There are times when you work hard and even though things are tough you know that you’ll get through it and past it and everything will work out at the end. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and the clouds have a silver lining and if you just stay positive and work hard and persevere, it will all be ok.

Then you realize that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a freight train coming your way, the silver lining on the clouds is actually acid rain, and you realize that if you work hard and persevere, all that awaits you is more hard work and more difficult times.

When life reaches the point where it consists of waking, going to work, working, going home, having dinner, going to bed, lather, rinse, repeat. And you realize that wow, if I do this for the next 20 or 30 years, maybe I’ll be able to afford to continue to do this for the next 20 or 30 years. What’s the point? I work so that I continue to have a job so that I can continue to work?

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It’s a good word to describe how I feel, frequently. Fragile. I don’t mean physically fragile (although I do feel that way too at times.) I mean emotionally, mentally fragile. Like, easily-damaged, handle with care. Between the various stresses, the depression, the anti-depressants, feeling like I’m being pulled in a couple dozen different directions, and not often not having anyone I can talk to about everything. So I can talk here, right? Well, no, not always. See, anything posted in a blog or on a website is essentially published in a public forum. So there’s entire topics I can’t even touch upon here. I have to watch what I say.

These are difficult times. Between the economy and the ever-increasing pace of life, a lot of people are feeling the stress get to them. Knowing that, I will say that one of the dumbest ‘games’ people can get into is the Who’s Life Sucks More? game. Also known as the My Problems are Bigger Than Yours game, the My Hurt’s More Than Yours game, and the I’m the Most Depressed game. Any time you and your friend/family start playing these games (unintentionally or otherwise) there are no winners, only losers. Now, most people don’t play these games on purpose. Maybe the occasional person is compelled to one-up-manship. But typically if someone mentions to you how shitty their life is at the moment, they aren’t trying to win at anything, they might want some sympathy, but that’s about it. And if you tell someone how shitty your life is and they respond with how crappy their own life is, that probably isn’t a ‘challenge’ or ‘throwdown’. They could just be comiserating. As in “I know what you mean, my life sucks too.” — although if you’re already feeling like crap, it’s easy to misinterpret their response as them trying to belittle your pain by saying how much worse theirs is.

Ultimately, everyone’s personal pain is the worst pain there is. None of us can know what the other is going through.

I’m going to pop in the ‘read more’ button here and warn you, if you want to keep reading, it is going to get a tad dark as I allow myself to wallow around a bit in some self pity.

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This is the true origin of the mythical Hydra. The seven-headed monster was actually just a euphamism for government bureaucracy. When you’re trying to get them to admit they made a mistake, when you’re trying to get a problem sorted out… every time you think you’ve beat them, two more challenges spring up before you, and the battle starts anew.

Of course, the drones with whom you communicate on the phone aren’t the actual enemy. They are merely pawns, and while they may put up a valiant fight, they may just as easily throw themselves on your sword. The outcome doesn’t really matter to them, and they know it’s hard to swing a sword if it’s got a bunch of drones stuck on it. Their job is to merely slow you down, wear you out, grind down your resolve by exhausting your ire and indignation. Like punching an enormous pillow – you never, ever hurt it and never get hurt yourself, but eventually you just can’t go on.

As difficult as it can be to engage one department in battle, when your task requires you to face two departments at once, you may as well forget it. You can’t turn them against each other, instead they each take turns playing you off the other. They won’t even talk to each other, so you end up having to run messages between them. It is a cruel, sick game, I believe.

I actually have a point to all this, a specific situation that I was going to rant about. But I’m truly exhausted after wasting another 2 hours with them this morning. Suffice to say that the process of getting them to correct their mistake is excruciating, and they’ll never, ever apologize for making the mistake, nor for wasting an hour or two of my life every week.

If they were a business, I’d take my business elsewhere.

Damnit to hell and back! Every time I update something Wordpress related, there’s about a day of peace and quiet, then something else is nagging me to update.

It’s a plugin! No it’s a widget! Now it’s bloody Wordpress itself!

There needs to be a setting where you can turn off the gods-damn update nags!

This is the sort of shit that will make me snap one day and delete the whole nagging mess!

AAAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHHH!

No I will not update now, I will do it when I am gosh darn ready! PISS OFF WITH THE NAGGING!

Have you ever done something that started out as just a minor chore that you thought would take a few minutes and make things better, but then the further you got into it the bigger the job got? And by the time you realize it’s going to be a major endeavor, you’re too far into it and you can’t just stop or ‘put it all back’ so you have no choice but to carry on?

So I have live plants in my aquarium. I hate “fake” stuff, and just as important, live plants help with the nitrogen cycle by absorbing some of the nitrates in the water. However, I’ve been getting more aggravated with the fact that it seems nigh-impossible to keep some of them ‘planted’ in the gravel. They come loose, float around, or bits break off, or for the worst offenders, they continually shed bits that then sink, die, decay, and pollute the water.  Grrr!  Plus it’s impossible to get the gravel vacuum in around them without dislodging them all over again, so you can’t even clean up after them! They’re messier than the snails – and believe me, snails are little poop-machines with supercharged poop engines.

So I got the idea to take the plants out of the gravel, and plant them in wee little plant pots that I could fill with a substrate that is better-suited for holding plants down. Then I could put the wee little plant pots in the aquarium, and (in theory) that would hold the plants down, keep them from floating around, and make it easier to clean around them without knocking them loose. In theory.

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been sewing all this time. Actually I put the sewing machinery away for a bit because it was getting confusing and frustrating. Since then, I’ve been playing with swords a bit more. I’ve been working at making a sword, based on a sword blade I bought not long ago.

The blade was made by Del Tin of Italy, but I bought it from Albion Armourers of the USA. It’s from some old stock they have laying around. Anyhow, it was an unsharpened, unfinished bare blade. About 32 inches long, with a fancy fantasy ricasso and a short tang. I like shorter blades and longer handles, so I cut off the fancy ricasso and shortened the blade by about 4 inches, adding four inches to the tang.

It’s been slow work, trying different sketches and designs, trying to come up with something I liked. I don’t have any capabilities for working with metal, so I’m unable to craft metal guards and pommels. Consequently I do a lot of work with wood. My metalwork is limited to brass accents, using hobby brass stock.

So, looking at historic examples of swords with organic (wood or bone) hilts, revealed several Celtic styles, and a few Roman ones. Initially I was working to a Celtic style, but it wasn’t working out and I got frustrated. I then started making changes, and ended up throwing out the upper and lower guards I had already made, and doing a new lower guard. It started looking good, and I realized it was taking the shape of a Roman pattern, like a Spatha.

So I looked at a few spatha designs, and then went to make a matching pommel. That’s when I found out that my supplier of exotic hobby woods, was out of the wood I was using. And they didn’t expect to get more. So I had a handle of oak, a guard of purpleheart, and no way to get more purpleheart to make the pommel. Dangit. I then looked to get walnut, since at least it would be dark and contrasty to the oak. No walnut either. Blast it. I ended up making the pommel out of oak, which I then stained with a walnut stain.

By this point though, I’d lost my enthusiasm for the whole thing. So I got sloppy and didn’t do a good job on the pommel. I finished it anyways, and from a distance, if you squint and blur your vision a bit (or take of your glasses if you wear them) then I suppose it looks adequate. I don’t like it.

The handle / grip is ok. The upper guard is not bad… but not great. And the pommel sucks. It’s all weighted wrong, the blade is too heavy for the design I think, and the parts look wrong. I think it’s going into a closet for storage. If I ever get the capacity for working with metal, I’ll throw out the pommel and guard, and make a nice metal guard and pommel, and then it will be good. The handle, I’ll keep. It’s pretty good. I haven’t sharpened it yet, it’ll be a lot of work to sharpen and I don’t have that enthusiasm any more.

Also, this is what happens when you reach a certain point. First, you’re just interested and enthusiastic, but don’t know much. At that stage, you make things just for the fun of it, and you can be proud of whatever crap you make because you made it. Then you continue with the enthusiasm, learning more, and you learn enough to know what’s good and what isn’t, you learn the details of ‘real’ stuff, and what makes the ‘real’ stuff as good as it is. Then you try and make some homemade stuff again, armed with the knowledge you’ve gained, and then you realize that your homemade stuff really is just junk and you’re no longer impressed by it.

I went through this with wine. I got into wine, I made wine, enjoyed it (and really, a few batches weren’t bad) but as I learned more and more about wine and I tasted more wine and my palate got more refined, I realized that 99% of my homemade wine was crap and I could no longer entirely enjoy it.

And so it seems to be, with swords. I’ve enjoyed swords for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never really learned about them, outside of some very basic generic stuff. I’ve even collected a handful of historic antique swords (although from a very narrow point in history and geography), without really learning more of the details. Over the last few months though, I’ve learned a lot more, and acquired a few very, very nice pieces. And now I realize that my knowledge and appreciation, have outgrown my abilities. Dangit.

A work of art from Albion

It never seems to fail. Stuff gets me all frustrated and angry and it builds up and builds up and builds up until finaly I snap (technical term is “Twang”, as in, the sound a piano string makes when it is wound too tight and finaly breaks).

So yesterday I cut loose with a big ranting rage-a-thon, my ire directed at Canada Post. They keep not delivering some stuff I ordered weeks ago.

Well what do I find out now? The folks who I ordered it from, the folks who last week told me it was shipped and the delay was probaby with Canada Customs…they tell me in fact they haven’t shipped it, it’s on backorder, they don’t know when it will ship, they can’t even tell me when they will know, for another week!

Some new ranting rage building there. Anyhow, so it’s not Canada Post’s fault (this time) and now I feel bad about the big explody ranttastic post, so I’ve removed it. Maybe later I’ll have a big explody rant-a-thon about lying liars who lie about shipments.