Goodbye 2021.

A huge plush hippo with a drawn on Santa hat and fairy lights around its neck sitting in a kitchen chair

©Giliell, all rights reserved

First of all, I hope you had a lovely christmas, if and how and wherever you chose to celebrate. We had a nice Christmas Eve. Many years ago we decided to destress the whole thing. No grandparents. No visits or visitors. Just us. that was nice. Yesterday, we had the family over, all fully vaccinated and freshly tested. Let’s just hope we were safe or at least lucky. Although the men in the family tend to have a lot more opinions than information, the subjects  stayed in the “ignorable” range. Who cares if those stories never happened, so this was also quite relaxed. Does anybody want some tiramisu? I seem to have made more than got eaten.

It’s no secret that 2021 can go fuck itself. Globally and personally. 2022 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better. Omicron will sweep the globe and it will be a catastrophe for those unvaccinated, regardless of whether they didn’t have access to the vaccine or were just assholes. I hope you stocked up on pasta.

Anyway, I’m wishing you all some quiet time with your loved ones, recharging the batteries, for we’ll need the energy.

 

Love

Giliell

View of my Knife Testing Lab

Its Christmas and that means cutting up a lot of food in a lot of different ways. So I thought I might share a little peek in our humble knife testing facility.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My mother is giving the knives thorough testing and so far she has not found any task they are not suited for. I have tested them too, yesterday, when I was gutting, skinning, and fileting the carp for traditional Christmas dinner. The three knives were up all the tasks, including sewering the head from the body and de-boning the fish (which consists of cutting out the ribcage and spine). I am usually very critical of my work, and these knives do have some cosmetic issues but functionally I am very satisfied with the design. The handles do allow for a variety of grips that are commonly used in the kitchen by both noobs and pros. The rounded tips on the medium and the chef knife did allow me to easily scrape off the scales with the former and place one hand safely on the blade for additional pressure for the latter. The tip on the smaller knife was sharp enough to pierce the wall of the abdominal cavity and its shape did help to avoid piercing the guts as well when cutting it open. Which is important, especially regarding the gall bladder – if you pierce that, it can render a lot of the meat useless.

The testing will continue of course – what is not known yet is how the cheap oil finish will stand up to time. For that several months are needed at least, several years would be ideal. But I do know already that when I am finished with my current batch of knives, it is worth making these sets for sale because they are not just ornaments and will be genuinely useful to whoever buys them.

Regarding my third Covid shot, yesterday the slightly elevated temperature was gone and I was feeling mostly OK. But I did notice a symptom that I do not remember from my previous two shots – in addition to a sore shoulder near the injection site, the lymphatic nodes in my left armpit swole a bit and became tender, and the pain extended to my left pectoral muscle. It has receded a bit, but it still hurts somewhat, although not as much as to impede me in any meaningful way anymore.

It seems that I had a different reaction to each of my three shots, although they were all Pfizer. And not only different in duration, but also where, when, and how the symptoms are expressed. Interesting but hopefully not very consequential.

Third Shot Experience

On Friday I got an SMS from our government that per new regulations, I am eligible for the booster shot. I wasted no time and on Monday I made a reservation with our GP for Tuesday morning when I got the shot at 9:00 a.m. For the first about ten hours, I got nothing but very mild shoulder pain and occasional pain in other muscles and joints. Definitively nothing as serious as after the second shot. Today I got a very mildly elevated temperature, but again, not as bad as after the second shot. Though I am tired as if I were shoveling gravel and my left shoulder and pectoral muscle hurt really, really badly. I do hope it subsides till tomorrow morning because I need to go and buy christmas carp, then dismember, skin, and de-bone it so my mother can cook it for christmas dinner. I need to be fit enough for that task to not cut my fingers off, so I really need at least the brain fog to go away completely and some of the pain. I will do my best to perform that task using only the three knives of my latest experimental set because if those knives are fit for this purpose, they are fit for 99% of kitchen works.

Gingerbread Houses

These are the more “traditional”

© 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.

gingerbread houses my mother made this year.

 

Gingerbread Bird Feeder

My mother has tried her hand on something a bit different this year. She has made “ordinary” gingerbread houses too (I will post them later), but she also made this.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Birch Bark Handles

When I was flatterooning birch bark, I have got some sheets big enuff to make handle scales on smaller knives, so I did.

This one badger knife has one handle scale significantly darker than the other, and the lighter one has a distinct camo-look. I am not sure what to make of that, but the knife looks nice and functional.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

On the second knife I had better luck finding more similar pieces of bark, but I was also experimenting with making ornamental pins and those were not entirely perfect. But I will probably continue making them, I think they do have kind of charm.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There is still a lot of blades to outfit before I can seclude to warm cozy indoors and make the leatherworks. In the meantime, I am thinking a bit about what kind of sheath would fit these knives best.

Simple Finish Knives

I have made twoo puukko. To be honest, I was not a fan of this type of knife at all. I have only decided to make them just as a part of my ongoing knifemaking education. But now I am totally a convert.

The first one has a handle made from birch bark, cow bone, and white brass. It looks a bit like a stacked leather handle but it feels different in the hand. Birchbark can be flattened by boiling it in hot water and pressing it between two boards to cool and dry off, making it into flat hard sheets. They are slightly more brittle than wood, but they do not have any preferred failure direction, so they do not split and break easily.

© 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 second one has a handle from birch wood with a small burl in it. It is not proper burlwood, it was just a piece of firewood that I thought will be interesting. I think I was correct in that surmise. The endcap and bolster are from pakfong.

© 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.

Both of these knives have just a simple finish to them. The blades’ primary bevels were ground only up to 120 grit and then tumbled after quenching in sand as long as it took to take all the scale off. Bolsters and end caps are not highly polished, as well as the handles. In fact, I took a steel brush to them to roughen the surfaces a bit. And the finish is just several layers of ordinary boiled linseed oil.

I was aiming for a simple, rough-looking sturdy knife as well as a simple, easy-ish manufacturing process. I think I have managed both. I really like these knives and I will make at least somewhat fancy sheaths for them. And I will definitively make more puukko in the future. I also think that this design is ideal for recycling old files into knives, so I will probably do some of that too.

Have Some Gingerbread

I’m not an artist with these things like Charly’s mum, but I love making them. It’s the first time I made a gingerbread house that wasn’t just assembled from a box. I probably should have trimmed the still warm edges again with the cookie cutters, but the result was nice nevertheless.

I looked at the kids with my evil mum stare and forbid them to touch them for about 5 days, which is a perfect time for the gingerbread to get soft again, but not so long that it would go stale. There’s a few ruins left that I expect to disappear within the next days or so.

 

Tree made of stacked gingerbread stars, decorated with icing and sprinkles

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof, front view

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof. Side view.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof, view of front and side

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Relativity of Value

In accordance with Czech law, my house must be visibly marked with my business identification number, my name, and the trade(s) that I am running here. So there is a small sign on the garden gate that says “manufacturing, sharpening, and repair of knives, shears and gardening tools and manufacture and repair of leather goods”. I have expected to get exactly zero business that way, because not very many people come by since I live at the end of a dead-end road, in the middle of large meadows. But my elderly neighbor has noticed it and she came by asking if I would sharpen her some shears, and two pruning shears ((large -loppers –  and small). I have told her it will cost about 20,-€, which she accepted.

The pruning shears were modern tools and not in very bad shape. I had to disassemble them in order to sharpen them properly, but there was nothing interesting about them and sharpening did not take too long. But the ordinary shears were in very bad shape indeed.

Those were tools over fifty, some possibly even a hundred years old. They were extremely dull and battered, most did not even close fully at the tip due to excessive wear and lack of proper maintenance for decades. The protective nickel or chrome coating has mostly worn off and they were covered in patina instead. But they were made in times when things were made to last, so I got to work.

Thus I have sharpened all the edges and I bent the blades and the handles and peened the rivets so they close and cut properly all the way from the base to the tips. I did not attempt to remove the patina, since that could destroy them. But I have restored them to full functionality and, given the quality of their manufacture, they will now probably last several more decades. And I managed to do all this in just over an hour of work since it was not my first time I have so I knew what to do and how, otherwise asking for money would be a bit cheeky.

Even so, I was in for a surprise when I brought them to my neighbor, who was so thrilled with them that she offered twice the agreed price, which I had to decline. I would feel like a thief taking the price of several new shears for sharpening old ones, although I am convinced that these old ones are better now than many of the cheap new ones she could get for that price. But I have told her that I will gladly accept any pretty pieces of wood if she fells some of the sickly fruit trees in her garden.

 

Look at the Grinding Noise!

I have been contacted by my previous employer, which has led me to remember the various works I used to do. One of which was measuring and evaluating noise. That has meant that I was making and interpreting pictures like this.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Of course, this was only done with my phone, whereas at the laboratory I had various kinds of fancy equipment and software available. But back then I did in fact check whether this phone app measures reasonably accurately, and it does.

At the very top, you can see that grinding handles is a very noisy work indeed. When the equipment runs idle, it emits over 78 dB, which is very near to a level when the noise becomes truly dangerous (80 dB). And during work, it exceeds 89 dB. So I am indeed diligent about wearing hearing protection since that noise level would damage my hearing pretty damn fast.

Whoever knows how to interpret the above picture, can tell that when the grinder runs idly (those parts with green at the top), most of the noise – and indeed the loudest noise – is below 500 Hz. And whenever the wood touches the belt, another very loud component is added, between 5 and 80 18kHz (those parts with red-magenta stripes at the top). There is nothing I can do about the noise that is emitted during the grinding, but I could if I were inclined to spend my time on it, try and identify the spots where the loudest frequencies are during idling and try to do something about that. For example, I suspect that a significant source of the low-frequency loud noise is the tensioning wheel.

However, as much fun as it might be, I do not think I will spend a lot of time over this anytime soon. It would be fun though. I liked my previous job, the work was not the reason why I quit.

The Myth of Self Defence

I wanted to write this for some time, but it was Marcus’s recent post that prompted me to finally do so. It will probably be a bit rambly, I am not Shakespeare after all.

As is not unexpected for someone who was really badly bullied in my childhood and even in high school, I have dabbled in martial arts a bit in an attempt to learn how to defend myself from bullies. It started with a bit of karate, then a bit of aikido, and then I gave it a pass because I have come to the conclusion that it is mostly useless and way too much effort for way too little gain. I still have some interest in them, purely theoretical, so I do occasionally watch youtube videos about martial arts and self-defense. And they have more or less confirmed this belief.

You see, in order for any martial art to be any practical use whatsoever against a dedicated – even untrained – attacker, one has to spend an inordinate amount training them and keep oneself in good physical shape. And even then, in an actual confrontation, there still would always be a huge luck factor that can completely do you in and that is a fuckt. Especially when weapons get involved. Any weapons.

I am glad to live in a civilized country that regulates weapons sensibly, not too little like the US, but also not to a ridiculous degree like UK or Japan, or AUS, so I have never encountered the level of threat that Marcus is describing. I have also successfully avoided the military draft, thus I have never had the dubious pleasure of encountering a loaded weapon of war by having to handle one, let alone to be in the presence of a maniac handling one. The closest I got to a firearm was when I was a kid and could shoot a varmint rifle for one day and that was it. I never needed a gun, never was threatened with one either. The only violence that I was threatened with was a physical altercation that would, at its worst, probably result in a black eye and perhaps a concussion. Not that those are pleasant, but this level of risk does actually allow one to employ the best self-defense there is – running away.

Occasionally when I mention this in comments on YouTube, someone answers that that is a great way to get shot or stabbed in the back, which always makes me LOL. Being shot is not a great risk around here. It is not zero, but it is not on anyone’s radar. Even a mugging is most likely to involve at worst knives. And getting stabbed in the back while one runs away is just ridiculous, try to sprint and stab a target that moves at the same speed away from you if you do not believe me.

One of the self-defense and martial arts YouTube channels that I occasionally have watched in the past, hard2hurt, has made a whole video criticizing the strategy “run away whenever you can” which I have considered completely ridiculous. AFAIR, his main argument was that it is not easy for an untrained person to outrun an assailant. Well, duh? However, the untrained person still has better chances to outrun him than to subdue him in a fight, since there are fewer variables involved. And if you train martial arts, you are most likely fit enough for running faster than Joe Schmo too.

If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, do your best to de-escalate and/or comply (hand over the valuables). If that fails, do your best to get away. If, and only if, that fails, is the time to fight – and at that point, you have probably lost anyway because you were caught unawares and were harmed before you could actually do any of the previous steps anyway.

That’s not to say martial arts are completely useless. They can be a great exercise if you have a body that benefits from one (I don’t). Visiting a martial arts club can also be a great opportunity to meet with people and make friends. Some people do enjoy competitions and that is fine too. Some people like all of those things and some more and that is just dandy. But any student of martial arts should not kid themselves that what they are doing is learning how to be invincible in a confrontation. And any responsible sensei should and would drill into their students that avoidance of confrontation is far superior to martial arts mastery.

All that said, I have used my minuscule martial arts skill a few times in my life, from that twice to get out of an assailants’ grasp and get away from the confrontation. If I were trying to “stand my ground and teach them a lesson” I might have won, but I also might lose. I would definitively suffer some damage. By running away I may not have “won” in the macho sense of the word, but I also suffered no damage, which is a win for me. But a bit of knowledge of martial arts did allow me to run away in the first place.

Last I would like to say that MMA is in this context just a useless as all the other “traditional” martial arts. In my opinion, in most cases, the useful parts of all martial arts are not the subjugation levers, armbars, chokeholds, kicks, and punches.  Outside of the controlled and rules-governed ring, those are useful to the assailant, not to the defendant. To the defendant are useful other things – the dodges, pressure points, evasions, safe falls, and, above all, being in good enough shape to run for it. And getting those is possible even in martial arts that are not well suited for competitive fighting.