I am apathy surrounded by ambition and self-improvement.
The “30 Day Challenge”…the latest craze on the Internets promoted by the bloggisphere and Facebook and Twitter and whatever social networking tool you fancy, driven by a fleet of users seeking new experiences and new beginnings.
The premise is that you commit to trying something new every day for 30 days and tell the world about it…like having the traditional New Years resolution, but failing at the end of the first day, then repeating for the next 30 days. This seems like a lot of work.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a time I was much more ambitious and filled with aspirations to be a better person. But in the wake of my failure to reach Freedom-25 (c) back in ’02, apathy and contentment with my own self-worth won my ever-beating heart. However, while my own laziness takes precedence over most things, when the scales are balanced, a gentle hint of peer-pressure can tip them one way or the other…
It tipped the other way.
And so…here I am. I have decided to do something similar. I call it…
The Weekly Wood
…but then I said it out loud. So scratch that. I call it…
The Wooden Weekly
In an effort to spur some woodworking inspiration and motivation, my goal is to prototype and build a wooden toy once a week…for 30 DAYS! So…4 toys? Yeah…that does seem a bit of an underwhelming variation of the 30 Day Challenge. However, I do intend to keep this going for longer than the prescribed 30 days; but then again, where peer-pressure can tip the scales, laziness always prevails in the end. I give it a month.
Why toys? My shop is basically non-existent, so I am limited by my physical strength and how it compares to the weight of my power tools, as they need to be moved in/out of the house to use. But I am also limited by the light of the Day Star and the resonating noise to my forgiving neighbours. Toys are small and manageable and there are a lot of toy mechanisms that I’d like to learn; in particular, traditional folk toys, automata, mechanical models, etc.
Despite the increasing toxicity of plastics and lead-based paints in toys, and the growing popularity of natural wood toys, it’s pretty difficult to make a living as a toymaker without the convenience of mass-production or deep-pocketed consumers willing to spends hundreds of dollars on a durably hand-made, non-toxic…wooden block. But until I build that home-brew CNC machine, maybe there’s a business to be had in toy designing!
And so, the Wooden Weekly begins…And here is where I shall blog about it…