-I am so ready for the tricorn hat to come back into style.

-Hearing comparisons along the lines of,“looking after a person with dementia is essentially like caring for a preschooler” still raises my hackles.

-Guitar repair is full of jokes about nuts.  They’re obligatory, and though tiresome I have to engage in the accepted exchange.

-My brother is coming to stay for more than a week and it’s stressing me out.  He was nice enough to give me a bed for a night when I passed through Vancouver but our time together totaled six hours, which is just about right as far as I’m concerned.  We truly are like oil and water.

I have very few heroes. A couple of months back I learned that a man whose guitar-making philosophy  I revere had passed away. I’d never met him in person, only absorbed his ethos through articles and an interview, but his ideas profoundly shifted my perspective on the essence of craft and workmanship. When I had my storefront repair shop I had a framed picture of his hands at work holding a chisel on the wall above my bench.

Today I met one of his daughters, who brought some of his wood stockpile to sell, part of settling his estate, along with some of his tools.  Most of the knives and saws and cool toys were already gone, but I found these. A little miter guide for cutting rosette tiles, and something really esoteric that few people outside the craft would recognize – a tiny scaffold with a violin peg running through it.  It’s used with a length of fishing line to winch tight cleats inside a guitar body from the outside to reinforce cracks in inaccessible places. Old school repair technology.

Care was taken in making them, I can see the rapid but sure way he eased the sharp corners. The screws that hold the box together are very old. There are scars from chisel chopping. Traces of use. Vestiges of work.  I paid her $10 for things I can make myself, but these  have a deep and indefineable meaning.

Plane-ride shenanigans. When you pay extra to sit in the emergency exit aisle, your seatmates will likely also have extremely broad shoulders.

Across the aisle there was a goth girl who made a tent out of her voluminous black hooded cloak to shield herself from the bright sunlight coming through the cabin window while she read an Anne Rice novel.

I’m not going to draw a picture of the man who rose from his seat every half hour to do a series of stretching exercises that involved extreme hip and butt gyration.

I wish there was some kind of tumblr filter that would allow you to follow people but see only personal posts and original content.  I like reblogged stuff and memes and such, but I have a compulsion to get through my entire dashboard, daily.