Both me and my wife have been into gardening, lately. Over the years, we have built up a few pallet boxes where we grow vegetables. This lead us into health and biology of soil, which again lead us into the adventures of compost.

After finally getting a place to do some woodworking, I wanted to make some small piece of furniture as a test to myself of what I was able to make. One of the things I wish I had was a footrest to our old recliner at the cabin, and as it was quite simple in its design, I thought it was a nice thing to make. I only used hand tools for this project, except for the sewing machine for the pillow.

When I took up woodworking and bought some chisels a while back, I got slightly disappointed. The chisels were OK, but not as sharp as I would have liked. I have three vintage Stanley planes. Two of them were really sharp upon arriving, but they had also become duller over time. So it was time to get into sharpening

After some investigation I bought diamond plates as they were an easy start. I also bought a jig to hold chisels and plane blades.

I live in a flat in a city, and having a workshop was off the table. We also own a cabin where we spend most weekends. The cabin has an annex, and last year we had it insulated. This gave us an extra room for several things: My son plays (electrical) drums there on his old drum set, and we also work from the cabin from time to time, so an office was a nice addition. But I wanted a workshop, like I always hoped to get one day.

Both my grandfathers made this puzzle and other wood puzzles in their time. My mom call them “trasbokk” in Norwegian (something like “a difficult thing”). As I am still quite inexperienced to woodworking, I thought it might be a fun project to make one myself.

2025 has been a lot for most of us. The world isn’t going in the right direction, with democracy being on the retreat all over the world, and the effects of global warming becoming more and more evident. There are a lot I can’t control, but I can do something about where I store my data and spend my digital time.

I have for a while wanted to make a new blog. I used to blog many years ago, but stopped when the world moved away from blogs.

Over the last couple of years, my wish to move away from large centralized services has increased. I want to get back the control of my own data. So getting back to blogging made sense.

I don’t expect many readers, and do this as much for myself as for others. But with support for activitypub, who knows? Perhaps I will get a reader or two?