The Giz-oof off.
Spent a couple hours yesterday playing with my woodworking tools. Christmas before last (or maybe before?) Angela gave me a Black and Decker dremel tool. We've used it since in working on some of the pewter figurines for DND, but I hadn't got to use it on wood really, since I didn't have a place to use it. Now, of course we have a garage, and the temperature is moderately warm enough to go use it. Add in the wood chisels I got from Christmas this year, and I really need to play with them before trying to work on my bokken (which believe it or not, is from a piece of wood Nick brought me in the summer before my junior year at UH. It was downed in a massive storm, and is a really nice piece of wood, though VERY DRY and hard to work with). I should point out that any similarity that it will bear to a real Japanese kenjutsu bokken is going to be fairly coincidental, because of two factors. One, is that I've never really used a real one before, and I'm not sure I've ever seen one in person. The other is that its going to be my work, and thus will reflect something of my own view on swordwork and style.
Anyway, I still had my first wooden sword, which was fairly bad. It had a sharp bend halfway down the blade. Its a bit of a different consistancy too, its pine, and thus is much softer. What I decided to do was take this old and already varnished blade, and attempt to cut it down to something a bit more elegant. I'd never really been happy with the way it had turned out, so I can take this opportunity to fix it up at the same time as learning some new tricks. So the plan is to turn the old crooked sword into a much thinner bladed dirk, with maybe a simple embellishment on the pommel. It'll be a nice change, I don't own any small practice weapons, unless you count my nunchucks which shouldn't really count, since they're easily more dangerous in a smaller space than my swords.
Aside from that, I did my taxes yesterday. Ugh, boy do I owe this year, both federal and state. I miss no-income tax Texas.