About this website and me

In the early 2000s, during the winter, I don’t remember the exact year or month, I had a big furniture order that represented several months’ worth of work.  The furniture included a rustic staircase and other pieces that required some installation.

The staircase parts were much too long for my pickup.  When I showed up at the rental place to get the box truck I had reserved, which had a diesel motor, the rental guy said, “If you shut the truck off in this cold, it’s probably not going to restart. If that happens, don’t call us, call your own mechanic. You’ve been warned.”

I loaded the truck that day and left it idling in the driveway all night. When I woke up at 4:30 the next morning the temperature was 24 below.  I checked the truck and it was fine, but the wind had been blowing all night and where our driveway makes a corner it was completely drifted over with a three-foot-deep snow drift.

I started shoveling frantically. I had a buddy lined up to help with the installation work and he was expecting to meet me in town. We had a long drive ahead of us, followed by a long day of installing the stairs and furniture and then, of course, a long drive home. It took about half-an-hour to clear the snowdrift under the light of a faint moon. It was long enough for my hands to get really cold, to break a slight sweat under my jacket, to feel sorry for myself because of my plight, to hate myself for feeling sorry for myself because none of that was helping move the snow, and to have a very clear impulse to start a journal. It seemed a shame not to record some of my more ridiculous activities.

Shame or not, the journal never happened, but this website is sort of a successor idea.  It is a place to record my ongoing projects, link to my books, provide a gallery page for anyone curious about the furniture I used to build, post essays and keep a more or less unedited, stream-of-consciousness financial blog.

For anyone wanting a more traditional bio, here you go. I was born a  white, North American male in Vermont in 1965 and I still live here. Got a pretty good education in classics at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and I’ve been mostly self-employed since then as a woodworker and renewable energy entrepreneur. Married with two kids.