Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As you know, I almost always carry a knife, usually an assisted-opening tanto-bladed Kershaw. As I understand the law in Canada, carrying a knife like this, even with a silly product name like “Cyclone”, is legal, but carrying a concealed weapon is not. However, as with many laws in Canada, the definitions are nebulous and very “eye of the beholder” — a legal phenomena that works out nicely if your police are trustworthy members of the community, but falls apart quickly when times shift to more of an us-versus-them hostility — so there’s nothing written in stone as to the length of blade that’s permitted or any other easy codifier. If you can convince the police that it’s a tool, you’re fine, so they’re not going to arrest you for carrying a machete down a country road if you tell them you’re clearing some prickly ash. However, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble over your sword cane (to my sadness), or even a regular katana, because they’re not going to pass their “legitimate use” test.

I truthfully do carry the knife for utility, but still, the reason I mention the above paragraph is I realized after the fact that having my phone full of pictures of whittled sticks may well keep me out of jail one day! Haha, although in today’s climate, it could just as easy get me a vandalism charge… In any case, while Nefarious plays at the park, I pick up whatever is nearby and chisel a rather crude face (and perhaps body), looking up occasionally to see her in the distance with her mouth wide open pointing out gaps as she and her friends spend a surprising amount of time discussing their personal encounters with the Tooth Fairy. The funnest part for me though is hiding my creation for a child to discover in the future… The farther in the future the better, because if the carving has had some time to weather so as not to look quite so “fresh”, I think it’s even more able to capture the imagination, and perhaps in life there is no more honorable quest than to do just that.

Unfortunately the found wood is quite hard, so it’s physically beyond Nefarious’s strength to carve (it’s hard enough for me to do with any accuracy), but that didn’t stop her from using marker to make this little voodoo twig of me (thus the beard). Because these sticks pretty much guarantee a serious and bloody injury if she goes at them I think I’ll keep my eyes open for a more blade-friendly soft balsa wood or the like. On one hand I miss the days that you could find craft stores on every block, but on the other hand, these days it’s only a click away… I’m not sure which is better.

Our other unschool-y (as in unschooling — and, question to self: why does the Firefox dictionary default to having “unschooled” but not “unschool”?) activity today was taking a handheld soldering-type blowtorch to small pieces of all the different kinds of styrofoam around the house — various structural computer packing materials, stuff that I think is insulation, ultra-light packing peanuts, and so on — and it was actually quite an interesting experiment. Most of the foams quickly melted into a hard plastic that solidified very quickly. We’d just finished repairing a plastic toy with glue, and next time I’m thinking about welding it with melted styrofoam. The packing peanuts were the most fun, because their ultra-low density made them disappear with pretty much no smoke and no debris other than a tiny grain of green plastic. One of the styrofoams, which almost felt like the material that a thick cold-water wetsuit is made of, was interesting because instead of melting and burning like most plastics, it disappeared and was replaced with a thick shiny coat of tarry oil that seemed to be bubbling, even after the heat was stopped, and then instead of hardening like all the others did, it maintained a flexible rubbery character. Anyway, it was interesting and I may even have learned something.

And no, I didn’t learn that it’s always fun to burn stuff.

I already knew that!

In a way it’s my father’s fault, because when I was a kid, he was always so cheerful about his many adventures and occasional misadventures alike, and so enjoyed telling stories about them. After a case of a lawnmower repair going wrong, instead of instilling in me a sense of careful fear about fire, visiting my father in the burn ward did the opposite. This was doubly reinforced by his subsequent glee at the scars. (Which for all I knew also helped create a love of scars, but that’s a different musing).