I want to convey, is that you don’t need to be a professional woodworker to build your own stuff.  There is no satisfaction like doing it yourself.  Although, I have a couple of guitars that convinced me that might not always be true.  And why I quit building them.  But they do look nice hanging on the wall….

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