Tinkering

This is a random beautiful picture.

My father's father was a tinker. In generations past, a tinker was a person who did not have a career and work the same job for 40 years and then retire with a gold watch. Grandpa Max was a radiologist during WWII and he was a groundskeeper for a public park when he died. In between, he did lots of different things to support and care for his large family, my father was one of 11 children. There was no shame in his profession of tinker. It was a profession that had a name.

I think that I am a tinker too. In my life, I've been a pharmacy technician, a bridal consultant, a stay at home mom, a sales rep, a professional shopper, a drugstore manager, see, the list goes on and on. I've never had one career that felt like my life's work, and I have worried about that from time to time. I never had an "aha!" moment when my life was changed forever by the discovery of a yet unexplored field.

I like to learn things, and I know at least a little bit about an enormous amount of things. I'm an armchair mechanic. I like to visit other places in my mind through other people's travel photos. I discovered once that I knew very little about how motorcycles work, so I watched American Chopper for months. That one paid of when #3 son decided to be a motorcycle mechanic. I like thinking about Egypt and King Tut's tomb. I learned all about Michelangelo one summer.  Lots of different topics, I know, but each one useful in its own way. Today I learned that you can make a working model of a Transformer out of paper. And it's only 8AM!

The thing that ties my life together is the creating of objects that have never existed before. Even if I make something from a pattern, that item has never existed before. I chose the yarn, the size, I made the inevitable mistakes, it is entirely my own by the time I'm done, and I am glad for that birth. Sometimes it takes literally years for something to be completed and used for its intended use. Sometimes it never gets used. Sometimes it's used differently than I had originally thought.

I never, ever lack for ideas. I feel a little dry, well, I jump on the computer and look at a blog or a community or a website that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm trying to work out. I have an enormous collection of pictures that I add to constantly, randompictures over at Live Journal is a constant source of amusement to me, you never know what you're going to see there.

This is a market in Nepal, boy don't I want to go there, just lookit the beads!!!!!!!!

So this is my tinkering life. Next time somebody asks me what I do, that's what I'm going to tell them.