I have noticed in recent weeks increased activity in buying, selling, and giving away of workshop equipment.

It appears to this causal reader that some members are feeling their age and are preparing to be less adventurous in their woodworking.

Before this sort of thing gets out of hand and too many of us to bail out from our usual activities, I have some exciting news that should make you hesitate before catching this latest fashion.

There is no question that the celebration of birthdays starts very early in our lives. While you may not remember it, most parents make quite a fuss of birthday number ONE. Once we get beyond the age of six and seven, we start having an appreciation for the fun, games, parties, and presents that a birthday brings. It becomes important not to cry on your birthday as this will mean that you will cry for every day of the upcoming year. As birthday follows birthday we reach adult-hood all too soon and again all too soon we begin to wish that we could ignore this red-letter day but alas if we forget the day there are plenty of others around us all too ready to remind us that we are older than we want to remember. Then comes a time that we become so old that we want to cry just visualizing the number we have reached and so not crying on our birthday becomes important once again.

I have great news for readers of my Corner. In the very near future you may have a new lease on life. It is possible that birthdays might not matter so much in the future.

Some years ago, biologists hooked up the blood vessels of a young mouse to those of an old mouse. They noticed that the old mouse seemed to behave as a young mouse. It seemed to show that something in the juvenile mouse had been transported to the elder mouse to make it feel and act like a younger mouse.

For a number of years this experiment was consider just an interesting experiment and further investigation was not pressed ahead with urgency. Just recently further research on this phenomenon was reported. Scientists at Stanford have taken the blood of young animals and transfused into the blood of old animals. They have also done the reverse. They have taken the blood of old animals and transfused it into the bodies of young animals. When the organs of these animals were later examined after they had died it was found that the organs of the young animals had aged prematurely and the organs of the old animals were younger than their age would dictate.

It was deduced that something was being transported in the blood of animals that affect-ed aging. I am glad to be able to report that this something has been discovered. It has been given a complicated designation, but I will just call it here Factor 11. The next stage in the experiment was to see if this factor was present in human blood. Indeed Factor 11 has been found in human blood. Even more exciting for club members is that these experiments are taking place on our doorstep. In October 2014 human Factor 11 will be injected into early suffering Alzheimer’s patients.

This is exciting stuff. Stop downsizing your equipment. Stop worrying about birthdays, soon they may be a thing of the past.

As an interim let’s have a club meeting every day of the week at our new school venue where youth abounds and maybe breathing in the air of all these young students will give us all a new lease on life before Factor 11 can be bought at the drug store.