© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Just some small flowers of different colors.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The Czech name for these beauties is “maceška” which is a diminutive form of the word “macecha” (stepmother). Don’t ask me why, I have no clue. These were not grown in the rock garden itself, they are in old ceramics throughs near the steps into the house.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Not the biggest collection imaginable, but the strategically put tulips here and there resulted in quite a few various pictures.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I got a commission for a knife, which did make me happy a bit. Making a commission has one huge advantage over making a knife just so – the existential dread questions “Will somebody want this?” and “Will they be able to afford this?” are both answered in the affirmative. And the requests were not unreasonable – a big camping knife with a striker and a ferrocerium rod. Handle from black locust wood, leather sheath with some black-locust ornament, if possible bark-like surface. Black locust has some personal significance to the customer, I did not ask what it is. And they have chosen one of my already finished blades, so I could go right ahead.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I gave them a choice of three types of black locust wood – untreated, treated with ammonia, and a very expensive piece of burl that I bought some time ago and did not deem worthy of a blade yet. They chose the expensive burl, and I must say it does look very fancy. I infused the handle with resin, although it is impossible to get a complete soak on wood as hard as black locust. But a few mm is just fine. The bolster and pommel are stamped 1 mm bronze. Not polished, just brushed with a steel brush and allowed to build up patina. Cow bone spacers for contrast.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is the same design as the “not a masterpiece” knife, but the blade is from oak bark blackened spring steel. For some reason the blackening reacts differently with the unquenched steel at the spine, making this funny light triangle on it. I would very much like to know the reason for this different reaction – the chemical composition of the steel is identical throughout, it is the crystalline structure that changes. Yet, evidently, various chemicals react differently with hardened and unhardened steel.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Google yielded no usable results for putting tree bark texture on leather, maybe nobody managed it yet. So I had to improvise a bit. I ended up with finding several pieces of sharp basalt gravel and pressing the ragged edges into the leather. It does look tree-bark-ish, I think. On the sketch, it looked a bit empty though, so we agreed to put a black locust leaf in there too. With a bit more refinement the texture would probably look even more like tree bark, but I had to end the experimentation at some point, otherwise, I would not be done on time. The tip of the leather sheath is darker, I have applied patina shading there. Now that I think of it in the photos it looks a tad peculiar. It looks better hanging tip down. Lesson learned – photograph sheaths and knives in them tip-down. Next time, the lesson will be promptly forgotten.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I could not buy bronze tubes for the striker and rod handles, it would seem nobody in CZ sells them. I have bought rods, but drilling a rod concentrically without a lathe has proven to be an impossible task so far. So I made the handles from brass and I coated them with a thin bronze layer electrolytically. The patina has built up almost immediately, which is nice. It took several days for it to build up on the knife bolster and pommel.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is a big, heavy-duty knife weighing 224 g alone, 447 g with the sheath and accessories. Blade 4 mm thick at the base, tapering towards the tip. Fullered, flat grind. Point of balance at index finger right behind the bolster for a comfortable grip and control when cutting food. When the long grip is held towards the pommel, it gives the knife a nice heft for chopping, for example, when making splinters for starting a fire.
The knife will be given to its owner next weekend. I do hope they will be happy with it and get some use out of it.
Very rarely do I have an opportunity to visit my favorite aunt in the spring when her rock garden is in full bloom, so today year when I got lucky I took a ton of pictures. I will post them piecemeal over a non-specified period of time.
This is the outside view of her house and the garden. You can already see the multitude of shapes and colors.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
And to start things first a picture of a small pond with water lilies. They are not blooming yet, so just a little anecdote to amuse you: When I was a little kid, I liked to play in this garden by running and jumping on the rocks. My aunt did not mid as long as I did not damage any plants, which I somehow managed. But she did warn me to not do it near the pond because I could fall in it. So of course I ignored that instruction and one summer day I did indeed fall into the pond, butt first. There was laughing and Itoldyousoing on my aunt’s part and wailing and gnashing of teef on my part. Luckily I did not hurt my self nor the water lillies.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
For me, a true sign of coming spring – a red kite sitting on the huge ash tree behind my house. They are magnificent beasts and I do wish they would sit still long enough to get really up close and in focus pictures.
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I have realized that I have not posted any bird pictures for a looong time. Unfortunately, there are very few birds around lately and even fewer opportunities to take pictures.
It is still unclear whether or not I or my parents will have some long-lasting Covid effects. However, so far it looks good. It does not look so good for one of my cousins though. The cousin in question is about twelve years older than I am. When we were kids, he sparked my interest in nature, and thus he was one of the first people who have put me on the path of actually seriously studying natural sciences. But…
My parents are an exception within the family in that they both are decidedly non-religious (my father even being resolutely anti-religious), a fact that I have not known about until my late teens. And although my religious relatives are not the “frothing-at-the-mouth-fire-and-brimstone-biblical-fundangelicals” that seem so typical representatives of Christianity in the USA, the negative effects of the religious rot on the human mind are noticeable amongst some of them even so.
That my moderately religious cousin has married a deeply religious woman was unbeknown to me for years. They both seemed pretty reasonable in our interactions and religion rarely, if ever, came up. When my cousin-in-law scolded my mother that she should not do laundry on Black Friday because it makes Jesus bleed or something like that I just rolled my eyes, but it was not a harmless superstition, she actually believes that crap. The first warning sign of really bad things to come was when she has become a part of a radical cult and the family almost broke apart – she almost left not only her husband but also her three children over religious bullshit. Once you start to truly believe moderate bullshit, apparently believing egregious bullshit becomes easier. They managed to reconcile that issue somewhat, but it was apparent from that time on that many of the problems in that family – which I won’t discuss in public in detail – stem from the fact that religion, not reality-based knowledge, and not even common sense – guided many decisions.
Things came to a culmination of sorts last year when they both got Covid and were sick for over a month. They did not get vaccines because “they did not believe in them”. They both have long Covid now and my cousin, a jolly bear of a man of rude health to whom illness was a nearly unknown thing for most of his life, is now battling chronic tiredness and depression. He did say to my mother that he will accept vaccine boosters if they will be recommended to him, as well as new vaccines should the need arise in the future.
It does make me wonder if this is “better late than never” or just “late”.
At first, I thought I am just tired from heavy work. Then I thought I got a mild strep throat infection and bronchitis from exposure to cold (something that I have always been susceptible to). It lasted from Friday to Sunday, yesterday I was almost completely symptom-free and today as well.
I have bought and made a Covid self-test today nevertheless and it turned out positive. So although I no longer have any symptoms, I very probably did/do have Covid, in all probability Omicron. My parents were due a visit to an orthopedist on Thursday, they will have to postpone it now. My mother probably has it too, she does have a sore throat and a cough, although no fever so far. My father thus almost inevitably has it by now as well. I really do hope they will too only have a mild case. They usually do fare better than I for some reason, and they fared better after the vaccine and both boosters too. But there are no guarantees with illnesses and Covid is no exception.
There are only two instances where I could get infected recently – during one of my bi-weekly shopping trips or during a dental visit last Monday. The dental visit seems a more likely culprit to my mind, although during the shopping I did of course encounter vastly more people.
I really hope my parents come out of it OK. We managed so well for two years and I bring the plague into the household when the cases are in decline around here. I guess it was inevitable, one cannot avoid it forever, but still.
This Wednesday and Thursday the weather was warm enough to plant pohtatohes. These are the fruits of mah lay-bour:
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
In the top left corner, you can see my sewage cleaning facility, specifically, its last two stages, the gravel-reed-bed where the water is further cleaned after the anaerobic tank and the seeping pond where it seeps into the ground around the edges. The reeds grew especially big last year with some stalks exceeding 3 m in height and 1 cm in thickness, which is normally unheard of at my elevation. Hooray for global warming, I guess. Mowing them with a scythe was an extreme p.i.a.
You can also see the pollarded willow trees around the pond that are due for firewood harvest next winter, but for years I did not know what to do with the reeds so they just rotted slowly on the compost. Two years ago I tried to put them directly on top of planted potatoes before they get covered with dirt. And it worked well, it lightened up the heavy clay significantly that year and I had the biggest haul of potatoes from that patch that I ever got – over 200 kg. We had even trouble to give the taters away because of the Covid travel restrictions, so we have tried some ways to preserve them for longer storage. Which worked well, especially dried chips for soups – we have those still and they work great in combo with dried mushrooms.
Last year there were no potatoes but peas, beans, maize, and pumpkins, so the soil can recover somewhat. It did not yield 200 kg of edibles of course, but we got a few dinners out of it. This year it is potatoes again.
So I am trying to replicate the success. On the vegetable patch, you can now see nine full and two very short rows filled with shredded reed stalks. In the next days, they will be slowly covered with dirt to form mounds for the tubers to grow. Inorganic fertilizer was added over the winter in the form of several buckets of ash from the house-heating stove. Some organic fertilizer has been added now with these reed stalks and more will be added over the year in the form of mown grass and raked moss. I do hope the weather won’t be too dry, but the sewage cleaning facility should help significantly if it is, and it adds some nitrogen too since the system is not as effective at cleaning ammonia as it should.
A whole cycle from poop to food in one garden.
Today I wanted to work on knife sheaths, but I am aching all over and it is probably not just from the work. I have a slightly elevated temperature and a bit of sore throat and a mild dry cough. The weather was reasonably warm, but not really warm, so I guess I caught a bit of chill and now some strep is trying to get me. I do hope to be able to work tomorrow, I have a commission due in May and although I still have enough time, finishing sooner is always better than later.
Avalos has sent some spring blossoms and I am wholly envious. Here the spring is so far in various shades of gray and the weather would not be amiss in February. In fact, we had this weather in February…
Mirabelle blossoms © avalos, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Cherry blossoms © avalos, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
A whole lot of mirabelle blossoms © avalos, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
And to top it off, there is also a very cute kestrel picture.
© avalos, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
… I am really proud of this knife and I think I have done a good job. I genuinely think I am getting better.
You have already seen the blade, twice. It is a big, fullered, mirror-polished, 5 mm thick at the base blade based on my working knife from a failed attempt at making a machete and a bushcraft knife that I have made for my friend. It has some issues – the fullers are not entirely regular and they are not symmetrically positioned, especially towards the tip. But it is a well-hardened blade and the geometry has been already tried and tested by both me and my friend and it is suitable for camping tasks, from preparing small firewood to cutting BBQ ingredients. So functionally, it is a good blade.
But the asymmetry was bugging me, so I have decided to make a visually asymmetrical handle too. First I have tried to use a piece of black elder, a light-colored wood with dark knots that I have thought would work nicely with the mirror polish. But that piece of wood failed me so I had to seek out an alternative
And I am glad it turned out that way because the alternative I chose was a piece of an old and gnarly juniper wood (probably Juniperus x media). Any piece of that has pretty much guaranteed stark asymmetry in every piece and it is a reasonably hard softwood (oh the peculiarities of the English language!) with very small pores, so it is suitable for small woodwork.
The wood also has two distinct colors – white-ish sapwood and reddish-brown heartwood and lots of small knots, which quite coincidentally ended up positioned in – in my opinion – aesthetically quite pleasing places, especially on the right side. It has curly bits too, so it changes in some places color depending on the viewing angle. My original intent was to make the fittings from pakfong with bone plates for color contrast, but I thought that a combination of pakfong and bronze would look better and would fit the wood’s color palette more. And when I see it, I think I was correct. The pakfong part was stamped out of 1 mm sheets but the bronze half had to be made out of 4 mm sheets simply because I did not want to spend another day making a second set of punches. But I probably will at some point if I make more knives in this design. I was thinking about whether to solder or glue the two halves together and I have decided to go with epoxy glue since I needed to fill the hollows anyway and the knife tang stops them from experiencing any great shearing forces so it should be fine. And if someone uses a knife like this instead of a hammer or tosses it into a fire, then, well, some conditions do not have a cure…
Anyhoo, enough of babbling, here are the pics:
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is a big, big boi. ~18 cm long blade, ~14 cm long handle, ~270 gramms. Balanced on the index finger but still packs a punch.
I did not make a sheath yet and I would like to ask you if you do not mind giving me some ideas to consider in the comments. I want to make something really fancy, keeping the two-color scheme. With a pocket for a striker and ferrocerium rod. Maybe some basket-weave with differently colored weaves? Or dragonskin?
I also need to find a suitable paracord, none of those that I have in stock fit the color scheme, I might have to go with a simple beige color.
Simon Whistler has made an excellent video essay about the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Content warning: graphic depictions of human suffering.
The Czech language has a similarily sounding word “hladomor” which means simply famine. I always understood it to be a combination of the words for hunger (“hlad”) and plague (“mor”). That might be a case of folk etymology though, the expert opinion one for the Czech word I could not find online. The Ukrainian term came according to Wikipedia from “морити голодом” i.e. torture by hunger. Whether the two words are false friends stemming from different roots or if they share common ancestry is however secondary to one fact that I have learned only recently – the Ukrainian language does sound a bit like in between Russian and Slovak/Czech, which should not be surprising, so I am in fact able to understand spoken Ukrainian a bit better than Russian (still not very well without subtitles though). One such similarity to Czech is that Г in Ukrainian is pronounced as “H” in Czech (in English like the H in “have”) and not as Czech “G” like in Russian (in English like the g in “grave”).
A linguistic interlude aside, whilst I knew from school about a number of famines throughout history, The Holodomor was completely unknown to me until well after the fall of the Iron Curtain. During my education, the collectivization in the USSR in the 1930s and in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s was always taught as a quick and glowing success of the regime. The demonization of the Kulaks, as mentioned in the video, continued well right until the end of the regime. We were taught that some farmers refused to join колхо́з and were punished as the dastardly criminals they were, but the sheer scale was never mentioned, nor was the fact that this was done along national borders. And that there ever was a famine in the USSR was not denied just because it was never mentioned at all. Maybe it would be mentioned later on with some west-blaming if the regime did not fall, but I doubt it. I have checked the most comprehensive world history book from that era that I own, an official textbook for high-school curriculum and it portrays the era s as I have just described – blaming only the kulaks and mentioning it all as just some isolated setbacks by some rebels who received some non-specified punishment. No mention of famine at all. Only a very brief mention of Stalin’s cult of personality and his “heavy-handed” dealing with problems (an understatement if I ever saw one).
And thus a genocidal act of a paranoid power-hungry maniac fell from history books for three generations. Not the first one, not the last one either.