I’m going to post a series of this, I hope, as it progresses. Really, we’re talking about maybe an hour or two of actual work but … why not? Turning stuff on a lathe is tremendous fun when it comes out right. I realize that by posting this I am setting myself up for failure.
I’ve been busy running around building forms for casting the liner for the forge body, and dealing with a bunch of other stuff, including stressing out about my first colonoscopy, which is tuesday morning.
That song still sends shivers down my spine. It sounds like a bunch of very stoned people jamming with their heads in a bad headspace. If I’d been in charge of the evacuation from Kabul airport, I’d have had someone queue it up on the public address system, then run for the helicopter.
The shop doors project is finally drawing to a close. I’m “only” about a year and a half behind but I’m going to blame politically-induced psychological stress for my apathy – once it’s comprehensible then it’s excused, right?
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.
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.
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.