Cabinet and Shelf Done

Done.

Or nearly so. Now I'm going to find myself anxious to move this project forward in some other way. Oh, I'm still making a thin shelf box and finishing the shelf that goes in the vanity, but those are trifles. Just like the cabinet pulls, which I will mount last, or the cabinet floor holes for the water pipes. That can come later.

Leave it to my wife to keep me humbled. She looked at that cherry shelf box, then looked at a nearby $25 Walmart bookshelf - particle board covered with a wood pattern laminate. To her, they looked the same.

Yes. I imagine they do. The desk I am sitting at is covered particle board held together with quarter-turn fittings. The laminate has worn off the front edge and is permanently loose. The top is cracked and bowed along the edges. Perhaps one day I will make a desk for myself.

This has been an interesting "winter" project. That I am overly self-reliant has often been pointed out as a weakness of mine. In that light, I find it fascinating that I react to my want of cherry woodwork in my master bathroom by learning woodworking and making the items myself. My reaction to wanting a tiled bathroom floor is to take a Polaris class in tiling.

I have a hundred dollars worth of floor tile sitting in my front room, waiting for me to tear up my bathroom and install it.

Is this me, or is this me rebelling against a label by living it in spades?

My midlife crisis continues unabated. I showed my daughter a video of a shuttle launch and explained that I saw one a couple years ago. She told me that she would like to see one, too. She was not happy when I explained that we had retired the shuttle and had nothing to replace it. I had gone back to NASA to make an impact - to put some poor sot's butt back on the moon or sling a hunk of iron to Jupiter.

Perhaps Jimmy Buffet put it best in A Pirate Looks at Forty.

Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late
The cannons don't thunder, there's nothin' to plunder
I'm an over-forty victim of fate
Arriving too late, arriving too late

Maybe I'm not two hundred years too late, but fifty. Arriving too late, indeed.