All Things Gary ...

Yeah ... I don't sound like a stalker or anything ... but - I guess I am a stalker. I adore the man. I follow him where ever he resides. I thrill at phone calls from him (OK, I guess that is anti-stalker'ish - I would be calling him ...).

Yesterday just seemed to be lots and lots of Gary. Which is a very good thing... Really.

This morning he was pouring himself a diet coke for the road and I just about asked him if we were going to have enough diet coke until he left. We laughed about it, and he said that soon maybe I would be wishing he was leaving - but he has no idea how wonderful it is that he is home. I am just not used to it - was really, really getting used to living alone. So, just an adjustment and I am sort of slow on the uptake with changes in my life - just barely start get used to one thing and it up and changes on me ....

So without further ado, here was my day with my guy:

CHURCH

Thing are still ... off? weird? discouraging? depressing? for me since I am still wandering lost down the Rabbit Hole. I became upset at church and needed to leave since I couldn't stop crying and I was mortified. I saw Gary as I was leaving and told him I had to go. He asked "Why?" and I told him "Later" and he didn't push it. Got in the car and found something driving out of the parking lot a different way than I usually do - something I had just mentioned to Gary I wanted to find. A bush of sunflowers (I think these are sunflowers). So, I wiped my face, got my camera, parked smack dab in the road since there was ZERO shoulder, and hiked in my heels and dress down a very scary, weedy hill to the bush.

I only got honked at once - that's pretty good for blocking an entire road ...

I went home, put on my inappropriate headbanger music to drive everything from my brain, and starting doing something familiar, soothing, fairly mindless ... editing my photos:

Gary was teaching the last hour or I think he might have followed me home. But 4:01 sharp his truck pulls in the drive - a very fast exit and trip home! He came in where I had my headphones on and leaned over and smiled at me - so that he would not scare me.

I turned off my music and we talked, I cried, we talked some more. Gary asked a few questions. I answered. Gary then in his wonderful way was able to make me see that things were not a dark and dim and .... whatever - trying so desperately to pull me from that bleak, dreary foreign landscape I discuss in Falling Down. He is very good at it. By the end of our conversation we were both laughing - usual for him. A rarity for me right now.

When it comes to me and making me feel better about something .... Gary has magical powers ...


LUNCH

He set off to grill up some dinner.

Minutes later he opened the back door and yelled "Lori, grab your big camera and hurry!".

So I did. And this little guy was posing on our back fence.

Nice of Gary to know it would make my day to get photos of "The Masked Bandit":

JIGS AND JOINTS

He had been working in the garage on Saturday (yeah - when is he NOT in his shop on a Saturday? OK, scouting is now looming in the future again - so when he is off playing Scoutmaster ... but other than that?)

This is a photo of the desk he is building - probably just as is, but maybe a few changes we were discussing the other day:

Now, I know that you know that I buy things ... I am spoiled, I know it, you can tell me, and I will agree with you. If I want something ... I buy it - ie my iTouch. This is a family trait! All I had to say in my e-mail to Gary to tell him I had bought an iTouch was to just 'shout out' "Clamps" and "Routers" and "Drills" and he got the point. No e-mail back with recriminations about buying something that I TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY didn't need. We each have our weaknesses when it comes to what we feel we just cant live without!

He had recently purchased a mortise & tenon jig. Mortise & Tenon is the name of a joint in woodworking - you might know this - but I will show you since his jig rocks at doing this.

You basically have a 'male' and 'female' side (I don't know how they word things like this in woodworking, but in electronics - which I am used to this is the terminology - not trying to get nasty or anything - just the way it is ....):

These fit together like a puzzle:

His jig is making both sides (a 'jig' is a piece of equipment that you use with a router, etc to make something else - generally a particular 'cut' - like these are cuts). The jig works with a router and makes both the male part and the female part, and has surgical precision:

Here is the jig with the router sitting on top of it since it is useless without the router doing the work - it is just the thing that guides the router:

Gary is very pleased about it and it seems to be working well. So he is a happy boy. I like that - so I am happy the jig is working out.

He has started the desk and here is a side that is just put together like a puzzle - nothing else is holding it together - the final 'put together' will be with some wood glue - all with mortise & tenon joints (OK, it just occurred to me if I KNEW which was the mortise part and which was the tenon part - I wouldn't have to refer to them as male and female ... Gary will inform me after reading this and I will let you know .... I know you are dying to find out .....).

So one leg put together like a puzzle:

THE TAIL THAT WAGGED THE DOG DEFENSE

He also got a drill press in a very ass backwards way. He calls it the tail wagging the dog.

He read about a great drill press table and decided to build it. It would give him more precision because there were slide insets that you could put clamps on and guides on and a bunch of whatnot I don't really know what I am talking about ...

So - he decides to build this table. He gets so far, I walked out one night to make sure he was still alive and not bleeding on the floor from whacking off some body part and he sheepishly admitted he couldn't stop ... he had covered the top in black Formica and edged it in oak! A very pretty drill press table, indeed!

So ... he started thinking that his 20 year old drill press didn't deserve the new, fancy table, and the next thing you know - a huge drill press is at our house and we our both trying to get it out of the back of his truck ....

The beautiful drill press table (with a guide on it - the blue aluminum tracks can also have clamps slide in them and hold down what ever you are trying to drill - so a very clever design):
And what I was most impressed about the new drill press:

Cool laser cross hairs (broken up by the guide so not a complete 'X')! Ooooh. Cooool.


X-RAYS

We had visitors later that evening and they were asking Gary about his injury and he mentioned that the screws that screw the two plates into his bionic clavicle jut out a half inch from the bone and just apparently hang out in muscle and tissue. I realized right then that I had not seen those x-rays - he had them taken after I left and I had not looked at them after he moved home with them.

And what's a blog if not to share gory operation and x-ray photos of injured loved ones?

The screws do look pretty ... intense. Especially since none of this metal has set off a metal detector ... yet:

Well, and thousands of words later - that's it for Gary and my Sunday!

Hoping to find my way of of my own personal, horrific 'Wonderland' sometime soon ...