"Tom Watson" wrote in message
news:1126229189.56f170ded3cac2e4838262f6e0341d1d@t eranews...
I am sometimes the recipient of kudos for the beautiful work that I
have done.

Tommy Plamman gets the same treatment.

The interesting thing to me about this is that it is really about the
kind of work that we have been allowed to do.

The stretching of your skills comes at the behest of your customers.

For a man who makes his living at it, these stretching exercises come
more frequently, and with the added impetus of profit.

Mike Hide would never have learned to carve as well as he does, if he
were only responding to a request from his wife, to make a nice carved
piece.


I'm with you Tom. As much as I love to work with wood - it's only a hobby.
I have no desire or interest in doing it as a profession. I love to bass
fish too but have not interest in doing tournaments. I did a couple of
tournaments for the experience a while back - and I hated it. As soon as
you put competition or the $$$ as part of the hobby, it's just not fun
anymore.

I have an office job and the woodworking allows me to escape that and focus
on nothing but the project at hand.

I'm not a religious person but it brings up the sermon our priest gave
months ago. He said that we often live in the past or the future. We are
always thinking about what we did yesterday that we need to fix tomorrow.
He said there are very few things that make us live in the present. I
thought, woodworking is one of those things, you think about anything other
than the present, you'll lose your fingers in the future.

I think when you turn your woodworking hobby into a profession, you lose the
present. Now, you have schedules to meet so you can put food on the table
and you lose that ability to focus entirely on the task at hand.