WeeklyPosts

I’ve spent the last week sorting through decades’ worth of tools, from the practical to the strange to the beautifully unnecessary. Some I’ll use, many I won’t, but each one carries a story, mine or the previous owner’s. I’m keeping a few of each, the best, the oldest, and the oddest. A pruning saw, a bent awl, a heavy center punch… tools that may never work again but still deserve a home. They remind me that making is also remembering.

A weekend of renovation work left my hands bruised, scraped, and stinging under hot water, and strangely, that made me pause. I spend most of my week behind a computer, but these hands have lived other lives: cuts from old projects, numb spots from old mistakes, callouses from tools, not instruments. They are clunky, uneven, imperfect, and completely mine. We forget how much they do until they hurt. This week, I found myself grateful for them.

I’ve been reading Never Too Small and Apartamento, two magazines that look almost identical but couldn’t be more different. One is obsessed with how spaces work; the other with how people live in them. Together they reminded me of something I keep noticing these days: homes gather meaning fast, no matter how long you’ve been in them. A lived space is always a mix of intention and accident, logic and story, and that balance says more about us than we think.

Instructional design is a real discipline, but it rarely reaches everyday products. This weekend I assembled a sauna and wrestled with a power tool’s cryptic interface, both cases where bad instructions turned design into frustration. Great instructions are invisible; bad ones shout. They define how much we trust the product, the brand, and even ourselves. We may forgive flaws in form or finish, but never in the moment a product fails to tell us how to use it.

We filled a Tacoma bed and made over $300 at the scrapyard, one man’s junk turned cash. My friend helped me separate copper, aluminum and iron; the place looked rough but ran like a small, lean economy. Men shouted in Spanish, cranes moved with octopus arms and a compactor turned scrap into bricks. It wasn’t romantic, but it was honest work. For quick cash and minimal fuss, the scrapyard is the place – ugly, efficient, and quietly essential.

Commuting is wearing me down, so I’m testing two days a week at home. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. I’ve always been a studio rat, thriving on energy, noise, and collaboration. At home, the distractions multiply: renovation noise, kitchen temptations, unfinished projects calling from the window. Even my desk setup conspires against me. For some, remote work is freedom. For me, it’s a discipline I have to earn again, proof that even comfort takes effort.

Travel loses its glamour with time. What once felt exciting becomes exhausting, even when the hotel has five stars. I stayed four nights in a shabby place by choice – cheap, close, forgettable. The stains, the lights, the smells, the mattress shaped by strangers, every detail reminded me how far I was from home. And yet, experiences like this sharpen the eye, test tolerance, and redefine comfort. The best part of travel? That moment when you finally open your own front door.

Sorting through a sculptor’s garage, I realized I wasn’t cleaning, I was curating. Every item, from rusted tools to wooden mock-ups and forgotten molds, carried a decision about what mattered and why. Curation isn’t just selection; it’s storytelling, authorship, even a form of censorship. What we keep, what we let go, and what we choose to pass on all shape meaning. Like rust on metal, meaning lingers, slow, inevitable, and deeply human.

At 18, I was an AFS exchange student in San Diego, living with a ceramics teacher who shaped more than clay in my life. I left ceramics behind, though it kept surfacing – in design school, Expo’98 vessels, and now in my daughter’s studies. Our new home came with a sculpture studio, alive with the presence of its former owner, and I couldn’t resist: it will become a ceramics studio. After decades, I find myself circling back to clay. Go figure.

I spent the weekend planting trees, nine of them and shaping a vegetable patch. Hard work, sometimes made harder by rocky soil and roots, but deeply satisfying in the silence of the morning, hearing the blade cut into the earth. My wife can name each tree; I mostly plant and hope. The real reward is knowing time will take over now – growth, seasons, patience. A poorly designed tool gave me blisters, but that’s a side note. What stays are the trees.