Anyway, I had the reoccurring nightmare again, of working a radio broadcast shift in a studio where nothing works, I can’t find the songs on the playlist, I’m running out of time, forgetting to air the required spots, the log is all wrong… I understand that many people have nightmares about a final exam that they haven’t studied for, or for a class that they aren’t even in … I have the nightmare about the Radio Station That Doesn’t Function.

The other thing is that I get a wild hair about fixing something … something big. When my daughter deployed to Kuwait and Iraq for six months in 2003, I ripped out all the carpets and painted all the inside of the house, to include the walls and the concrete floor. This time around, it’s only been a couple of pieces of furniture: the first was a nice Colonial-style slant-top desk that I built from a mail-order kit. A corner joint cracked apart, ages ago, and nothing seemed to work as a permanent fix until I took it all apart, sanded the top and sides, scraped out the hardened glue, and reassembled it all with wooden pegs to reinforce the broken corner joint.

I didn’t have room to work, and even to get to some of this until my daughter got her own place for herself and Wee Jamie. This time, I’ve tackled the 1920s Hoosier cabinet that I bought for $600 around 1981 from a vintage/handicraft store in Glendale that was using it as a store display fitting. But it had a price tag on it, and I was flush after the year in Greenland, so what the heck? I liked vintage and antiques. A previous owner had a go at inexpertly refinishing it before. From the bits that I discovered, I think originally it had been painted mint-green, with chrome latches, hinges and drawer pulls. It had a flour sifter, three original glass spice bottles, and a small clock and a mirror in the center door, and some other interesting elements … but it has been sadly neglected in the last decade or so. One of the metal brackets which held the top and bottom in place and allowed the enamel worktop to slide between had almost rusted through, and the tambor cover for the bottom shelf had disintegrated so badly that it didn’t slide any more.

So I took it all apart today – and boy howdy, was the tambor in sad shape, now that I could get to it after removing the back panel! (Yeah, and filthy, too … looks like it had been repaired several times – there are three different fabrics involved.) Watched a Youtube video about how to repair and revive tambor covers, sent away for a bottle of hide glue, and some replacement parts from one of the enterprises that still offers reproduction furniture parts … and … well, renovating furniture as a stress response is better and more useful than most available alternatives, isn’t it?