Not learning from one’s mistakes.

I go through a cycle with my welding cover lenses.  They get dirty and scratched and I clean them.  They get worse and I keep saying that it’s not too bad.  Eventually I get to a point where the weld puddle looks like an fuzzy light, change the lens, realize how clear things are with a new ($0.99) one and vow to never cheap out on cover lenses again.  Then the cycle begins again.

It seems that I do this with kitchen knives too.  I was touching up the edge on my trusty old Marttiini puukko and decided clean up a long-neglected carving knife for The Wife™.  It cut OK before nut now it works as it should.  I will never let a kitchen knife get that dull ever again. 😉

I’m a man from Nootka Sound…and maybe a little bit of a crank too.

I’m known to be a bit of a cheapskate who happens to have a Scottish name and every now and then somebody puts the two together and says something tasteless about my ethnicity and thrift going hand-in-hand.  Sometimes I ask them if they’d verbalize that thought if my name was Shlomo.

The most recent incident happened this week but this time I steered the conversation another way and explained that I feel little affinity with the Scots; at least no more than with any other people.  I have traveled to Scotland but the only reason was to see and ride a motorized boat lift.

The exchange made me draw parallels and wonder if the self-loathing Scot is a widely acknowledged archetype. 😉

What an introduction to travel!

Two good friends of mine who have never traveled outside of Canada, except for a school trip to Japan for one and a training exercise in Yakima for the other, just returned from their first proper trip overseas.

It was a friend’s destination wedding and the trip had it all….rioting, gun fighting , a brief appearance by a grenade, and even a marriage too….  Island life might be too tame for them now.

Addendum:  That’s not all!  My friend happened to pass me on the highway the other day and we pulled over for a chat.  If the action on the ground wasn’t enough, on the flights two people had to be chemically restrained!