I'm thankful for you guys. I am self taught for a lot of things, but the help of colleagues is always useful.
I'm thankful for people who make me smile about little things. The other day I posted a picture of a tool & cutter grinder I picked up recently and a small forge my son and I were playing with to pound out our first blacksmith project. (We beat perfectly good round bar into a trinket of questionable value.) I was pretty happy spending the day taking turns with the hammer with my son, but a comment from a fellow tackle maker in the Makers & Builders group really made me smile. He said, "If I was in you shop I'd be running around like Smeggle saying :Oh my precious to every machine in there." It really made me appreciate every tool I have.
Today we made a stump for my little 70lb anvil. Living in the desert big old chunks of tree trunk for anvil stumps aren't laying around everywhere. We cut and planed the 2x12s that were laying out back of my shop. The ones I rejected when I put the ceiling/upper floor on my office. Now I have a giant glue/lam a little less than 2 feet long. My son and I spent a large part of the morning and a bit of the afternoon flattening boards and gluing them back into a tree trunk. Probably an inadequate one for a real anvil, but the 70lb Russian anvil will work fine on it... when we finish it. We ran out of glue.
Days like today I am really thankful for every little thing, and it doesn't really matter that its Thanksgiving day.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody.