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small hammer
Wednesday, August 6 2008
After a long social drought, suddenly our house has become social-central, and it's become taxing on my social muscles. I can only play the role of quirky husband for a limited number of hours before my eyes glaze over and I turn into a troll. I know this because my eyes were already glazed over tonight when Gretchen's new friend Deborah came over for dinner, and I actually like her. Deborah has an enormous dog named Juneau who delighted in chasing our various cats. It wasn't anything too bad until Deborah and Juneau went for a tour of the shop and Juneau chased poor Sylvia (an understated black cat) out an east window, which features an eight foot drop to the ground. I felt terrible for Sylvia, who goes through life being about as inoffensive as it is possible to go through life being. (She doesn't even demand wet food.)
At some point this evening I decided to make a short-handled hammer by welding a thick iron rod to an old hammer head. I'd found the hammer head on Wynkoop Road (someone had thrown a broken hammer out a window, and I'd stopped to recover it). As for the iron rod, it had been part of some ancient farm equipment I'd found in the woods east of the abandoned Go-Cart track. As with all my recent welding projects, I used my cheap & simple Chinese stick welder, which gives me much greater precision than my expensive Italian wirefeed welder.
Why did I want such a short-handled hammer? I wanted to include it with the other small collection of tools in the lighter/match compartment in front of the woodstove pedestal. One needs a hammer more than you'd expect in a living room environment (for hanging pictures and what not), though such domestic hammer demands are always of the sort that can easily be met with a short-handled hammer, particularly one as rustic and pleasant in the hand as this one.
Occasionally I think about the archælogical site I will leave behind, and it gives me some pride that this hammer will be in it (or perhaps it will be in the archælogical site of the Canadian invaders who will one day rape and pillage Hurley, though — shit — I'd greet them as liberators!).
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