Normalcy

Things have started to settle down now at work ever since we passed FCT's. This means I've had time to work on my qualifications, study, PT, and work on my carvings while still having enough time left over for tea and reading. There's something about drinking tea at night that helps to clear my head and stimulate the thinking portion of my brain that's often underutilized (and sometimes not required) at work. Unfortunately this has backfired on several occassions where I've spent half the night working on some idea for a carving, or sketching, only to glance at my watch and realize that I have to get up in 6 hours for work.

For right now I'm patiently waiting for warmer weather so that I can start riding my bike again. I'm almost finished with my frog and lilypad carving, I'm in the middle of carving a dolphin, and I've just started carving a dragon. It's a little bit comforting to see that I'm improving in carving and everything that goes with it (sharpening, stropping, setting up a bevel, laying out a thorough design in full). Once I complete the dragon, I'll probably do several more versions of it just to try and improve upon it. Although the first one is still crude, I'll probably leave it with the tool marks on it. Hopefully I'll put up pictures of these carvings in the next few days if I can ever figure out how to work all this blasted technology.

Pu'er Favorites the Second Time Around

I enjoy trying new things unless I'm feeling exceptionally grumpy, and sheng pu'er is no exception. But, it's comforting to continually explore the same tea: I usually notice different notes that went previously undetected. Over the past year, I acquired three bricks of the Xiaguan Baoyan, which I plan on letting age, one bing of the Kunming Guyi 2006 JingMai, three bricks of the Yiwu Yongpinhao 2007 Fall Harvest, and one Xiaguan Baoyan tuocha. Right now while I try to make time outside of work, I'm slowly chipping away at each bing and brick with the exception of two Yiwu Yingpinhao bricks and the Kunming Guyi bing.

My final thoughts on the Yuannian 2008 JianCheng 1094-I originally noted some muscatel and malt flavors about a year and a half ago. This has subtly changed with the malt fading away into a rustic sweetness in the background and the muscatel becoming muted. As of now, the flavors mesh wonderfully with each other, but there's nothing special about this decent tea.

Surviving until the holidays

Hopefully this weekend I can catch up on sleep and exercise, but I'm really looking forward until Tuesday when my vacation time starts. 9 days of rest and relaxation, here I come!

Dryad carving

I'm almost done with my dryad woodcarving. Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures once I clean it up. As for right now, it's really just a "first draft" carving. I've got another piece of black walnut that I'll use to make another carving and learn from all the mistakes that I made on the first one.

If they didn't have Christmas, they'd invent something else

Performance Bike was having an early bird special so I went to their Raleigh location to see what I needed. After going through their clearance rack and seeing that only larges and xxl sized jerseys and bibs were left, I decided to look elsewhere. I went through the whole store and settled on a bike stand to use with the front tire when you're using a trainer. It cost a whopping $8.60. I brought it up to the cashier who looked disappointed when I put it on the counter, and after spending 2 minutes checking to see if I'd ever shopped at one of their stores, commented, "That's it? I mean, 20% off all purchases..." I replied, "Yeah, but this is all I need." He rang me up and I waited for my dad to finish with his purchase while I watched the other people stand in line with items costing less than $50. I know that if we didn't have Christmas, department stores would create something else to inundate us with some sort of cultural obligation that would require us to spend a small fortune to enjoy the created holiday.

Woodcarvings

So far woodcarving has gone swimmingly. I still need a bunch of tools but I expect to slowly amass enough to complete a wide gamut of projects. Certainly the most valuable lesson I've learned so far is patience. That's patience for becoming proficient at carving, for finishing a piece, and attempting to make do with what you have. Hopefully this December will allow me enough time to create a couple of jigs so I can hold carvings in a variety of places, along with attempting to make furniture solely by hand.

Tranco Pire!

Last night my sister and I watched a movie from our childhood, "In Search of the Castaways." I found out that the crazy Frenchman that we remember as being a goober and constant source of bumbling gaffs is actually the French singer Maurice Chevalier. Weird. But the one thing I couldn't stop laughing about is a native Chilean sporting a wicked buttcut hairstyle going into convulsions like he was afflicted with tetanus in his garbled attempt to convey the native word for earthquake. Fast forward to 1:45.