Friday Ramblings

I've been pretty busy this year so far.  I've got three knives in progress in the shop... no four.  I've got two stained glass transoms to build.  Sheaths for all of the knives.  So much to do and it seems I've been going and going and going.

On top of this, I signed up for the Pigman Triathlon down in Palo, Ia - near my hometown of Cedar Rapids.  So I started training in earnest again.  Oh, I've been doing a little on the treadmill, an occasional push up or some crunches.  But June 5th will sneak up on me awfully fast unless I get my rear in gear.

So it's off to the races again!

I turn 40 this year.  40.  Twenty years ago that seemed so old!  So far away.  But now that I'm here it doesn't seem that bad.  I'm creakier than I once was, and more than a few pounds heavier.  But in all I don't feel old.  Although I do get stressed about time when I think that I'm probably more than half way to the finish line in this life.  I was not nice to my body while in the Corps, and I have not been so good to it since.  So I think my lifespan will fall short of where my parents get.  Mostly those thoughts are as follows...

If I can make it to 70... that means I only have 30 gardens left to plant!  That's really not too many to try out the several hundred varieties of tomato that I want to try.  If I am only making 20 to 40 knives a year, that's only six or seven hundred that I will make in my lifetime!  So much to do!  So much to do!  Maybe I should up that number to 10 - 20 knives a month.  Maybe that will help.

And thirty years really doesn't seem like that long.  Especially since I've already gone ten years past that. 

But then I think about all of the things I've done in forty years.  The list is literally HUGE!  Someday I'm actually going to compile a list.  I did a ton of stuff up through high school.  From then to now I've done things like paddling the Mississippi river from Itasca to St. Louis.  I was a Marine for about a decade.  I've travelled all over the world.  I got married, had kids, bought a house and a couple of cars.  Somewhere between Boot Camp and Bluefeather, I became a grown up.

That has been hard to get my head wrapped around.  Because when I was a kid, grown ups had jobs and bills and worries that I never wanted.  Worst of all, most grown ups never seemed to have any fun.  Thank God I had the parents that I did!  Role models for keeping a kid-like attitude even as a grown up.

Mom loved family nights watching the Hawks win or lose, and Sunday night suppers were a treat with fudge and popcorn.  I don't think I had a toy that Dad didn't play with too.  I can remember launching little foam F4U corsairs off of a huge plastic aircraft carrier with him.

And so when the Boyo saved up enough of his allowance to buy his very own indoor remote controlled helicopter, I had to have one too!
The Boyo got a yellow one that he named Fireworks because of the red and blue flashing led on the nose...

I got a red one.  The Boyo wanted to call it Fireworks Two, but I told him it's name was Dragonfly because that's what Grammy said they looked like...

As busy as I get in the shop, and as much as I have on my plate as a grown up that is still adding years onto this body, I guess I'll always be a kid in my heart. 

More Later