I have arrived!

[Wednesday: 3 mile hill route in Columbus; Today: St. Paul’s Church – 5 miles]

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been impressed with the fact that family members live in the same house and experience generally the same events but see things so differently.

I have three siblings, an older brother and sister and a younger brother. All of them are good people and have been very good to me over the years. It may help that we don’t live within shouting distance of each other, I don’t know.

Part of the problem with getting to know your siblings is that you experience them the most when your life is very fluid, and your own inexperience doesn’t give you much in the way of tools to figure them out. So they kind of come and go and you wrestle for your parent’s attention and all of that.

Growing up my younger brother got interested in trains. And not just model trains but real trains. We spent a lot of vacations going to railroad museums and seeing train things. Later on he became the engineer on a steam train at a tourist railroad, at least a couple of different places. So he got greasy and did mechanic type stuff. (I don’t think I ever saw that translated toward automobiles, strangely enough. But much of this happened when we were spinning out of orbit into our own adult lives.)

And, younger brothers can be bothersome at times. I can think of a few, not many, but a few instances of aggravation that I lay at his feet. But generally he is an interesting, funny and generous person. So I don’t have much to complain about.

But! The very best thing about my brother and his interest in trains was that it led him to buy a drill press. And not just a puny bench-top drill press either, the tall stand-up kind. I don’t know what ever happened to that drill press, but I have felt, until today, like it was a hole in my life when I moved away from home and no longer had access to his drill press.

Yesterday I spotted on the facebook market a person over in Alabama who was selling off an estate and there was a drill press. I shot them an offer, and they agreed. So I drove over to Birmingham this morning and picked up the drill press.

It isn’t the floor-standing model, but nearly as big. I was hoping it was a better brand, but turns out it is a Harbor Freight or similar quality. Really it is good enough for anything I might do and many times better than using a hand drill. It had quite a bit of surface rust so I worked it over with the wire wheel in my hand drill and knocked that down. I cleaned the things that needed cleaning and oiled up the things that needed oiling. I plugged it in, and it ran fine.

I need to clear off a place on the workbench where I can put it. [Hmm, says I, the work bench was his old work bench. Hey Brother, I have your old blue work bench if you ever need it.]

She also threw in a rusty and moldy old Husqvarna Rancher chain saw for free, so not only did I get my long wanted drill press but I got a bonus project.

It has been a good day!