How to make a signal horn -- a 'toot'orial... also, I think I approached the end of the internet

The slogan for Clan Donnachaidh, "Garn 'nuair dhuisgear!" means, "fierce when roused!"  What a great thing to attach to a signal horn!

I'm an odd duck, I admit.  I'm a touch atavistic, I enjoy working with my hands although I've got nearly zero training, and I seem to look for projects that don't have much practical application.  These projects almost never have local experts that I know, either -- a condition that would have made them unattainable for me in any previous era.

But, today we have a Great Equalizer: the internet.  I have been able to use the World Wide Web to find experts who've taken the time to show what they know, others making mistakes and learning, and even those rare masters who know how to teach something in ways that give you the confidence to try it out for yourself.  The internet is an incredibly egalitarian force when it comes to previously unshared information, or even information that had been difficult to share due to its nature.

For the work I do most -- leather -- the good folks at Tandy Leather had broken down that wall many years before in books and classes, and easily took their expertise to the Web.  Their video man, George Hurst, is great at explaining and showing techniques in ways that make you feel like you can actually do it, too, and his videos at their website have been a great gift to me.

But even other hobbies and skills I've tried -- from transplanting trees to blackpowder shotshell reloading -- have a varied and robust library of YouTube videos and other free online resources.

However... I think I reached the end of the internet when it came to making my latest project.

You see, for some reason unknown even to me, I wanted to make signal horns out of steer horn.

Honestly, I don't know why I picked it.  I feels obvious that I would want to make one, and when I declared my intention, nobody in my house batted an eye, because of course Josh would at some point want to make a signal horn out of a steer horn.  It wasn't a matter of "if" so much as "when" to family.

I jumped on the interwebs, to see some amazing expert with a great YouTube video or Instructables (although, honestly, Instructables has been less than impressive).  But this time, I found almost zero.

Just a couple of guys saying that they were going to try, and they made them.  But, no experts.

When I dug a little deeper, looking for how to work with horn, or Googling how to make powder horns, I found a little bit more.  But signal horns are woefully underrepresented online.

One place I found was (gasp!) a guild that required pay-to-play.  There were a couple of nice looking projects, but very few pictures and almost zero description.  Now, I understand the nature of guilds and trade unions, but a guild giving away its knowledge for money bothers me.

Anyhow, it ain't rocket science, so I dove in and tried one for myself.  I enjoyed the process so much, I bought two more horns to make for the kids, and took some pictures to post.  And so, here's my addition to the ether, on how to make a signal horn:

1.  Buy a horn, preferably from a place that sells them already cleaned out and sanded (Tandy Leather sells them sanded for about $25, but I'm sure there are other places that sell them, too).  I didn't buy mine off the internet, and so didn't have a huge selection.  In retrospect, I'm glad I had a place to look at them, since many of them were cracked and might not have made for a good horn (though I don't know, I didn't buy a cracked one to try out).

Tandy Leather sells sanded horns approx. 16".  I have a local store, so I get to check them out individually.  Here's what it looks like.  Let's put a shine on it.

2.  Sand and polish the horn.  I've seen videos for drinking horns where they start with like a 120 grit and go up through just about all the grits out there... not me.  We aren't trying to remove a lot of material, just knock it down and get a nice shine, and horn is easy to work with.  I start with 220 grit, and after a quick run over the whole thing, I switch immediately to #0000 steel wool.

For illustrative purposes, I've just sanded the black section, and I'm about to start with the steel wool.

See the shiny part?  That's what we're going to get.

And more!  The steel wool gives a quick sense of accomplishment.

It'll feel like it's going fast.  Then it'll get slow, when your muscles begin to argue.  I usually stop at that point and do something else.  Also, pat your steel wool from time to time, to remove dust.

You might have noticed that my pictures are all outside.  That's because horn smells very, very bad when you work with it.  It's yucky. 

After the steel wool, you'll have a nice horn. 

To put a real shine on it, add some brown polish compound to your buffing wheel and run the horn over it for a while.   I like to add beeswax in the end -- just rub a stick of beeswax over the whole thing (like a crayon), and run it on the buffing wheel.  You can also just take some felt and apply it by hand, but the buffing wheel makes quick work of it.

Here it is, all shiny an' purty.

3.  Now, the sound-making part.  If you have calipers, use them to find the part of the horn that is about 7/8" wide, down by the tip.  Take a saw (a bone saw if you have it, or a hack-saw, are best), and cut off the tip (you can use that part to make buttons).  Then, take a 5/8" drill bit and chuck it in your hand drill.  I have found that a spade bit is best for me.  Get it up to a good speed and, holding it tight -- better yet, put the horn in a soft vice if you've got it, but it has to be really, really soft -- drill a hole anywhere from 3/8" to 3/4" deep.  The deeper you drill, the deeper the horn will sound, unless you get too deep and ruin it.  Be careful, though, the horn will buck and you can hurt yourself, if you are holding it (and I make no health nor safety claims here, you are on your own).

Once you've drilled your 5/8" hole, get a 1/8" inch bit (if you haven't already breached the chamber), and drill a hole through the center of the first hole and into the chamber of the horn.

I'm sure you can do a better job making a pretty set of holes here... but, this works, so I'm sticking with it.

Now, go wash it off really good, dry it off, and blow!  You blow it like a brass instrument.  It's a riot.

Three horns in different stages of becoming a nuisance to your neighbors.

If you google "drinking horn", you'll get tons of different designs if you are interested in carving or metalwork.  I don't know how they attach metal to the edges (I'm sure that's a skill "hidden" in the hornworkers' guild, which isn't really a guild because you can pay to see it, so I ain't going in there).  I decided that all I wanted was a leather band for carrying it around.

Springing Spring has Sprung in Northern California... I need tips on keeping the mosquitos away!

Our lovely garden, with decorative dog-repelling wire fence material to make it look ugly, but keep the idiot dog out.

 Well, here in the Northern end of the Great Central Valley, Spring is upon us.  You can tell it's Spring if you live on the edge of the Delta because the mustard begins to bloom.  We have a flower just about all through Winter -- sourgrass, or oxalis -- but when the wild mustard (which is everywhere here, along with bull mallow) blooms, we are at Spring.  Soon after, the wild radish will bloom alongside it.

Last year, in preparation for the big shed and house projects we were expecting, I moved a few plants that would have been destroyed.  I've done very little transplanting in my life, and I'm always scared, so I did some Googling and YouTube video-watching to get tips and tricks... but without the confidence that comes from experience, I'm always a nervous wreck.

The plants were a calla lily, a couple of roses, and a Japanese maple.  I know all three are hardy plants, and I shouldn't have been so concerned with the outcome.  Still, the roses have been wonderful -- they were on the property when we moved here, and are huge (one of them had grown well over ten feet tall) -- and the Japanese maple was a Mother's Day present the kids and I had bought my wife a few years ago. These have history, and I didn't want to lose them.

After transplanting, the calla never stopped looking alive, and the roses shot new growth almost immediately.  But the maple didn't do anything for weeks.

These leaves emerged almost immediately after transplanting back in November.  We've got a happy rose under our bedroom window.

Last week, however, the maple began showing tiny signs of life:

Success!  Tiny new growth emerging from the tips of the maple tree.

Since I was successful at transplanting four established plants, I'm now an expert here on the interwebs.  So here's my process:

1) Dig a big hole;
2) Pour some kind of plant transplanting help juice/water mix into the dirt left from the hole;
3) Dig out your plant, sweating and nervously chuckling at the horrible crunching and cracking sounds;
4) Put the plant into the first hole (not the second hole, that was made where you took it out, remember?);
5) Fill around the new plant with the dirt/transplanting help juice/water mix;
6) Pray and be nervous for 6-8 weeks.

I hope you gain something from my now publishable experience and expertise.

Something else that pops up in Spring is my archery class here in West Sacramento:

My backstop could use a dye job.

Sadly, we also get to deal with the perennial invasion of many, many mosquitoes.  My son gets especially large welts from some of them, but they are no fun for the rest of us, either.  What I need are tips for reducing/eliminating/fending off mosquitoes that don't involve bug spray directly on us, nor massive amounts of pesticide or pyrethrum or its chemical equivalent.  I know we'll never get rid of them, but the numbers are pretty amazing in my back yard.  (Yes, I know to remove standing water.)

Anyhoo, give me your tricks for getting rid of mosquitoes if you've got 'em.

Shotgun sling, and getting on the stitching pony

©2019 Joshua Stark

One crazy discovery I've found from my time working with leather is that I really, really enjoy stitching and lacing by hand.  The stitch I perform most often is the saddle stitch, which involves two needles on either end of a six-foot thread, through a project that is clamped down in a contraption known as the stitching pony.

A rifle sling in the stitching pony, about to have a deer skin pad stitched to it.

Of course, my stitching pony is an example of my "useful" handiwork -- a perfectly practical, hideous creation that works a little bit less than a store-bought version, but which cost pennies.

Stitching appears to be a very boring endeavor, but in reality, the subtle steps to get it right take a lot of time to learn, while improvements and a job done right are nearly immediate in their reward.  I get great joy just from hand stitching a straight line.  Also, the saddle stitch is nearly indestructible, and easily repaired.

These pictures do not convey the satisfaction of getting it right.

But it is also one of those skills that goes completely unused if there is no motivation to begin.  The steps are many, and they have one purpose -- to put a thread into a material.

It's a type of work that goes well with a radio -- usually NPR, in my case, or music.  I can also talk some, though I can't really lose my focus, or else the lines start to sway.

For the past month, I've been coming back to a project that put me back on the pony: a shotgun sling for a friend of mine.

A shotgun sling differs from other slings in that it is not strapped into hardware directly on the gun.  Rather, leather straps are slipped over the gun, as in the picture below:

I'm not a photographer

 Although you can shoot with the sling on, it is really meant to help for long treks without shooting -- say, to a duck blind -- where it is then removed during the hunt.

It was a riot to make, since I had to research and test parts, get the buckle on right, and tool a new head for me, a Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata).  These are wonderful birds, picked on by many waterfowlers who don't know how to cook them right, but appreciated for their comical bill and striking colors.

I also tried to tool silhouettes of canada geese, which came out alright, but definitely not as good as I'd have liked.  More practice is needed, for sure.

Since duck hunting is so wet, I decided not to put a deerskin pad on it, but rather, some neoprene.  I looked all over for swimsuit-type stuff but couldn't find it in anything but really large amounts, so I went to the local Big Box and looked around.  I found some light neoprene in the form of pads for truck tool boxes, and I cut the piece from one (after I bought it, of course).

A neoprene pad, hand-stitched.

It seems to have come out pretty well.

If you are interested in a piece of leather work, check out my Etsy page here:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/OldSoulLeatherWork

Also, if you have suggestions, let me know!

A couple of (kinda) cheap shop ideas put to use

As our new shed was being built, I was tickled pink with anticipation (a strange sight, indeed), and since I am a huge fan of Pinterest, I incessantly poked around there for shop ideas.

Being as absolutely cheap-skate as I am, I particularly focused on things I could make or repurpose from what I've already got, or from dirt-cheap basic materials.  One idea I'd had in mind was using cedar fence boards for wood paneling, cupboards, and the like.  I already had a jug of boiled linseed oil and some paints, and I went to town.

I'd seen some pretty cool leather workshops put together with tools hung on wood panels.  I didn't want the dark painted wood I'd seen, but I figured that if I sanded down some cedar boards and treated them, they'd look quite nice.  And at $2.50 per five-foot board, the price would be something I could live with.

The result:

My leather workshop corner made from cedar fence boards treated with boiled linseed oil.

The cedar boards worked like a charm.  Cedar is easy to work with, cheap, and took on a pretty honey look with the linseed oil.  The odor was quite strong, both from the wood and from the oil, so if you are sensitive to that kind of stuff, I'd go with something less volatile.  I love the smell of those things, and after a few days (even in the fairly cold Winter), it had dissipated. 

One great, cheap trick I discovered was the variety of uses of brass mug hooks.  I used them to hang tools, bending them to the shape I needed for weird-shaped ones like this leather stitching punch:

I also used them to hang my electrical cords, and of course, some of my leather projects.

 

As a person who rarely paints or stains anything, I've always been flummoxed by people's ability to dry their project without leaning it against something and making a mess and leaving unsightly marks.  Well, it dawned on me that I could temporarily screw in the mug hooks to the project I was drying, and voila!  No visible marks, and nice, even application:

One project I discovered down the Pinterest rabbit-hole was a DIY cyclone shop-vac.  Now, I'd been given a gift card by my lovely wife to the local Big Box store, and I'd purchased a vacuum cleaner... I know, it sounds stupid, until I call it a Shop-Vac -- then, it sounds manly and cool.  I'm dumber than I thought.

Anyhow, I'd seen folks do some elaborate woodworking, gluing, drilling with fancy bits, etc., to make a "cheap" cyclone vacuum.  A cyclone vacuum will separate the bigger chunks and thicker wood dust, allowing your bags and filters to last a lot longer.  But, cyclones are expensive, and I'm not.

After thinking that the amount of time it would take to make one would make it more expensive than just buying one, I found a guy who said, basically, to just cut a hole in a bucket at an angle, glue in a hose, cut another hole in the lid, jam a pvc pipe into it so that it drops a bit below the bucket-hole, and jam the hose to your vacuum into that pvc.

I found out that you don't even have to glue it, you can... what's the term? Ah!  "Pressure-fit".  I just cut the holes a little bit smaller than I was supposed to (don't ask if I did that on purpose, just go with it), and jammed the fittings in out of sheer frustratio... genius.

The result:

Behold the considerably cheaper, but still not cheap, cyclone vacuum.

One word of caution to the truly cheap-skates among us.  The dad-gum extra hose was twenty bucks!  I don't know about you, but if my project runs into double digits, then it can't really be "cheap."

Anyway, the thing works like a charm, and I expect my filter and bag will last quite a while.  It was worth it.

If you have any cheap shop ideas, do tell!

Small business musings

A purse made from Wickett & Craig bridle leather.  I'm happy how it turned out.

     Since I last posted in 2017, I have continued with my leather working enterprise.  I typically sell between one and two items per month, and take in about a hundred bucks.  Thank goodness I have an amazing day job!  Really, though, I'd never thought of this as anything more than a hobby that would help offset my hunting and fishing, especially as my kids get older and show an interest in those same, bank-account ravaging pastimes.

There are, of course, upsides and downsides to running a hobby as a small business.  In my case:

UPSIDES:

• I am forced to the workbench if I have an order, even if I'm not feelin' it.  Fear of being late to finish (or start!) a project that somebody already paid good money to receive is a pretty effective motivator.  And when I get to the bench, I remember in a visceral way just how much I love doing the work.
• I am forced to repeat processes and techniques.  This sounds boring, but if you love the work and love getting it just a little bit better each time, it is a remarkably satisfying experience.  Also, repetition of proper technique in handcrafts is essential to creating good, high-quality work.
• I have a reason to buy decent quality, and proper, tools and leather.  This is a big deal, because it really helped me get off the ground.  Let's be honest here -- when it comes to buying stuff for me, I squeak when I walk.  They greet me by name at Harbor Freight.  But when I started making nice stuff, I realized that I'd need decent tools to get the job done.  A bonus is that I deduct the cost of this stuff, and that really helped me to get started, for sure.
• I get to go off by myself and do something that I love.  My family is super-supportive, but I still carry with me some internal guilt whenever I go off to do something alone... that's natural, and a good check on complete hedonism.  But sometimes it gets out of hand, and so it's nice to have a little mental crutch ("yikes!  I have to get that order in!").

There are, of course

DOWNSIDES:

• It is, indeed, a business -- which brings a number of headaches, like keeping receipts, and tax time.  And state and federal and regional and local taxes don't always match up chronologically.  And fees can bite you in the butt, big-time.
• I have less time for new ideas.  If you have to get the same five things out that you know you are good at getting out, then you have less time in your life for experimenting with new styles or products.  I haven't hand-stitched nearly as often lately, for example, nor laced up anything like that purse in quite a while.
• I'm stressed!  I do stress about getting a product out on time, and that carries its own baggage, even if it ultimately results in a good outcome for me.  Adding hobby stress to my work stress is not always the best idea.
• This hobby takes precedence if an order is in.  Since it is in my, "me" time, it sometimes takes time away from other things I'd like to do -- like fishing and hunting or gardening.

I also teach archery as another hobby/business, and much of these apply to that work, too.

Do you run a hobby as a business?  Have you taken it up to become your primary income, or kept it small?  Are you happy with it, either way?  I'd love to hear from you, especially any tips and tricks you might want to share.

Of course, everybody is welcome to leave a comment here if you like!  Let me know what you think.

Also, I am looking for ideas for leather work, so let me know if you have any.

What am I doing back here?! We'll see... maybe nothing

© Joshua Stark 2019

In our newest addition -- an honest-to-goodness workshop... also, just an obligatory picture

I've been away from the blogosphere for quite some time, spending most of my days in the Facebook.  There's something really great about that space, namely, I've found many long-lost (even somewhat forgotten, at times) friends and family, and I get to read about their goings-on quite regularly... well, the ones who use Facebook, that is.

But I have noticed that lately I'm having a difficult time focusing on longer pieces.  I can't seem to stop and think, linger, contemplate the nuances.  Rather, I'm constantly looking for a photo, or for the "next" update.  Part of this is probably just the digital medium, more broadly.  It is very picture-oriented, and it is very, very fast.  Pictures are now, perhaps for the first time in history, cheaper than words to take, to make, to print and disseminate.

That's not to say that good words or good pictures are cheap.  Good words and good pictures still require skills, and most people just don't take the time to develop these skills.  For example, keep reading this blog, and then go read something from Faulkner.  You'll see. 

But the relative price of written words has dropped to near zero.  Once, we had to carve out writing space and time, and have the tools of pen, pencil, paper.  And photography was even more expensive, requiring actual gear and usually the ability to travel, and also the purchase of film and processing, and the time it took to see what picture you actually took.  The very physical nature of all of these things was limiting, too; just imagine storing as many pictures as you have on your phone in albums.

Back when words were more expensive, people didn't write so much.  Rather, we prioritized, writing to our dearest loved ones, or writing to our superiors, our government officials, our teachers.  Most of us didn't write as much because writing is hard.  It took time and effort, it took a part of our brains we didn't exercise nearly enough in our day-to-day affairs.  But, some of us obsessed over writing: the skill, the dedication, the drive to draft perfect sentences that uncover deep, universal emotions and truths about our world and the human condition.  Some took it up as a professional craft, either by stumbling into it, or driven by dreams of wealth -- using the written word to convince, to titillate, to shock, all with the end goal of making a buck.  Most of us just stayed away as much as we could.

(Some of you can take this quick quiz to discover if you are in the camp of writing as a profession/dedication, or if you don't care so much:  have you been either bemoaning or smiling contentedly at my use of two spaces to separate sentences?  If so, I daresay you work in writing quite a bit.)

Back when pictures were expensive, people didn't take so many, either.  We prioritized, taking pictures of loved ones, great and beautiful places, tragedies, and the like.  Again like writing, some dove into film and photography as a passionate desire, a discipline, and/or a profession.  But for most, photography happened at birthday parties and the Grand Canyon.  For those of you of a certain age: how many selfies did you take before digital formats became as high-quality as those of film?  I certainly did not think of myself as photogenic enough to waste expensive rolls and the time it would take to send off to get developed.  I could just look in the mirror and see all my flaws -- no need to preserve those for posterity at ten bucks a pop!

Our now-ubiquitous tiny, portable computers, and our connected social media platforms, changed all of that.  Though good words and photos still are not cheap, there are so many more cheap words and photos out there in the ether.  We don't need to pick and choose, or rather, many of us find it so difficult to find the good stuff because of the proliferation of the bad.  And the sheer number of words and pictures has driven down the price for all of them so much that many good folks in the written and photographic professions find it really hard to scrape together a living.

And pictures are now even cheaper than words.  People have taken that whole, "a picture is worth a thousand words" to heart, thinking that just by snapping a shot, they don't have to explain nearly so much.  I mean, it's right there, right?  In technicolor?

But there is something even more ephemeral about this current medium.  We've thrown up so much out into it that finding good stuff is so much more difficult.  Just last week, I began moving some of my pictures from my phone to my computer.  When I first bought the phone, I was impressed at the amount of memory it can store.  Now, it's just annoying; finding a decent picture buried in a sheer mountain of crap is the same as not ever having taken it at all.  The scrolling nature of personal, political, local and global news and economic updates is similar; there may be good words strung together out there, but finding them is purnt-near impossible.

I think there is a happy medium still out there, between the tremendous scarcity and elitism of the "old" ways and the utter anarchy of the new... it isn't nearly as popular as it was in the last decade, but it is still around.  I'm talking about the blog.

I loved blogs, and I pored through them until I found some that inspired me.  I learned how to do so many things -- little things, like make yogurt or prune a pomegranate or wax a duck, but still life-changing skills.  Unlike books, where I have also learned so much, blogs allowed me to reach out directly to authors, and from it I also made dear, lifelong friends.  I also felt a connection to a group of people I had cobbled together, even though they didn't, and may never, know of each other.  I brought them together into my world because of what they said and how they said it.

When I jumped onto Facebook, it was for a completely different reason.  I saw a friend who was on there, and it occurred to me that I could find friends and family who were physically distant from me, and I could communicate more regularly with them.  It wasn't because of what they thought, but simply of who they were -- people who'd been in my life, from my small community or from my large extended family.  I read their posts out of love.

Slowly, I lost the threads to bloggers.  Many disappeared, never to be heard from again... something that bothers me from time to time.  Being a fatalistic Okie, I wonder if they've died, though probably like me, they just stopped putting their best ideas down on a blog for free.  Others also moved to Facebook, where they mostly lurk. Still others may reside on social media places I haven't tried.

And it very well be that blogs were the downfall of good writing, since they lowered the price for valuable information to near zero.

Over time, I lost the desire to sit down and think through ideas to put on my blogs.  I have three that I regularly posted in the past, but the world started moving so fast, it felt, that I didn't have much desire to come back and post... also, I never was really good at it.  So it's been two years since I've posted something to one of my blogs.

But I come back here and read them myself occasionally, or link to an old piece I wrote when I see it may relate to something in the news that a friend might find useful or illuminating, or silly.  Mostly silly.  I also look up old recipes I developed for woodworking, cooking, gardening.  This blog, in particular, was originally meant to be a placeholder for useful yard and garden things, leatherworking, cooking, duck-rearing, etc.

Now, I'm back.

I don't know if I'll keep it up this time, but I want to try.  I enjoy writing, I don't do it well enough to get paid for it, and I like coming back to read ideas that I'd discovered from great places around the internet and noted here.  I also enjoy doing the things I write about here: gardening, hunting, fishing, foraging, and this place helps spur me when I can more easily do other things that don't give me the same pleasure, like perusing Facebook.

So, on to updates.

There are so many!  In the past year, we started upgrading our house to make room for our growing family.  No, we didn't have more kids... but, if you didn't know this, then beware:  when you have children, they literally grow.  You have to feed them more and more, and you have to make room for them.  It's crazy, and wasn't in the manual when we first looked it up.

So, we are having an extra bedroom built for our daughter, because we don't want her to kill us at some point.

We've also put in a shed that is big enough to house all our outdoor things, plus have room for storage AND a workshop!  It's been wonderful, simply wonderful.  I've also got a barrel smoker I rescued and fixed up for about $30, and I hope to build out a cheap cook-out space in the yard for it.  I'll try to update with all of these things at some point, including how I'm organizing the shed, prepping and planting the garden, and getting back into leather work.

If you've taken a moment to read my little rant here, leave me a message.  And have a great day.

Wood and water and moving earth.

© 2017 Joshua Stark

I didn't grow up with a fireplace, nor a fire pit.  When I was a kid, we burned some of our trash in the back yard like good people did then, but that was it.

When camping, of course we built a fire.  But at home, we didn't have a woodpile, or anything of the sort.

Now, I've decided that I want a fire pit in our back yard (for days when we are allowed to burn, of course -- like good people do today).  We've collected some river rocks from Craigslist, and have a decent little camp-like pit.  We also have a small rock garden next to it, and I moved one of our raised beds to make some room (pics when it looks better).

We are also getting plenty of wood from downed branches off of our walnut, redwood and cedar trees, and I do not plan to buy wood to burn.

However, since everything is wet, we are having quite a time getting something to burn...

In my search for how people put up wood, I did stumble upon this little stand idea on Pinterest, and put it to use:

It's very simple:  a cinder block, two 2x4's, and  firewood.  No glue, no nails.  It ain't pretty, but form follows function, right?

Around the neighborhood, fruit trees are in bloom.  It feels early, because it is (climate change is real, folks).  The rains have been, until today, relentless -- for the first time, I had to cut a channel around one side of the house, to drain away some water.

Today, there's some wind, and a little chill (say, forty degrees), but there's also sun!  I think we get a couple days of respite before the next storm rolls in this weekend.

And speaking of wind and storms (because, let's face it, I live in California):

Queue ominous music...

Somewhere, in that tangle, thirty to fifty feet up, sits a widowmaker.  On the other side, about ten feel lower, is another one.

A widowmaker, for those who don't know, is a large, broken branch.  My redwood here is over 100 feet tall, and so the perspective is lost in a photo -- but for scale, consider that each of those larger branches is, effectively, a small tree, hanging horizontally and sixty feet up.

There is a general understanding that redwoods are light weight woods, and this is true up to a point.  However, none of those branches up there are dried out -- they are all filled with water, which makes them still pretty danged heavy, and some of them have got to be thirty feet long.  And since F=MA, we've had our troubles over the years with this tree, including roof, car, and fence damage.

Widowmakers are one of those wild, foreboding natural phenomena... especially if you are a logger. But, not exclusively.  Back when I was a State Park Interpreter, my docents told me a story of a fifth grade class visiting the Forest of Nisene Marks in the Santa Cruz mountains. 

This forest is a patch of second-growth redwood, and also the infamous epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake way back in the 20th Century.  My visitor center, tasked with interpreting the Forest, would lead groups of fifth graders on a nature and history walk on one of its amazing, dark trails, talking about fairy rings and cathedral stands, banana slugs and eucalyptus.  And Loma Prieta and widowmakers.

During one such walk, after the earthquake/widowmaker talk, the class was gifted with a particularly pointed lesson: a 5 or so scale earthquake and a gigantic branch that fell among them.  Thankfully, nobody was hurt.  But, it's outdoor education like these that shape and mold young minds...

I'll be getting out the ladder later today or tomorrow, getting a rope onto these branches, and yanking them down if I can.  Of the four seasons in California, we are on the back-side of Flood, which means we've gone through three of them.  Only one left.

(Bonus points for knowing the four seasons of California.)