Arlette

Naw, they weren’t really abstract, they’d just both done too much acid

She’s arguing with her boyfriend that they should bring the dog next time (“yer not lissnin, hessuchagooboy”) even though he’s agreed with her at least ten times

I wanna be annoyed at the drunk girl at the table behind me who won’t shut the fuck up but I can’t because all she’ll talk about is dogs she knows and every dog walking by

I was using it to crisply separate a perforated card and was like, what coin is that anyway? This changes nothing about how I use it because it is the perfect letter opener (light, just the right bevel on the blade) and I miss it whenever I open a paper envelope any other way.

A knife-shaped letter opener with a coin on top and a nice patina to the silver

TFW you discover the silver letter opener you’ve been using for a zillion years and don’t know how you got it is a hundred years old, and the neat coin you always liked is a 19th century silver coin from the Ottoman Empire

Si vous voyez quelque chose, dites quelque chose

LA PLUME DE MA TANTE

Metal fabrication classmate on the first day tried to tease me saying I must own the textbook already, but hahaha turns out I own another in the series by the same author. Haha. Ha. hahahhaaaaa wonder why people keep mistaking me for a TA hahahaaaaa

Buddy the cat staring past an open door at a very wet outside with one little foot tentatively extended.

Five seconds later Buddy started yelling at me to do something about all the gross-ass rain.

Buddy sitting in an empty cardboard box, looking bored.

Buddy’s taken to spending, like, an hour a day in this box, staring at nothing. The little freeloader finally has a day a job!

Buddy yelling

Buddy not yelling, incredibly

look at this ridiculous animal

It’s the cover to a propane camping stove I bought from someone in Pacifica. It was hella rusty, because Pacifica, and now it is not rusty and I am, like, really good at cleaning a sandblast cabinet.

Three shaped pieces of metal hanging from a metal rack in front of a bathroom-sized walk-in oven. The pieces are a smooth, new-looking, satiny black because I did GOOD

After weeks and weeks of prep in my automotive painting class (fighting with and cleaning an under-maintained sandblast cabinet, mostly) I have finally powder coated something!

Anyway the next person who uses the word “adulting” around me for something like making a dentist appointment gets fucking murdered and I won’t be sorry

Got to talk my aunt down from a probably overdue “coming to terms with age and advancing cognitive decline” meltdown today, now I’m apologizing in advance to my carsickness-prone elderly cat for tomorrow’s drive so they can hang out for what’s probably the last time.

Buddy the cat with his head and shoulders buried in a cardboard box

That’s my boy!

Not to be a dick about it but if you’re gonna ride a 40-year-old motorcycle, you gotta get used to carburetors. They’re fine. Lawnmowers use them. Syncing and tuning them? Sure, be nervous. But the carb on an old Japanese thumper is about as easy as it gets.

I’m so so so so tired and not done yet but also today I showed someone how to drain the float bowl on his motorcycle and I hope made him a little less nervous about carburetors in general.

I swear watching videos of pinstripers at work makes my heart rate instantly drop. www.instagram.com/reel/Ckh04aq...

Was completely unprepared for the art store paint department guy surrounded by oils and canvas to home in on the can of 1 Shot I’d picked up, have me try out a sign painter’s brush and then sell me the brush as a demo for five bucks. It’s Oakland, of course the art store has a secret pinstriper.

GAH

A close-up of graded class schoolwork. All nines out of ten!

The welding teacher teased me about whether I’d have any MiG welds done today, so I banged out a third of the sheet and got all nines out of ten. (Brady’s never been observed giving a perfect score.) Whew.

Buddy the orange cat, passed out hard while snoozing on my leg. What a precious baby.

Buddy fell asleep spooning my leg last night.

On the plus side, I have almost enough structural-grade 3/32 flush aluminum rivets to build an airplane for a field mouse, and I can recognize fractional rivets on sight in sizes from 3 to 8. One more overly specific and unpopular skill for the pile!

I’m pretty sure they’re some dead old Air Force guy’s rivets. It’d break hearts to know they were all dumped in together in a garage clear-out, so I tell myself he must’ve sneaked them home from work a few at a time over the years in a classic Johnny Cash “One Piece At a Time” move.

Last week at the Habitat ReStore I snagged three sandwich bags of solid aluminum rivets (“Maybe I can use these with that rivet gun I got!”) and decided to sort them. One week and one bag later I now know wayyyyyyyy too much about rivets for someone who’s never actually bucked one.

Chatty hardware store cashier: “Lacquer thinner? Acetone? Wow, you’re serious!”
Me: “Yeah, I’m gonna take some STUFF off some STUFF!”

Well the cat is starting to nod off in my lap so he’s way more over that earthquake just now than I am

A close-up of a piece of metal with several awkward, incomplete or irregular MiG plug welds and at the center, one very very neat one with a really uniform heat penetration ring around it.

My plug welds sure got better once we put on a new spool and the wire started feeding right. Lookit that center one!

At one point the student rationalized their understandable anxiety by saying “It’s different when you start riding in your 30s,” and kinda started when I blithely chirped “ Tell me about it, I started at 36!”