First off, I love wood. I love the woods. I love trees. I love wood furniture. I love wood floors. I love wood beams, wood mantles, wood everything.

A friend of mine’s sister is a woodworker. A crafter in wood. A wood turner is how she describes herself. It is beautiful wood. Lynne Yamaguchi. Beautiful stuff.

I love some of her work. But I have to say, okay, where am I going to put it? I am married to a person whose decorating style is minimalist. Mine is not, but I don’t want stuff everywhere. Is there anything I have now that I am willing to get rid of to have this? Yes. But the wood pieces don’t really fit where the other pieces are. And I already have some pieces that I love that I don’t really have anywhere to put them. I don’t want to end up with stacks of things put away because I have nowhere to show them off.

I certainly don’t want to end up like my grandmother with so many things I love in my house that people have to walk through a corridor of things piled everywhere. They almost couldn’t get my uncle out of the house when he died. It’s a fire hazard if nothing else.

But I love beautiful things and her beautiful things are within my price range. You can buy a beautiful peroba rosa plate for under $50, when it’s on sale. Or a smashingly exotic yellowheart bowl for $150. I have a thing for yellowheart, even though it’s not my normal color, because of Elizabeth Moon. Of course, my favorite is a paduak bowl for $300 normally. (Wow, that’s a scary number.) There’s a Burmese rosewood bowl for a bit less.

There are three beautiful bowls, a soft maple, claro walnut, and quilted maple, which I adore as a set. They are each about 7 inches in diameter. But one is white and one is dark and one is medium. (Wow, imagine that, no reds, which are usually my favorite color woods.) There’s also a sapele bowl that I like.

I’ve been looking up woods on the net, reading all about them and learning more from the things she had up for the Tuscon Art show than I have learned about woods before. And I have a woodworker in my novel. Cedar is his normal work, Lebanon Cedar. (Which is where the story is set, about 3000 years ago.)

I’ve also watched a couple of woodworking shows on Tivo. On Master Craftsmen, I think it was.

My girlfriend, whose sister the woodturner is, bought a wood piece at an art show in Austin. I am sure I could not afford it, but it is fantastic. It is actually a collection of about twenty different very small bowls and plates of different kinds of woods. It has its own mantle to sit on and black sand. It’s amazing.

Maybe I’ll just get a small muhuhu bowl to start.