I haven’t been posting to Instagram much lately, just fighting the battle against the metabolic illness that I live with and unfortunately not winning. Sometimes it takes me a whole day now to teach a simple 10 minute woodworking task.
The physical side of having a metabolic disease, (not actually being able to use the boats that I make) isn’t exactly fun but humans are fairly adaptable creatures and we can learn to live in a variety of contexts. The bigger problem is just the effects on brain function. The bottom line is that the brain needs to be able to utilize glucose at a reasonable pace to work properly. I’ve been fighting the steady cognitive decline for a long time with nutrition, daily hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and what seems like every supplement known to man, but the reality is that sometimes I can’t make it past the first sentence in an instructional video before my brain function just crashes and I find myself staring at the camera wondering what the heck I’m talking about.
The only positive thing is that research suggests that the neurons are still mostly intact so at least theoretically if metabolism could be restarted, brain function might be restored. With all the incredible things happening in science right now anything is possible but as things stand right now I’m probably going to have to accept that this just isn’t something I can do anymore. After teaching boat building for 20 years that’s a pretty hard thing to wrap my head around. Before that happens though, I’m committed to getting the boat building courses updated and the video quality as crispy as possible. So that’s what we’re doing this month. Building and re- documenting my two Greenland replica designs, and my F1. I’m also hoping to make some skin on frame related videos that I’ve always wanted to make for the YouTube channel. If I feel OK in the spring I’ll try to get the River Kayak design done as well, I put about 10 years into that boat so it would be nice to see it make it into production. So yeah that’s what’s going on with me today, back to work..
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
