Pre-Orders Shipping Out!

The past two days will be forever blurred as one in my mind. At 10:30 Monday morning, I got the long-awaited phone call from the freight driver telling me he was arriving at my storage unit with the magazines. My good friend and studio assistant, Mike, and I met the driver and began unloading. Shortly thereafter, two more cars showed up: my wife Julia and my friend Ryan (you probably know him as the red-bearded Liberty Tool Company guy). We carted the boxes of pre-ordered copies in a three-car caravan to my house/ad hoc packing facility.

Then the chaos began. As we were setting up the tables and working out the workflow details, the rest of the crew arrived. There were nine of us working our tails off to get these things out asap for you readers. It was the perfect crew for this project: Richard (from the Living History Days event), Ryan and Tanya (from Liberty Tool), Mike (my studio assistant), my sister-in-law, my mother-in-law, our good friend Brittnay (who did the interview transcriptions), and Julia and I.

We all got along so well even though not everyone had met before. The truth is most of us are drawn to this mid coast Maine area because of very similar interests. Throughout the two days I overheard conversations about hand tools, the role of traditional craft in the today’s society, local food, homeschooling, breastfeeding, spinning wool, raising farm animals, homesteading, hauling water, the role local economy plays in the development of strong community, and the evils of television. Our community here is still living out the back-to-the-land movement inspired by the Nearings in the 1950s so we were in good company.

My wife and I tried to make these two days as fun (and delicious) as possible for everyone. I think I can say with confidence we all had a blast. I am so grateful for their help. They all worked so hard and stayed optimistic to the last minute. There were new friendships made and the existing ones were deepened. What an amazing crew. (Thank you for your help, gang!)

We ran out of shavings for packing halfway through so Richard began making more!

We loaded up Richard's pine box to overflowing several times

The first day we were able to get just under 1/3 of them packed and dropped off at the Post Office. The second day ended up being a 14 hour day in total. Around 8:00 pm last night, we had them all packed into the poly mailers. Today I’m attaching the shipping labels and delivering the last 2/3 of them. As you can tell from the picture below, it is still a lot of handling and hauling so I can’t guarantee they will all get out in today’s mail but I will do my best. Although totally exhausted, I am feeling very blessed to have your support, readers. Thank you so much!