I have spent most of today chiseling a 30+ pound piece of alabaster. This is my project for my Sculpture class, and it gave me a chance to test out the repair Cory Partypup did on a hose I brought home from school (pneumatic hose with a manual stop-cock inline whose O-ring got destroyed. The pneumatic hammer used for stone carving has no regulator of its own, so you need the stop-cock) This air hammer also has no way to secure the chisel, so you need both hands to manipulate it -- one to hold the hammer and one to guide the chisel where you want it to go. If you don't know what an air hammer is, think a miniaturized jackhammer -- the stone carver version looks like a pared-down, jacked-up Dremel tool (no on-switch or speed control, and the 'motor' is the pneumatic system) but it still packs a lot of vibration power, making it hard to hold for any period of time. I bought anti-vibration gloves knowing this was a problem (along with needing to wear a dust-mask, ear plugs and goggles for this work). The fixed hose works fine now... but even 2 hours to carving has worn me out -- my wrists are numb, my body humming, and I was slurring my words.

The bottom line of this is that I don't think I can draw tonight. It's taken me 20 minutes just to type this, whee! What I will do, however, is take pictures of my project(s) and place them in a new folder (school? projects? not sure which to call it) so folks can see what I've been doing. Oh, and if my hands let me, I'll scan my sketchbook so the stuff I was drawing on my stream can be seen. Oh, yea, and tomorrow is my wedding anniversary -- 15 years marriage, 35 years friendship. :D