A field guide to the rest of the week.

I’ve been building for as long as I can remember. My collection has survived several moves, and now spans a row of bookshelves and a small mountain of boxes. The project of sorting through loose bricks to complete vintage sets is ongoing.

I lean toward Star Wars™ and Harry Potter™ sets—the ones where the instruction booklet reads like a thin novella and the satisfaction is in a sprawling magical castle or a highly swooshable spacecraft. The Modular Buildings theme is one I would defend at a dinner party.

If you’re visiting and you ask—or even if you don’t—I’ll show you the highlights and maybe even an in-progress build. The LEGO room is always a must-see on the house tour.

The first tank was a freshwater community in the corner of my childhood living room, a birthday gift from my Uncle Bill that turned into a thirty-year hobby. The fish were standard for the era; the room around them was not. Most weekend evenings the only two light sources were the tank and the CRT running Deep Space Nine or Voyager–which is a sentence that explains a great deal about me without my having to say anything else.

The saltwater era began in 2015, when grown-up money finally arrived to meet the reef chemistry I had been reading about for years. The first build was an open-top Fluval M60 AIO– a pair of clownfish and an anemone called it home.

The current era is tankless. The next era is being planned in my head, which is the most reliable phase any aquarium goes through.

Photography for me is the practice of looking on purpose. It started on a backcountry trip in New Mexico—desert, mountains, an Olympus point-and-shoot, more flora and fauna than I’d ever bothered to notice. What stuck was the attention the work asked for. The small act of composing a frame—balance, lighting, focus. Twenty years later it’s still the discipline I reach for when I need to be more deliberate than instinct allows.

The shop is a one-stall garage and the tools are a mix of hand and power, sorted by job rather than by preference. Hand-planed and honed joinery for the furniture, where the surface matters. A power-tool bench for the rough stages and for the bowls, trays, and small statuary that come off the carving side. A small assortment of hand carving tools for the knick-knacks and figures—mostly an excuse to add a little whimsy to the workshop.

Only a small portion of the work leaves the shop entirely—picture frames and memory boxes for families who have experienced pregnancy loss.

The thing I find about the shop that I did not expect: it’s the only room in the house where I cannot also be on a call. The phone goes in a drawer, the dust collector powers on, and the day’s second phase begins.