Recovery from the weekend

Oh man. I hate the uncommon cold. This past weekend was the (In)famous Paul Bunyan Festival in Nelsonville, Ohio. The amount of testosterone in one place can be staggering. What is Bunyan you ask? Well, simply put it is /the/ expo for loggers and logging equipment in the US. Now, I bet your wondering why I was there. Good question. I ask myself the same thing every year. It is held at the campus of Hocking College, where Robbins Crossing is located. If you do not know what RC is, it is an 1840 village I spend my weekends at running the blacksmith shop. Fire...metal...good.



Anyway, while I did make a little cash, I suffered for it. I had a cold all weekend. Still do today. Perhaps I pushed a little too hard this weekend, but all in all the food for the soul it creates makes all the hassle worth it. We made many peoples day with our showing off, stories, jokes and trinkets we gave to the kiddies. I know if I heard / My was a blacksmith.../ Okay, sure. Thanks for coming. Seriously, seems everyone who came by had a relation to a blacksmith and somehow that made him or her more knowledgeable than the average schmuck. There seems also to be some sort of inverse correlation between the closeness of the relative and the lack of donations they leave. Direct relative the leave zip, zero, and zilch. One generation away, well change maybe. 2 or more generations, folding money. Heck, we do not care, it all adds up.



So, here I am on Monday, still sick, but now my hands and wrists are swollen to go with it. Talk about feeling puffy. Its like typing with boxing gloves. Overall I am not too bad off, just stiffer than a corpse who ODed on Viagra. The body just does not want to move very well. This has nothing to due with age or lack of physical conditioning; just we spent close to 22 hours working in the shop over 2 days. Imagine going to the gym for 22 hours of working out in two days and how would you feel when the day after rolled around? Yea, you get the picture.



Now to add into all the normal weirdness of Robbins, add the Bunyan show to it. Okay, now here is where the exponent of weirdness was added: About 50 feet from the shop a group of Ecuadorians set up two stalls. Not too strange, I got some awesome llama wool serapes for Judi and I. Tent number 2 is where the weird began to flow. For two solid days we were forge working to the native sounds of Ecuador. Yep, flutes and everything. It was like National Geographic on acid. All these flannelled loggers running around an 1840s village to the tunes of a group of native people from South America. Check please, table 2!!!



I have started relaxing a little more now that Judi has become more mobile, but I most likely will not mellow all the way back out till she is sans-cane and back to fencing. I know, shes a big girl and can take care of herself, but hey, what can I say, I care a lot.