We knew a big storm was in the forecast, so we spent some time tidying up a few things. I made sure all of our scrap metal was stacked and weighed down. We get pretty bad storms every year, and so far, I haven’t experienced any major damage since moving to Mississippi in 2001.

The storm hit and we were lucky. The majority of the bad stuff passed south of us or north of us. We watched as several rotating clouds passed over, but thankfully none of them dropped a tornado. I grew up loving storms. As a kid, not knowing the true power of a storm, and thinking nothing bad would happen if I were inside, I was drawn to the power of storms. As an adult, not so much.

In the days after the storm, we focused on inside work, as the ground was too soft from the rain. I found a listing on FB marketplace for pallets. One for $5 or twenty for $40. Knowing pallets are most often beat up and slightly broken, we got twenty, hoping that we would get eight good ones. It turned out that we had 14 good pallets and only six that were junk.

The need to hang stuff on the wall is creeping in, so I decided to experiment with a wood plank wall. Rough cut pine is what I used. Specifically, pine from the very place where the shop exists. These boards were unexpectedly delivered to me from the person who got most of the logs after our controlled burn. Some of it even has char marks on the live edge. It’s a slow process, but we’re making progress on the shop setup.