I am absolutely tempted to just focus on tables again today, but since I realized that not everyone is as obsessed with tables (more specificaly table legs) as I am at the moment, I will do my best to resist. We are in the middle of what is probably going to be a very long, drawn out process that started with moving our 90 or so year old dining room table into the garage and will end who knows where. We have just completed stage 1 (hours of obsessive research, planning & mind changing by me), stage 2 (whittling down my plan from the grander, gorgeous and far more elaborate version to the slap-dash easiest, bargain basement version), stage 3 (dark tung oil testing, which went very well & Ikea Butcher Block species and Leg selection), stage 4 initial assembly & first coat of oil of said table (chosen Ikea legs are very cute, but not up to the task at all), stage 5 realization that I should have either a) gone with the very expensive table that came finished, assembled and delivered in place from a store or b) I should have just bough the far more expensive legs that I wanted in the first place and been done with it. Now we are moving on to such things as finding new legs, deciding on colors for new legs- raw steel, stainless, white, pink, dipped yellow feet and so on & so on over the next week as we add at least 5 more coats of the dark tung oil to the Ikea Butcher Block and hope it turns out decently enough. After that there are even more stages that include recovering chairs or replacing them all together and will ends somewhere in the kitchen with adding more cabinets & counter space. What does one have to do with the other you ask? Well, possibly nothing or everything, depending on who you ask. So anyway, my wish list of to-do items has vastly expanded and so has my obsessive searching of ideas and inspiration. It includes the feasibility of chopping up 2 galvanized shelves to make a counter height table, weights of drop cloths and stencil options for a possible floor cloth project, chairs- both vintage and new, big and small- for 3 different rooms and the yard, side tables, bluestone pavers, sheets of zinc and concrete planters. I could go on and on, but I won’t go any further. I’ll just get to the point and show the pretty pictures and such.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 6:06AM 
For whatever reason, the short story collection is the much maligned bastard child of modern trade publishing, which is a shame when one comes across an excellent collection of stories such as 
