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Posted by Derek Olson (Oldwolf) January 26, 2010

A day full of suprises.

Well sometimes you wake up in the morning and you don't know where the day is going to end up. Most of the time in my experience, where you end up is worse off if it's unexpected. I'll never have Ed McMahon knocking on my door offering me a million dollars, (come to think of it that would be especially out of the question these days, wouldn't it?)  Today wasn't a million dollars, not close to that by a long shot, but it was on the very positive end of the bell curve.

It started with a call from one of my former managers, I sent her an email several weeks ago asking her to let me know if there were going to be any openings in the near future. See I am an experienced Surgical Technologist when I am not making sawdust, but to skip a very long and tedious story, I find myself back in Wisconsin without a job in my field. Thus I have been answering customer service calls for Verizon Wireless for the past 4 months. It's killing me, slowly and painfully, but you have to do what you have to do. Right? Anyhow, I was woken up this mid morning by the call, my former manager called to tell me to apply. A huge weight off my shoulders. My wife is going back to school and not working right now, I'm making just over minimum at Verizon, back to a good paying position with decent benefits at a job I'm good at. . . . to say this is a good feeling doesn't really do it justice.  Actually it feels pretty surreal after all the worry and stress. Now that makes for a pretty good day by itself, but if it didn't somehow involve woodworking I wouldn't be flapping my lips about it here. Today's my day off, usually my wife takes the car to school and I stay home and beat around the shop, but I had to go into LaCrosse to buy some supplies for the next project (more on that in the future) So after the call we got up and decided to go get some breakfast to celebrate. We finished eating with about an hour to spare, so we drove over to the antique mall a few blocks away. Three floors of antique anything... you gotta love it. Two weeks ago I found a nice rosewood tri-square there in good shape and still at a true right angle for 10$. But two weeks ago we only had the time to look at the first and second floors of the mall, we skipped the basement. We purposely went down to the basement to pick up where we left off.

On a shelf in the back corner of the cinderbrick walls, not buried or hidden, but sitting calmly with a bunch of fellow tools, was a great old saw vise, sticker of 15$ on it. I swooped in and grabbed that baby and did not put it down. Found one just like it tonight on eBay asking 9.99 + 10 S&H, no bids were placed yet and that would, ofcourse, drive the price up. I don't have a name of manufacturer yet, all I can make out stamped into the steel now is "No. 3" It will take me some more research to find it's maker. Now this puppy has a lot of caked on rusting and will need a good amount of cleaning and scrubbing to clean it up, but all the articulations work, the vise clamps tight and even, the thumb screw works smooth to clamp it to the bench. let me just put up some pictures here of this thing for a bit. Now it will take some time and effort to get this baby cleaned up and working like a champ, but the whole thing is funny. I have been feeling like hell lately, but to get an opportunity to go back to work doing something I like, and to find a good priced saw vise, on a day I have money, and at the same time I'm working on cleaning up and getting my saws in order... man I tell you what, I cannot sit back and tell myself that this is all chance and circumstance. Like the vice that's going to take some elbow grease to clean up, something or someone is telling me that everything is going to be fine if I keep working at it.

Labels: Thoughts and Observations Tools

