Fits and Starts and Harvey

The truth is, the new place has been moving forward in fits and starts. i think the original idea was first spawned sometime in July, and the lease didn't finally happen until this month.

For the past 2 weeks, we (Chris, Don, and I) have been building a dividing wall to separate the space into two areas, one will be the bench room, one will house the machines. The basic idea is that the noisy dusty stuff will happen in one room, and the quieter stuff will happen in the bench room, where we'll be free to breathe without dust masks on.

By "the past 2 weeks," I mean, a few days last week, and a few days this week. Chris and Don both live in the area, and they have had other things to do for the latter half of each week so far. So it took us basically a week and a half to get the wall put together. But it's up. Mostly... it still needs doors to fully separate the space.

One side note about the shop... there's a peregrine falcon that lives on the side of the mill building on the other side of the parking lot. For no apparent reason, I've decided his name should be Harvey. We heard about him from Jimmy, who takes care of the building maintenance, and is also doing our electrical work. He said that he found the next on the other building.

Jimmy also had a recent story that happened in our space shortly after we started negotiating with the building management. He was working with his assistant, and the pigeon was perched up near the ceiling on something. Jimmy told his assistant to watch, as he poked a stick at the bird. Jimmy said that if the bird got onto the stick, that would mean that he's tame. Well, sure enough, the bird was tame, and had a band around his ankle, and Jimmy's pretty sure it was a homing pigeon. So, he took the bird in hand, walked over to the window, and let it go. Around this time, he realized "Oh, shit... the falcon!" He's pretty sure that's why the pigeon decided to hide indoors in the first place.

We have no idea if the pigeon actually made it home or not. But it's a pretty cool story.