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| In Which I Am Sore For Silly Reasons |
Today I had lofty goals. So very lofty. Such goals have never been seen before.
My goals were as follows:
- Get up before 10AM
- Polish the rocks from my goblin horde as seen on Instagram.
- Shower
- Hang out online with my boyfriend
- Eat 3 meals.
Yeah... Not really what I managed to do. Or at least, not entirely and not in that order.
I woke up a little after 10AM, sadly, and when I went downstairs to prep for my shower and morning coffee, I was asked to please shower first, which is maybe suboptimal for when you're planning on making a mess with wet rocks. After my shower, I dressed in clothes I was fine with getting mud & toothpaste on and headed downstairs to polish up the rocks.
I filled half of an empty Sargento Balanced Breaks container with water and popped the rocks in there to soak, hoping the water would offset the dust I'd be making. Then I put that down on my dad's work bench, put a handkerchief over my hair like a cottagecore lesbian with a secret 60s fetish, and strapped on a proper dust mask and safety goggles. Never ever use power tools without protective equipment. Unfortunately for me, I have very short hands and my stubby fingers do not fit into any of the safety gloves we have, so I ended up with a few abrasions from the grinders, sanders, and even the woolen polishing wheel.
First I used a cone-shaped grinder attachment to roughly bring down the peaks of the stones where necessary, and this was where I discovered that perhaps the orange and white pebbles were not going to be polished today. See, my fingers are chubby, the pebbles are tiny, and the grinder bit hurts when it hits you even on the first setting, so I gave up on them pretty quickly and tossed them into the empty half of the container. The rest of the rocks were also difficult to grind because despite my hands being tiny, they are also chubby, and it's hard to grip what amounts to Large Gravel with wet baby hands. Whenever the rock would start to throw dust, I'd dip it back in the water, hence the wet hands. Every time I finished grinding a rock, I tossed it back into the water, which made the water pretty silty and muddy.
The second step was sanding, and I used a larger drum and a smaller drum for each rock. This was when I lost two of my pebbles. One, a scallop-shaped stone with lots of mica in it, I found right before I headed back upstairs at the end. The other is still hiding somewhere around my father's workbench and no amount of bending and pointing a flashlight in random places could reveal it. Other than rocks being flung around the cellar, there wasn't much that happened here. More dipping-when-the-dust-began-to-fly. More standing around and hoping I wasn't getting too messy (spoilers - I was). I ended up popping the rocks back in the muddied water between the large drum and the small one.
The final step was the "polish" step, and here's where I am 100% sure I botched it. See... my polishing compound was completely solid, so I had to improvise. I was gonna use spackle (yes, feel free to yell at me for that in the comments) but the tub wouldn't open. I did, however, have a small tube of toothpaste that had fallen on the hotel floor near a toilet without the cap on while I was on an adventure once. I experimented with the toothpaste and found that, while it kind of worked, it just left everything sticky and unpleasant.
Fortunately, my efforts were not entirely in vain. Turns out that all that silt in the bottom of the water container could be added to the wool wheel and used to serve as a polishing medium.
By this point, however, I was exhausted. I'd been standing in the cellar for about 3 hours, and I was ready for food, a stretch, and a warm washcloth around my neck.
I had hoped to have this all done by noon.
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| Clearly not all stones polish well, but I'm pretty happy with the top left one... |
So here's the new plan: from now on, all polishing will be done
- outside when possible
- In proper safety gear
- As soon as I get new rocks
- in very small batches (1-4 rocks)
- BEFORE a shower.
So that's what I've been up to lately lol!
For the next few days, here's the plan:
- Tomorrow I'll draw & paint
- Thursday I'll upload art
- Sunday I might tell you about a few cups of tea? We'll see.
- Next Monday I really want to have some pictures of crochet progress
- Next Tuesday I'll blather some more.
That's my plan as the world stands now. We'll see how that goes in the next few days - especially since my neck is now so sore from holding position and grinding all morning!
If you want a say in what I'll be drawing, go ahead and send me a Ko-Fi donation with a message saying which category you'd like!
- Animal
- Vegetable
- Mineral
- Dedbert
- Word
- Geometric
- Location
That'll do it for me today, I think.
Go Enjoy Something!
FC
