Dear Carpentry Way community (that means you!),

First, congratulations on making it through a year of pandemic life! It’s been an incredibly difficult year in most parts of the world, and I’m glad you are here and reading this.

Thank you so much for the continued, wonderful messages about Chris or to let me know you are thinking about Ryden and me, even though often we have never met and may have never even set foot in the same country. It’s truly inspiring to me to continue to discover Chris’s legacy, almost a year after he died. Part of that legacy is all of the amazing people.

Also, if you sent me a message through the blog and i didn’t reply, it’s probably because I JUST found that there are over 200 messages in a separate section that I didn’t know about. I check Chris’s email but had no idea about these messages! i am going through them now!

One year ago, Chris was in hospice at home. The United States was in lockdown from COVID, and his closest friends could not visit. He was fading… I decided to ask Chris a few questions about one of his favorite subjects – milling machines – and film our conversation. His brain tumors were affecting his mental capacity by then and he was in pain all the time, only two and a half weeks before he died. However, he is surprisingly lucid in this conversation and focuses on why milling machines are so versatile and useful.

This is not high quality video: it’s taken on my phone and my “uh huh’s” and “yeah’s” are loud because I’m holding the phone. It’s also…sad. But I thought that many of you would want the opportunity to see this. It feels like a strangely intimate moment in some ways, even though we’re talking about milling machines. It’s a window into Chris’s final days, which very few people got to see in person because of COVID.

With that ringing endorsement, here you go…

With love, Ilana

I will have some lighter material to post coming up!