What Meaneth This?

A brief history

Bare Bones Musings? What does that even mean? How did that come about? Come along, it’ll be fun.

We’ll travel back in time a few years. I became really obsessed with woodworking. It’s a great hobby. I learned a lot from the whole thing. I still occasionally put together a little project. When I first started dove into the hobby, I looked into magazines, books, YouTube and even TV shows. I was doing research. I wanted to learn how to build things. After a while, I began to notice something. The men and women that were producing these amazing looking builds, furniture, tables, rocking horses, etc. all seemed to have something in common. They had like $50k in tools and equipment. They had shops, dust control systems, computer operated engravers, like the craziest stuff I’d never seen.

I’d head out to my garage with a head full of ideas and dreams. And there I’d find my circular saw, cordless drill and assorted hand tools. Now I know that our forefathers had even less than that, I understand. This is not me complaining. But I quickly recognized that I had very little to start with. But I started anyway. And jokingly referred to myself and the projects as “Bare Bones Shop”. As time went on, I acquired more tools and developed some skill, but I am nowhere near what those other folks had, and I am OK with that. I learned to not compare myself with others. Just work on it for the fun of it and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Fast forward a few years, the awesome skill of blacksmithing found me. I fell in love. I did a lot of the same research that I had done earlier. Again, I quickly found the prices of tools and equipment to be very high. I invested in myself, took some classes to learn the basics and moved on. I bought a (very) small anvil, a couple of hammers and tongs and figured out how to build a forge. Again, I saw others on YouTube with equipment that I couldn’t even imagine but they turned out amazing work. Regrettably, I wasn’t able to do much to develop that skill. Metal is expensive. Tools are expensive. The time commitment was even more expensive. But believe me, the desire to return to that trade is still inside my soul. Once one starts bending and shaping metal on an anvil, it gets in your blood. I, again, found myself referring to it as my “Bare Bones Shop”, in a loving, joking manner.

Here again, I find myself within a new pursuit, writing. I lack a lot of what other people might have. I don’t have a degree from college. I don’t have fancy machines, I don’t know how to use AI or ChatGPT or anything. I am OK with that. What I write are my thoughts, or lack thereof. I have a laptop. I have some ideas. As of this writing I have 19 followers. So I consider myself pretty fortunate. I find myself at the “Bare Bones” stage.

There is another meaning to add to this, a double-meaning, if you wll. As one writes, they are, in a sense, baring their soul, or at least that’s the way I do it. I am working to improve that part of me, being more comfortable with opening myself up to others. I look at as, when I write I am letting you see the “bare bones” of who I am. Hence, “Bare Bones Musings”.

For now, I’m just a guy writing, learning, trying something new. Nothing fancy. Trying to find a voice. Hoping that as I go, someone else will find an ounce of courage to do something new in their life too. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe today is your time. Go for it.