Pawn Shop

I never frequented these places before, but there are two pawn shops within a couple of blocks of the museum, and now I check them out, once in a while. One of them Diamond Loan, has a large collection of tools, and I like to poke in the pile. Last week I found a beautiful splitting-maul head in the bin, two bucks, it needed a handle. Following B's advice, I found a young Black Gum sapling and I've spent some hours shaving it down to fit. I drove the handle into the head tonight, split it, and drove in a wedge. It feels very nice, it's tempered, and fairly sharp. The first red maple stump I hit blows half-way across the yard. This is a maul as God intended. Assuming a god. I have a bunch of chains for my electric chainsaw, which I just use in the woodshed, to cut branches and splits to length, and I sharpen one of them to deal with what I think of as the Osage Orange Problem. I need to clean out the woodshed . Burn it all. The past is a bucket of ashes. Staff Xmas party at the pub. I only allowed myself one beer because I really wanted to get home, despite the fact that it meant a walk in, after dark, on a muddy driveway. It was completely overcast and therefore as dark as it could possibly be. My small LED flashlight had me following a cone of blue light all the way home. I left the pub when Steve Free started singing carols. Not in the mood for them. The new bosses had kind words for all around. Barb had saved us the back section, separated off with a folding screen. Very nice. Good food and good conversation. Pegi is taking a group of eighteen kids to do a performance (condensed) from her Circus Nutcracker, and some other Cirque/dance pieces, at a women's prison on Saturday, and we talked about that. There were some prison stories, Mark had hung an art show at the same prison, Pegi was there last year too, so they compared notes on the physical plant and the tightness of security. It's a maximum security prison. Charlotte, naturally, knew someone from Louisiana that had done time, and I've known several. Story time. I wanted to stay, but I wanted to get home even more. I'd already eaten, and that meant I could just get a drink and go to my computer. I couldn't remember where I was in my writing, not that I keep track, but I couldn't remember if I'd started another paragraph. I knew (I thought) I had sent one last night. I nearly always have a paragraph started now. Sometimes two of them. If I saw the fox, on the walk down the driveway, I might open a file at work; occasionally I stop in the middle of a paragraph (when it's perfectly obvious where I'm going) and start another one, that might not be quite so obvious. I actually like not knowing what's going to happen. I gaze off, into an infinity of chose's. Is there an implied noun, is that why 'chose's is correct? I call several people, and it seems I'm quite accurate when it comes right down to it. What I remember is the same as what you remember. Three crows singing in the dead of night.