Andrew's View of the Week

I was doing some research for today’s blog post and discovered that you can buy a former US nuclear missile site.  Turns out that there are a bunch of people out there who’ve done that and have posted extensive YouTube videos about the process of buying, digging out and renovating an old missile base into a home for your family.

Part of me is thinking, WOW! that would be cool – my very own missile base.  I grew up during the cold war and there is just a coolness factor in owning a piece of history.  Kind of like owning a tank – I mean what kid wouldn’t want their own real Army tank to drive around town.  It would be fun to drive to the store to pick up your groceries in one. “Thanks, just throw the chips and salsa into the turret, hang the other bags on the cannon.”

The other part of me knows that Heather won’t agree to either buying an abandoned missile silo or a tank.  Well, I’m basing that on how she reacted when I told her I wanted to buy a crane.  “What would I use it for?”  Come on it’s a crane I could move heavy things around.

I found out about missile silos because I finished the first set of cabinet doors for the laundry room cupboards.  The doors work, but they aren’t perfect.  Turns out the frame isn’t square, the doors are about 1/16 of an inch too wide, and I placed the knobs so high that you can’t reach them from the floor.

A few hours of fiddling, recutting, sanding and thinking I should just start over, I got them to close – sort of – there’s a trick to it.  I have more work to do.

Okay, nothing is perfect, which naturally made me think of my Methodist roots and the many quotes from John Wesley on perfection.  A very Methodist thing to say would be something like, “We’re not perfect, but we moving towards perfection.”  I’ve actually said that kind of thing to others.  There have been times in my life when I thought striving for perfection was the perfect goal for my life.

These days, I’m less inclined to try to be perfect.  It’s a really heavy burden to work that hard to achieve perfection in anything.  Clearly, I’m not a perfect woodworker and getting to perfect first time fitting doors seems a daunting task.  Looking at my doors and other projects, I’d settle for good enough.

Then I thought that might make a good name for a YouTube channel, “Good Enough Woodworks.”  Since it was time to write a post, I decided to do some quick research.  I opened a tab for YouTube and Google search and started clicking away.  I looked up some Wesley quotes on perfection and after a few minutes of trying to decipher 18th century English I switched to searching for woodworking channel names.

Then I realized that I was getting nowhere on my post for the day and thought I wouldn’t write a post at all.  Then for reasons I can’t explain, one YouTube search showed a channel devoted to tanks – specs, pictures, discussions, how to renovate and where you can buy a nice WWII tank.

Personally, I would kind of like a WWII halftrack and with a few more clicks I found the all M3 halftrack channel.  It didn’t take long for that to escalate and presto there was the Titian II missile silo channel and a video on how to buy one.

It was at that point that I realized that my goal for the perfect post was gone.

So instead, here is a post that I hope is good enough.