It's rather liberating to wake up on Thanksgiving morning and remember that the whole meal is already done because I'd prepared it the day before. It's the one day a year that I cook meat, so there's always a bit of squish in the timing and I love just letting each part of the whole be done when it wants to be done. Turkey done at 2. Potatoes done at 5:30. No problem.
After battling a bit of holiday traffic, we arrived at Dylan's shop a little after one to pick him up, then went to his place where I threw the rolls in the oven (having risen overnight) as I heated everything else in the little microwave. One of Dylan's housemates, Stephanos, joined us for dinner. He's here on a student visa from Greece (this is his fourth year) and is studying in the industrial design program at San Francisco Something-I-Can't-Remember. His background doesn't include Thanksgiving, per se. Our celebration, though smaller than some, did however include all the usual traditions, including ignoring the green food at dinner and vegging in front of football games. You'd have thought he'd been doing it all his life.
Dinner went fine. There's an unusual glassed-in greenhouse structure on the deck in back and we enjoyed the view of the city at sunset (pictured) as we ate inside it, all toasty warm (also pictured).
Friday and Saturday were spent at Dylan's shop. They're at full capacity, now, and Dylan had just begun to build a huge shelf around two sides of the main work room when we'd picked him up the day before.
It was needed in order to create more space on the floor for projects and consists of lengthwise half-sheets of 1 1/4" plywood supported by steel support bars that are screwed into either concrete or 1/4-inch steel. My job was to help Dylan, while Tom went upstairs to Dylan's office to continue to work on his website (see below) and set up a more efficient email-response system for the business.
So that's what we did. It turned out great. We learned a lot about drilling into steel over and over, for one thing. One whole wall was unable to support anything like shelving, so we hung those support bars from overhead steel by means of lengths of allthread (rods threaded the entire length). For every problem (and there were a few), Dylan figured out an elegant solution, usually involving some cool tool or other they have sitting around. Now I'll know what to do next time I'm asked to help out with, I don't know, the building of a new football stadium somewhere.
I'm so happy to report that Dylan's business is beginning to gather some real steam. He has several orders, more recognition from design mags and blogs and retail outlets and quite a bit of activity on the website. Here, you can be one of the site visitors, if you haven't checked it out in awhile http://www.dylangold.com . Tom has been working very hard on all the computer-based tooling to make it all flow smoothly and Dylan continues to design amazing furniture.
So, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend! Hope you did, too!
