Then I realized my situation: I – a grown man – was standing in the middle of a retail store with an axe in my hand.
In fact, I was wandering around the aisles with an axe in my hand. And no one was staring.
That’s why I like hardware stores so much.
It started like this: we got some money from the province, the last installment of a subsidized home construction loan sort of thing. Instead of spend it on something mundane like paying bills we decided to buy a woodstove.
So we got $2000 woodstove. Alpha organized everything perfectly. The chimney guys came and installed the stove, everything was ready to go by Friday.
Except we needed a $2 door for our chimney. When the chimney sweeps come to clean, etc., they do it thru little doors at bottom of the chimney, in the cellar, and up at the top in the attic. And this little door was badly corroded.
So on Saturday I went looking for one. No luck, too old. Need to buy the whole new thing, door, frame, external door, chisel the old one out, cement the new one in. Feh.
We called the chimney guy, he assured us the outside door provided a good enough seal, we can use the stove until his guys come next week to install a new door.
Feh, wood. Where are we going to get wood? Found kindling at a store, but that was all.
Father-in-law finally brought some wood. Has to be hardwood, seasoned 2-3 years. I tell you, that’s great firewood. I grew up burning green alder and stuff.
But the wood was too big! Need axe! The hardware store had a ton. Huge selection. One kind of Nacho at the supermarket, but two dozen different axes at the hardware store. Who buys the little wooden-handled hachets when you have slightly-larger hachets with yellow fibreglass handles?
Anyway.
House is nice and toasty. And who needs a television? The family sits on the sofa and watches the fire now.
arrghh! give a man an axe and you soon have the Sahara Desert!
I am going to be up all night trying to figure out what that (above comment) means.
We have a fireplace in our sitting room. It’s very gothic, tall and narrow and the brickwork painted black, really nice against the aged redwood walls of the Arts and Crafts interior. But our landlady thought it’d be cute to put an ivory shag carpet in the room, after refinishing the hardwood floors in the rest of the house. So we have this like firepit with a white shag carpet in front. The phuck we’re gonna light a fire in there and get soot on the carpet, or heaven forfend a loose spark.
Our cat goes out for hours at a time, in the fall and winter, and comes back smelling like someone else’s fireplace. Little sneak.
I thought we already had a Sahara desert? Isn’t it in Africa somewhere?
more than anything else, the axe to me represents a new level of opportunity for traumatic personal injury. after what i did to myself with a chisel a few years ago, i approach the tool with trepidation and respect.
Drove a screwdriver through my hand yesterday. Which was nice, being as I hadn’t driven a Dremel blade into my thigh in well-nigh a week.
Tools are not our friends.
Last time I visited my mom in (small town) Minnesota, I was sitting on the front step relaxing when I saw a husky woman in her fifties I didn’t know charging towards me with a bare knife in her hand. I was momentarily startled but then I realized where I was. It turned out that she was headed to my mom’s garden, which she shared in, to cut some broccoli.
My feeling also is that when people buy axes and then go kill perfect strangers for no reason, they don’t kill perfect strangers right in the same store where they bought the axe. Somehow the symbolism would be screwed up.
Remember, always cut *away* from yourself, CLM. And if you have to stab something into your hand, I recommend a brand-new chisel. They’re so sharp you hardly feel them.
And you’re totally right, zizka, I’d never thought about that before. But you never hear about a mailman shooting up a gun shop, do you, or someone hacking everyone up with a machete in the garden center. Way I see it, you might have to shop at that store again, and they’d kick you out if you had a reputation for murdering their customers.
i love tools. but i could really do some damage with an axe. PMS and an axe??
NOT.
axe. cut down trees. no trees left. deserts ensue due to, um, nothing keeping the soil together and stuff. hence deserts are expanding.
how’s that for an explanation? can you sleep now, sue?
Do chimney sweeps really still exist??
They definitely do in Austria. Far as I know, they each have their turf — section of a town, etc, so they don’t get in each other’s way — and go around in black outfits with white bill-less caps sweeping chimneys. They visit customers prior to Christmas, distributing little calendars and collecting tips, like members of many other guilds (postmen, volunteer firemen, etc). They are a good luck symbol and if you touch your button, I believe, when you see one you’ll have good luck — your chimney won’t catch on fire or something. But I have never seen one dance or sing like they do in Mary Poppins.