From the Back Porch - 11/14/2017

What a difference a few days has made in the colors around here!  Frost has bitten the tender things.  Our yard is carpeted with leaves.  No more complaining about not having anything to go in the composter!  I just hope that these moderate temperatures linger for a while.  I dread being run in the house by cold weather.

 I have been wanting to try my hand at wood carving.  Sunday, I selected a stick of wood from the log pile and lugged it to the patio.  I could not find a chisel in any of the places where a chisel ought to be, so yesterday I stopped by a hardware store and bought several, in sizes ranging from fairly small to fairly beefy.  When I came home, I began hacking on the log, thinking I might whittle myself a wooden rabbit.

Wood carving is hard.

I discovered that my log has a crack in it, which probably goes all the way through and will ruin my rabbit, but I kept hammering away.  For two hours or more, I chiseled.  So far, it looks like I've sculpted a butt crack peeking out from torn pants, but that was a natural feature of the log.  Heh.  I should leave it that way and carve a rabbit out of another log.  ;)

Anyway, as I was saying, I hacked and chiseled and hammered for about two hours, sitting straddle of a concrete bench.  The next thing I knew, the sun was going down and I was cold.  When I put my tools down and stood up . . . Lord have mercy!  I could barely move!  And about an hour later, my shoulder started aching, and it seemed like there was sand in the joint.  I'd pounded my left hand with the hammer a couple of times, and it was swollen and blue.  

But, dang, the chiseling was fun.