Awesome: Ten year old boy from Santa Claus, Indiana, catches a huge catfish with his bare hands. Are you more surprised by a ten year old noodler with the active support of his mom or that we have a town named Santa Claus?
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them.
I love this video on shillelagh making by Eoin Reardon. Also, from another of his videos, I learned the wonderfully symmetrical rule about renewing the finish on a handle (and maybe a walking stick?): re-oil once a day for a week; once a week for a month; once a month for a year; then twice yearly.
Stove-mas continues! The interior work is done. Tomorrow they’ll finish the chimney outside. There’s a practical reason for the 45 in the stovepipe but I love the character it gives it.
“The work by which a man becomes trustworthy”
Greg Cello: Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection.
Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.
I made a walking stick and posted a short video about it.
The gap between who do I want to be and who will I be is rooted in who I am now.
A talk with the ancestors
Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell. We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not.
Thinking back on my phone call with mom last night, how she was cried, worried she would go to Hell. Remembering a line from an old David Bazan song: “I discovered Hell to be the poison in the well.”