OK, I'm not a young man anymore and I become less so with each passing year. But, like the Energizer Bunny, I'm still going. And at a pretty good clip, too.

I feel fortunate to have arrived at 2014 and to still be working when most of my contemporaries are looking for the recliner. But each year, it seems to get a little harder to maintain the pace. The little aches and pains that used to go away after a day's rest and a hot bath now just ease up a bit but never really go away.

I am in awe of my father-in-law who, at 96, still shovels ice and snow off of his front walk at six in the morning. I have 30 years to go to reach that point and I wonder if I'll still be lugging boards back to the shop.

I've already decided that I will never retire. I just cannot imagine my life without making things. Those things might get a bit smaller and take a bit longer but it's too much a part of who I am to think about not doing it anymore. It's not like the work of many, unfulfilling and unsatisfying and gratefully abandoned at the first opportunity.

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like to have spent my life working at a desk in a bank or something. But that would have driven me nuts even though it might have been less painful!

D.D.