Pure Gold In The Rough. Lumix M4/3 20mm

Previously, I have Blipped glimpses of my current woodwork project: a pair of bedside tables in the Cape Dutch style.  Characteristically, furniture made in 18th and 19th Century South Africa employed two different indigenous woods, one light, and the other dark.  The juxtaposition of the two produces a very pleasing, and quite unique effect. 
The light wood, traditionally, has been Cape Yellowwood – Podocarpus Latifolius.  This is a slow-growing, long-lived tree which thrives along South Africa’s eastern coastal strip.  It has been declared the country’s national tree, and is now quite rigorously protected from over-harvesting.  In times past this was not the case; the ancient, first-growth trees were felled on a massive scale, and the beautiful lumber used for telegraph poles, railway sleepers and roof beams.
I have had one plank of Yellowwood in my lumber stash for almost forty years, and earmarked it for this bedside table project.  It has turned out that I don’t have enough of this precious material to complete both pieces.  But all is not lost.  A few years back, I discovered that there is a lumberyard buried deep in the forests of northern Maine, which was started by a South African immigrant.  This man, one of that group of people who like to collect things, chose to have as his passion the collecting of different species of precious lumber.  He studied business administration at the University of Cape Town, and turned his passion into a large and viable wood import/export and processing business.  Unfortunately, this unusual man was taken from us back in 2018, but his widow and sons continue the venture, both in Cape Town and in Maine.
This last week, I called to inquire about Yellowwood.  The very nice man who answered told me that, in addition to the rather ratty-looking planks displayed online, he had some much better inventory which was originally brought over from South Africa decades ago by the founder – part of his personal collection.  “We don’t get many inquiries about Yellowwood”, he said…  Luke promised he would pull some planks from the racks, photograph, and send to me.  He selected a lovely board, 13 feet long, a foot wide and 1 inch thick.  It is perfect for my needs – and another future project.  He cut it to my specifications, and shipped immediately.  The package arrived yesterday, everything just as we had discussed. 
There’s a lot of manual labor in my near future to saw the short pieces into strips by hand, avoiding the inevitable imperfections of Nature, and join them into panels which will form the table tops.  The Blip today is this pure gold in the rough.  In keeping with the pieces which I’ve made over the last few years, these little tables will have a direct connection to my roots.  That’s a good feeling.