- Joined
- Jul 31, 2022
- Messages
- 149
I love it ~ Please keep going your stories are Awesome
Thanks! I just tell ordinary, truthful stories about my experiences - if it's a joke-ish story you'll have no trouble telling, by the content although if I write more than a few lines, it is true, too. I've been criticized by starting too many sentences with "I", but I do that to show that those experiences were mine, not someone else's I reshaped into my own. I always tell the truth without embellishment, best I can remember. These days my memories are a bit "iffy" at times, and if I find that the case I go back and correct them.
I've lived a life that's boring to some people, interesting to others. I was a coal miner but had a lot of jobs in that field from Union miner flunky machine operator, foreman, superintendent to later a comptroller. I've been a full time fur trapper, radio announcer, grocery clerk, mainframe computer operator, programmer and troubleshooter, secretary, personal assistant, longbow hunter, and a pretty decent tomahawk thrower. I got bit by the re-enactment bug and portrayed an Icelandic Viking, a Lusignan (French) man at arms from Cyprus in the1360's, a fencer from the 16th century, a frontier scout from the far west (which at the time was the center of the Appalachians), a Cherokee captive turned a "brave", and an Austrian artillery officer. As with life, some of those I did well and some not-so-much. Some might say that I can't hold a job, others would say that a job can't hold me, but none of this is a brag, just things I've done. Now, back to the thread which I believe is supposed to be rants.
I despise a dull blade, but due to breaking my back last September I can't sit long enough to do a good job sharpening mine, so if I need a truly sharp blade I have to go digging through my box of old knives for one. That will eventually change. By blade, I mean any blade. I live with a family of friends which now includes a grandson and great-grandson of age 13. You can forget finding a sharp kitchen, he's ADD and a little ADHD, it's a struggle to keep the "sharps" out of the damned dishwasher. His grandmother is the greatest destroyer of edges in use that I've ever seen. I love her dearly, but I think she's advanced to the point that merely her gaze can roll over an edge.
I fell much the same about rifles - as someone (P. O. Ackley I think) said "only accurate rifles are interesting.
Someone misusing a knife except in an emergency is almost unforgiveable, and doing things like using the tip to open a bottle cap, gives me a feeling between horror and anger. The 13-year-old has no such problem and some day imagine him running a 10" French knife completely through his hand while trying to use the tip of it (of course his hand is near the end of the handle) and he had a dubious grip on the bottle) to open a crimped-on metal bottle cap. I like him very much too, and hope luck stays on his side until he finally gets the message.
People who walk away from cabinets while leaving the doors partly open makes me cringe. The same with drawers.
I don't like knives that are hard to open. I have a nice, thin Puma from back when they made some decent slip-joints, but I never use it because I can't get it open without tools or splitting a thumbnail. The small blade will take an incredible edge that I've used like a scalpel in the past, The big, nicely shaped main blade can only be sharpened by careful and determined work, but won't hold that edge for more than a day of light use.
It's a shame that most "average" people have no idea of how to properly cut things without endangering themselves or spoiling the edge unneccesarily. I lent my Solingen Boker 4-bladed "swayback" to a new crew member to cut a walking stick, cautioning him "it's sharp, don't cut toward yourself). The surgeon used 9 stitches to close the wound on the meat of his thumb, and they should have used at least 12 much smaller ones. I hope that he eventually he regained his sense of touch in that thumb as a couple of years later he hadn't.
I despise those white-faced/bald-faced hornets. One day while cutting a line-of-sight for the transit-man I heard another member of the crew yell "Bob! Stop!". It turns out that my next swing of the machete would have cut a basketball-sized hornets' nest pretty much squarely in half. I was looking at the transit-man at the time so he could direct me in getting rid of that one or two weeds that were in his way. It was the end of the day and I was very tired (We'd had to run part of the survey down a narrow but paved highway with speedy, loaded coal trucks running both ways, and the transit-man and I had both had to jump into the creek to keep from getting hit, so my mind was on other things and I'd run out of adreline. Anyway, it was my fault for not being completely aware of my surroundings - but I still despite those damned hornets. "Fun" thing about them - if you throw a rock or shoot a bullet at their nest, they can follow the "con-trail" (air disruption) right back to you with deadly accuracy, and it won't just be one hornet. I didn't believe it, so one day we turned the Jeep cross-ways and at some distance to a nest, rolled up every window but mine with only rolled down enough to get a varmint rifle out of the window - and although I was prepared to pull the rifle back inside the Jeep and get my window rolled up immediately after firing, I barely made it in time, I don't know how many hornets hit the windows and windshield going full-bore, but once the first one tracked back to us they attacked from every direction. Again, I despise them, and see no reason for their existence. We should get rid of them along with gnats, mosquitos, flies of all sorts and above everything, ticks. My late wife got tick fever in her late 30's, and from the symptoms I'm convinced it cause her much misery and contributed to her early death at 60.
Long rant over. Also, a TL/DNR doesn't hurt my feelings, I wright hoping people will either/both enjoy the stories or maybe least learn from some of them.
I hate it when I find something I love with the former that fails on the latter.
