Day 20: SNAFU.

It was so chilly last night I had to get a blanket. Lately I've been sleeping with just a sheet. I've not even been wearing my nightcap. That would surprise Val. But last night I slept great.

As I was riding to the shop I heard my phone go off. But I wasn't about to answer it as I'm riding my bike down a street--which really wasn't so busy this morning, being July 4th and all. It was Dwain who called me, and he was going to ask me not to come because his back was really bad, and he felt like he couldn't get up. But he did, and by the end of the day he was a bit more limber. He was still in pain, though, and that was obvious throughout the day. In part, this led to the day being one SNAFU after another. You know, situation normal, all fucked up! This is right out of any military manual in Appendix 1, which tells a GI what to do when all the well-laid plans go to hell.

So Val and I figure out he way to make our relationship last. We just encourage and allow one another to be children, to imagine and play freely, to make up games that we can play together, even if only for a moment or two. And we do it without booze, which would only wreck our relationship.

Booze is bad for me. If you see me drinking remind me of that. I take medicine so I don't drink, and I thank the VA for that. But sometimes I don't take it and I do drink. And I get drunk. And I get so far inside of me that I am forced to work things out with me. Alcohol started as an entheogen, right? People were dancing around fires and using booze since 10,000 BCE, and I have a neanderthal brow. That all adds up to I can be one drunk, non-thinking dude searching for god. I think many vets are like that, and that is why others are so (rightly) afraid of vets. Veterans are the unwanted, drunk uncles at America's b-day party.

So I'm feeling a bit down, and I'm not sure why. Today was hard, for sure. And there was a long string of things that went not right, but the day ended on a high note when I was pretty far into successfully finishing my first peg head.

It won't be a scroll head, but that'll come.

And we had some great cheese sandwiches. Dwain got me some great cheddar with spicy stuff stuffed into it. I used mayonnaise for the first time in forever, but it was really vegenaise. It still tasted so good. And we had chips. I'm not sure when the last time I had a chip was. They were good. And I had a piece of a carrot and some sweet peppers. So yeah, the day at the shop ended fine. Maybe I'm so low because I'm sitting here alone watching others go by laughing, surely going to party on. But I don't want to be around a bunch of drunk people blowing shit up. I've seen enough stuff blow up, and it is hard for me to enjoy the beauty of the fireworks.

I was driving in Iraq, and I was the last guy in the convoy of six or so trucks. I was on a mobile task force, and we were tasked to maintain whatever needed maintaining. I was with the 5th Combat Engineers, and they could brake some stuff. So I looked in the mirror and saw a huge explosion. It was so pretty and lasted so long that I had to pull over to watch--pretty stupid, but there it is. My TC was asleep; we were both worn thin. I took a few minutes to watch the explosion die down and the embers float through the air. It was so pretty. I wonder how many people died in the blast and if I watched them float back down to the earth as ash.

There is a run in my near future to get this shit out of my head. It is 9pm, when do they stop blowing things up?

The first thing that I was tasked with today was to plane down the walnut that I book matched. There were 8 of 'em that I did. Two of them were done just fine. Two of them separated just a bit at the top, and then we split the boards making sure that they were okay. And four of them just snapped in half, like a wishbone at thanksgiving. The two that didn't come apart I fixed using fish glue, where there is more working time. The drying time is longer, but we're in no hurry. The other four sets I'll have to plane again. One of the lessons that I took from this is that I will change the formula for my hide glue so that I have more working time. Dwain saw the first day that I did this that I was dawdling and said don't dawdle. Clearly I'm a dawdler.

I really lost confidence in what I was doing, but Dwain coddled me while I worked. He told me to buck up little camper, and we just kept on working to get the rig set up to plane the two pieces that were done. Boy was that a mess. But Dwain doesn't do that often, so it was important to get the process as tightly regulated as possible so that my work would be consistent.

We eventually got the rig set up, and Dwain said that we'll document it for further use. The rig is really specific to this machine, but others may use some of the ideas, like the apparatus to hold the wood down.

Then we had a snack. I had two eggs, some crackers, and an orange. It was delicious.

Then I got to work on my machine. I worked on the fretboard some more, and damn is it challenging to get it flat and square because then make a convexity in the bottom profile to slightly bow the top both laterally and longitudinally. Eventually the fretboard and top are bent against each other during assembly, in a calibrated manner, so they must be held in a slight arch by weights and clamps while being joined. This is one of the reasons that the Bear Meadow design is so responsive.

But I'm getting ahead of myself because today I made the blank peg head a well-worked peg head.

I had an evening snack of pickles and peppers, which were delicious.

Is anyone even reading this much?