Kats Carvings

It kind of looks like I went through some kind of midget phase. I guess I did. Not that I had any kind of wood shortage issue. I left Texas with a goodly supply of wood to carve. Unless I get busy I'll still have plenty when we get back. So I'll get busy on something a little taller.

The center piece is a Whimsical house carved out of cottonwood bark. This piece is about 2" thick and right at 9" high. Fun and easy to carve. The little guys are all carved from basswood and are all less than 4" high. My tool kit is about old country doctor medicine bag size and contains a roll of 17 assorted knives, gouges, and 'V' tools. That plus a shaving kit full of sharping stones and I'm good to go. I do have a clamp and a couple of saws that take up a tiny space but nothing else would fit there anyway. And of course I have some wood. More than usual right now but it will be a long summer and I didn't want to run out.

My current problem is finding a place to put the finished stuff. Some of my stuff is fair to good but honestly speaking some of it is just 'designer firewood,. The problem is Kat won' t let me get rid of anything. As soon as its done it hers and I ain't leaving anything of hers behind or giving it away. Well not much anyway. I am prone to hang something in a tree or nail it to a post but the longer I do this the more we seemto accumulate. I do appreciate her apprecciation of my work but we have got to do a better job of convincing her to let some stuff go. You can contact her at 503……………………. Well you know how to contact her.

Thank you

Upper Stamp

So here we are in to our second month at Upper Stamp Creek. A real tough gig. Well, not so much really. The park is open on weekends only and our job, if you could call it that, is to watch the place during the week. So we lock it up Monday afternoon and kind of watch the place until Friday morning. Mostly its walk or drive through and make sure nobody enters the park through the boat ramp which can’t be seen from where we are. Like I said, “tough gig”.

The real work goes to Jim and Glenda. They are the contract folks who do the real work on weekends and staff the gatehouse. But it’s a small park and they’re not complaining. They came from a much larger park and this is only 20 sites so they will be staying and coming back. Real nice folks! We get along well and more often than not have our social and cocktail hour at five or six o’clock to close the day. Sometimes if they are working we just put our chairs in front of the gatehouse so they can continue to work. A couple of days ago Jim got and split a watermelon for us all. Very tough gig!

Just recently Jim (see above) helped me do a ‘service’ on the MH.
Over the past several years, maybe even decades now (Damn!), I have gotten away from doing my own work. It was too easy to go to Jiffy Lube, or cars became more complicated and just more difficult to work on. Even harder to work on because of the need for bifocals. (How do you get your head in that position?) Anyway, I got use to having it done and paying for it. So Jim says “I’d be glad to take care of it for you”. I said “Cool!” Well I couldn’t just let Jim do it all so I got involved and rediscovered how easy it is. Mostly I guess because there is lots of room under these ‘big rigs’ to crawl around; even for an old fat guy! And with all the time I want and lots of time I can even get my head in the right position to see what I’m doing. So I’m genuinely excited. I mean that saved me a couple hundred bucks. And now I can do it myself for the next 15 services and even I can do the math there! Soooo………………… THANK YOU JIM !!!!

So Kat went to get pizza that night for ‘social hour’. A really tough gig!

We’ve seen my old friend and “best man” Doug who lives down the road in Marietta. We took in a ballgame in Gwinnette County. The AAA ‘G’ Braves, a farm club of the Atlanta Braves. And we’re just kind of ‘hanging out’. Catching up on reading, carving and motorhome maintenance. It’s still a lot to keep clean and polished. Kat enjoys her knitting, farming at Farmville, and shopping in Cartersville.

Life is good!

Michigan's first Living brain donor

You can see I needed a cold compress after getting the results or maybe it was just too much reading. It was a very good book. The Quest, Bernard Smith.

Did you happen to watch the Miss America Pageant? For want of something better to watch or do we had it on. Kat was on the ‘net’ and I was doing some reading but then we both got sucked in. My selections never do well and this was not much of an exception. And Miss Oregon was disappointing. Anyway, the girls I liked kept being eliminated until the only one I liked was Oklahoma. I kept saying Miss Maine was entirely too tall at 6’6” and Michigan was trying too hard and thought she had ‘it’ and was using way to much of ‘it’! They came to the ‘question’ and Oklahoma knocked the “Arizona immigration” question out of the park and Maine did real well too but I forget what is was? Michigan’s answer sounded like her I.Q. was a lot lower then her bust size. Not only did she not know the answer, she didn’t even understand the question. So then it was three. I said OK, Oklahoma (no pun intended), maybe Maine (it was a good answer and maybe it made her look a little shorter), but please not Michigan. Maine goes next and I’m thinking OK! (This time you got it right?) And then they picked Michigan. Being from Ohio, that is hard to accept; I mean come on! It’s Michigan! And then she is perhaps Michigan’s first living brain donor! Oh well! It’s 2010! Why should I be surprised?