Hello, people of permies! I'm making this post to fulfill the
thread requirement for the
brand a location BB.
I attended the SKIP event at
Wheaton Labs last year, and overall I had a great time. By the end, I was completely burnt out from the sheer volume of information I had learned and tasks I had carried out. So I set a single goal for my last day - make a
wood burned sign. It seemed like a simple
BB I could knock out with the time I had left. Several people suggested that I make a sign for the bench that
Ash had created before I arrived, so I did just that.
I didn't really have any context on why people thought it was important to label his bench with his name, nor did I have the mental
energy to ask about it. I just made the sign, mounted it, and then headed off to the airport. After I got home, I saw that my submission was rejected for being too small. The size requirements were clearly stated in the BB description, I just completely overlooked it. So I figured I would try again next time I visited WL.
Well, with the BB20 event, I had a chance to redeem myself. I knew from my last attempt that making a wood burned sign was really quite easy, so I once again left it for the last day. One BB I was very excited to tackle was the
three log bench. I asked folks if they knew of any good logs to use for that purpose, and I was told "there's a good log over by Ash's bench".
I didn't realize it until later, but by putting the sign up last year I had branded the location. There were a few times during the event where someone made reference to objects by Ash's bench, and I'd like to think that the sign I placed helped the name stick in everyone's memory. So off I went to make a bench of my own, by the bench I had branded last year.
It was really quite challenging to make the bench - I ended up working on it over the
course of four days, stopping to focus on less strenuous BBs when needed. A fellow
permie took a lot of footage of me making it, which was cool - hopefully it'll end up as a nice video. Ash's bench served as an excellent place to hold my tools and to relax a bit when I needed a break. In the end, I was very happy with the result of my labor:
After a couple days of working on it, I was talking with some of the folks at WL when they told me more about Ash's bench. Rather than splitting a log to make the flat surface, he hewed the top with a hatchet until it was flat
enough to sit on. And when he finished, he found that it was too high to meet the BB requirements. So he had to keep hewing until it was short enough, which apparently took hours. After all the time I spent laboring on my bench right next to where he built his, I felt a spiritual kinship with Ash, even though I've never met or seen him!
All of this takes me back to my wood burned sign. I'm a strong believer in the value of failure as a mode of learning. Despite my first sign being rejected, I learned a lot by making it. So for my second sign, I wanted to honor the value of my past failures. I put a quote I really like - "The master has failed more times than the novice has tried". I tried to decorate it a bit with one of the stamps in the wood burning kit, but those didn't turn out so good - just another step on my path to mastery. I mounted the sign on the bench I made, which was a short ways away from Ash's bench. Plus, the first two legs I cut for my bench were too short, but they were a great height for sitting on, so between the two benches and the two extra rounds I cut there's a nice little circle for sitting.
So that's the story of Ash's bench, and my bench, and what I learned from the
experience. Perhaps later someone will say "Let's go hang out at Ash's bench" and they'll have enough seats for a whole group.
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