It's been a challenging few weeks here in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I've been feeling constantly exhausted – crashing as early at 7-8pm at night and waking up in the morning still just as exhausted. I suspect chronic / adrenal fatigue from dealing with excessive stress for far too long.
Last Sunday was particularly challenging after an incident which left me feeling very down and drained. I arrived home with the intention to do some work but as the garage door opened I looked in and saw my tools and thought…
“Oh yeah… let's do this…”
Around 18 months ago I purchased a full (haha, “full”? Like there's still not a bunch of tools I want to add to it?) kit of 18V power tools which I use occasionally to build items for my office. For some time I've been wanting to do a test build of some shelves and today was the day.
I don't (yet) have a table saw or mitre saw so this was going to be a skill saw adventure meaning extra care needed for measurements and cuts to ensure everything fits together. So with some measurements scribbled on the back of an envelope I got to work and 90 minutes later I made a thing.
I need to paint it to purdify it and also make it waterproof. As a proof of concept though it was a great experience, enjoyable and really helped take my mind off the chaos and stress that was making me feel down.
Building this also reminded me of my Dad who was always finding things to build and fix. I have him to thank for teaching us that safety always comes first – there are no shortcuts to safety when using power tools even when it makes the build times longer. Let's keep our eyes and fingers in place, yeah?
So next I'm going to look at building some shelving for my home office. Once again I find myself lusting over table saws and mitre saws at Bunnings trying to justify spending $1800 for tools I'll use maybe 1-2 times a month at most.