It was a big weekend. It was an early start on Saturday morning. The Yankee had a half marathon around campus.

Don’t let the angle fool you. It was a long uphill finish and she did this one as a training run. She actually ran to the race, and then did the half. That’s what you do when you’re gearing up for another Ironman. You run to the run you’re supposed to run.

It was a run a year in the making. This particular event was canceled last April because of weather, so she got an entry into this one.

We picked her up at the finish line. We being my stepfather and I. He called last week and said he was going to come up and help with a project. He drove up this morning, we picked up The Yankee and dropped her off. We went to the hardware store, picked up some lunch and then started the project. This was the first cut:

I’ve been telling him about this plan for about a year, and I think he just got tired of me asking him for advice on the small bits of this and that. I’d purchased specialized tools for this and picked up the right lumber. Some time back I cut the eight-foot pieces into the pieces, 57 and 23 inches. And then got busy with other things. But we spent Saturday night and Sunday afternoon making all the rest of the cuts.

Now I just have to do all of the sanding — and there is so much sanding to be done — and the finishing before I assembling my giant tie rack shelves. It’s going to hang on the wall behind the door in my home office. Ties will roll up and fit in little 4×3 cubby holes made from intersecting half-lap joints.

It all started with the first cut, above. And, at some point, I’ll be able to go to that tie rack each morning and think about how Rick came up and spent two days with me making it. I’ll admire how he made such precise cuts with new dado blades on a crooked, secondhand table saw using a ladder and some plywood as an out-feed wing. Each piece has eight or 16 1.5 inch cuts, depending. And they all have to snuggly fit into one another. We goofed on just one cut — remarkable considering the very basic setup I built — and Rick was able to salvage that one with some creativity, wood glue and careful sanding.

Some of the blooming shrubbery around the house this week:

Flowers mean bees. And the sound of the first bee of the season is something we should always remember. The first one I heard this year was on Saturday.

If you stick around for three or four minutes, you get one worth keeping.

There’s a lesson in that somewhere.