It turns out that when you plunk down the money for a 40-foot ladder, there are a lot of other folks in your neighborhood who need one. That’s typical for specialized equipment: people forgo using it because they don’t want to go to the trouble to obtain it, but … borrow it? Sure.
This is probably the penultimate report on the shop doors. I feel like that project is finally drawing to a close. It’s about damn time. “Operation Overreach” must eventually come to an end.
When I bought my farm, it included 20 acres of old coal mine.
This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I will be up in Rome, NY, taking a class in how to pull hamons [temper-lines] out of mono-steel, taught by journeyman bladesmith Greg Cimms.
It’s amazing what you can find on Ebay.
It took a remarkable amount of time to smear three coats of paint on the doors.
Every time I am using a gasoline can to fill a mower, chainsaw, molotov cocktail, etc., I am annoyed by the safety mechanisms on the pouring spout.
My projects, I realized, define my life and separate me from reality. When I am working on something, I am totally focused and nothing else matters, so all the evil of the world temporarily fades from my mind. Although, that’s not entirely true. When I am thinking about an article, I often read and re-read sources, and I sometimes mutter under my breath as my subconscious formulates my viewpoint. I am careful not to have one of my creative avenues bleed over into the other and destroy it – imagine if I started trying to make art that represented how I feel about the Palestine situation; it would not be pretty. I want to make elegant-ish cooking knives, not killing tools.
Often, my gutter-crawling through politics and the history of revolutions, government, racism, and nastiness, leave me so sad and angry that I don’t know what to do. Add on top of it my leg hurting and the clot-buster drugs, which seem to be making me a bit stupid and low-energy, and I’ve got a real motivational crisis. Oh, yeah, and looming over it all is my certainty that species extinction and the collapse of civilization is hurtling toward us at an accelerating rate. “Why bother?” doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable question; trying anything at all seems to be an act of denial.
This is the state of the doors as of Tuesday night.