A bit of news and a long, harsh rant

J.P.W. Griswold

Ok, this weekend is "the shindig" which is a collection of our artist friends coming up to the shop and generally hanging out and doing a bit of their craft for the public to view whilst a heritage festival simmers across the street in the Hart Heritage District (the only Industrial Historic District in Michigan, I believe).

It is something of an open house and community service to allow people to see the shop all rolled into one. In some ways, it's a real pain. In others it is fun. We have to make sure that all our clients pieces are secure and the shop cleaned more than if we were working, and that takes a fair bit of effort and time we simply often do not have.

But never fear, we still work when the place is not full of tourists! Then Monday we are back on the regular schedual and we will be getting some orders out on Tuesday.


We had a pretty major scare this past week that halted production completely for the entire week. My poor little wife was having some medical problems, now she seems to be feeling a bit better but it will be a major weight once the tests have come back and we can tackle what ever may be ailing her. Hopefully it is simply stress or something of that ilk. Generally, I would rather not speak of such things in such a public forum, but this was a pretty major scare that seems to be less than we first thought. More to come on that once we know.


And to make matters worse, her father is a corrections officer at a location that just had an attempted breakout, and was the first officer on the scene. We have been very concerned about his state, but have just found out that he is ok and unharmed. Thanks God! Of couse, the Media seems to think the prisoners are the victems here, forgetting that one of the pair is a convicted murder and the other kidnapped and repeatedly raped a young girl. Or that they severly beat a female guard and the driver of the trash truck that was commendeered, probably ending both of their careers and leaving them with a life time of pain and suffereing. Neither prisoner got what was needed; they were treated very professionally and did not recieve the beating that they so desperately derserved. The public was never in danger, but to hear TV 8 tell it, charlie manson was going to get out and take a bus load of kindergardeners hostage. The media spin here always seems to favor the attacker and paint the victem as the criminal.


Which brings me to: THE SOAPBOX

I have about had it with the treatment certain prisoners are getting by the goverment. Sure, some people in the prison system made mistakes, but that should not allow them special privilages they would not have had in the outside world. I simply can not understand why killers have it better than the working class people who they have attacked. Cable television, air conditioning, time in the gym, better meals than you and I eat half the time all on our tab.

In particular, the ones that really set me off (and I hope many of you as well) are child rapists. Not "molesters" as the politically correct like to call them. They are rapists. I am certainly far from the usuall "we must protect our young at all cost" groups out there. I think a lot of this "child saftey" line has gone way too far. Kids need to be exposed to germs; it builds their imune system so when they reach adulthood they are not killed by the common cold, as I expect we will start to see in the near future. They need to be exposed to trauma, strife and death and then taught how to cope and overcome such things. I am not saying they should be *intentionally* exposed to it, but when it comes along natuarlly, they should be taught to deal with it.

But to be raped as a child goes beyond the pale of childhood strife. The death of a loved grandparent is hard enough; let alone going to the funeral and being raped by someone in the bathroom (happened in a nearby town some years back).

My solution is a fairly simple, brutal, draconian one: Once proven and convicted (and proven well, as there are cases of kids or adults making false charges), take the kiddy-diddler out to the town square and start their legs on fire. All other prisoners in the system are *required* to be present and watch. Public hanging and such is also very effective, though in our nice, clean, antiseptic society this is considerd cruel and unusual punishment. Is it really? Think back to your happiest childhood memory. The really good one. Now imagine, right in the middle of that, being raped. Think how it feels to sleep under your bed at night, so that that person can not find you. To always be afraid. To never trust people again. What kind of punishment is that? Especially to someone who did not derserve it, could not struggle to avoid it and has no recourse.

And I do not think that execution for child rapists is the right course. A lifetime of pain, suffering and toil is so much more derserved. Once the charred flesh heals, and the brand on their forehead is placed, chain them to others like them for 25 years and put them to work for the country. The chains do not come off either, for the chains on that child's heart will last that long as well. Probably longer. This is one of the many things eroding our society that is often forgotten about, left unsaid or intentionally downplayed.

Get the kids help. Make the criminal pay and pay dearly for their crimes.

Harsh? You had better believe it. Too harsh? Perhaps. But with the way things get watered down in our punishment system, within weeks of putting this system into place, it will get watered down to yet another slap on the wrist. The criminal will get warehoused in a facility where he is living better than the guards and police that got him there, and he can train to be a better, stronger criminal than he went in as. He will have full access to a complete legal library, free council and learn how to use the system to his advantage, so when he gets out, he will know how to do his favored crime better and have less chance of getting caught or prosecuted. As it is now.

The police and jailors are trying to protect you and I from these sub-humans. Give them a chance, help them if you can. And if you know of a child rapist, get the child help and report the criminal. Sadly, he will only serve 6 years of his 25 year sentance and be released to do it again, but hopefully some of the "better" criminals in the system will deal with them. (those better criminals are the ones who made legitimate mistakes, and are justly serving their debt to society, while they try to better themselves, and intend to be good citizens upon release). You see, many people in prison have sons and daughters, just like the rest of society. They like these child rapists about as well as I do, in some cases are even darker viewed about them. And they often deal with the issue for us, even though they should not have to.

I have so much more bile to vent about this topic, and others, but that really is not what this weblog is all about, so I shall end it here.

OFF THE SOAPBOX


This weblog is really about metal, and making things, and I have been rather lax about writing on these topics. I shall endeavor to do so in the near future.

Until then, stay safe, enjoy life, love your family, smile at strangers, try to drive nice out there.

Thanks God, for my life, abilities, family and the saftey of my Dearest Little Wife.

Back from Pennsic

J. P. W. Griswold

Hale all, back from Pennsic (didn't suck) and only 26,000 emails to sort through. We are catching up with the back log this week some more, so a few things should ship soon. Once we have waded through the spam (viagra, cheep! and ebay scams mostly it looks like), we will get some responses out!

Thanks again to you all for your patience, good wishes to you all for these last weeks of summer 06!

IronAngel Forge

IronAngel Forge

For anyone looking for updates:

Still wadeing through 10,000 emails. I'm trying to get back up to speed asap. Some orders will be with us at Pennsic, inquire there if you have one. There are several orders waiting delivery in the shop, we are still trying to fish out data from a damaged drive to get everything back to who it goes to. I hate computers.

Back online finally

IronAngel Forge

Howdy all, just a quick post to let you know we are back on line after several challenges. Now only 10,000 emails to sort through to get caugh back up with everyone out there!

After we got back online, the weather has been a challenge... litterally minutes after. From record heat to huricane force winds in about 15 minutes. Severe damage all around us, with over a thousand trees down in the area, several transformers exploding, a few buildings flattened (including at least one large one over 100 years old at the fairgrounds nearby) power outages and lighting strikes on the power pole at the corner here by the shop. No deaths we know of, a few injuries as the window of our laundromat was blown in on a few patrons and now we are inundated by news trucks as we are the feature story of the day. Sigh. The adventure continues...

The Adventure Continues

J. P. W. Griswold of IronAngel Forge

Howdy everybody, the last month and a half have brought us many... let's just call them "life adventures". I am trying to get everything back on track and get orders filled.

More to come as time allows.

BooBoos of the internet begone!

J. P. W. Griswold

Just a quick update on the main website to fix a few of the booboos of the internet. As usual, I still have a lot of update work to do on the site including replacing some pictures with better versions and putting in pictures that somehow got missed the first time through.

Stay Tuned, it's been busy!

A lark adventure - part one

Somehow I managed to double post this. Sorry about that, move along now.

A lark adventure - part one

IronAngel Forge

There is a lot to write, but this is just a quick note. On a lark, the wife and I took a quick trip down to Lansing to attend a book signing with an author that the wife has recently begun reading. I not being much of a fiction reader simply went along to enjoy my wife's company, and watch her joy.

I was more than pleasantly surprised to discover that the other attendees at the signing were a fun group, and that the author herself was a hoot. The evening wore on pleasantly, and after a fun question and answer session, the book signing began. We are patient people, and waited til last.

The rest will have to wait for a later post, as there is much fun to write, as well as a bit of a teaser about another project in the shop.

Stay tuned!

Getting things done

J. P. W. Griswold

Well, we are still working on getting things done, as always. Orders are filling up quickly, and we are as busy as we usually are much later in the summer already at the first of April.

More to come.

A hard night

C.J. Griswold

From C. J. Griswold, Wife of the Blacksmith, and his keeper:

I don’t have a blog, and I don’t post much on the internet. I used to work at an ISP and did all the tech geeky stuff, now I pretty much use the internet for shopping and keeping up with my favorite authors.

I now work at a 911 police dispatch center. My job is the basis for this entry.

Today, for the first time in two and a half years, I learned to hate my job.

Now, before you start thinking, ‘Oh, just another disgruntled worker bitching about her job and how unfair it is’ hear me out…

Today, I had to listen to a friend and co-worker kill himself.

I’m not going to go into gory details, I honestly have no desire to type out the play by play. The Reader’s Digest version of ‘How I Learned to Hate My Job’ is all I’m willing to share.

Sunday nights are usually pretty laid back. People tend to be getting ready to go back to their daily grind, school, work, whatever. Sunday is a nice night to ease down from a long three day work weekend.

This morning, at about 4:00 am, one of our off duty officers called us and told us he was going to kill himself. He had his issued weapons in his vehicle with him and he, in his words, felt he was out of options. He was calling from a cell phone so we were pretty much unable to find him and he wouldn’t tell us where he was. All he wanted was for his last words to be on a taped line. He wanted his beneficiaries to know he was sorry and that everything would be left to them. He kept saying he didn’t want to hurt anyone else, just himself.

Well, needless to say, our dispatch center (Four of us working at the time) went into high alert. Nothing like a crisis to bring people together. We sent out area broadcasts and contacted the counties surrounding us. We sent police officers to his house, and the houses of people he was close to. We had a pretty good vehicle description and broadcast it to everyone in our county. We held all non-emergency calls and basically initiated a manhunt for our friend and co-worker.

Needless to say we found him. When we did he, in short, freaked.

I was answering phones at the time, and took his panicked and somewhat erratic call. I did all I could to keep him on the line (he kept hanging up on us) and try to calm him down. I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t type, so I just kept repeating what he said so that my co-worker behind me could advise the pursuing officers. I told him how much we all cared for him, that his fellow officers were there to help him, were worried about him.
No matter what I said, he wouldn’t stop.

His command officer came up to dispatch to talk with him. I handed over my headset with shaky hands and fought off wave after wave of panic and tears. Survive first, then panic. Panic never helps anyone in an emergency situation.

The officers in our county did not pursue him (as in lights and sirens stop this guy). They just followed at a safe distance, worried for him as we worried, wanting him to stop so they could help him.

He eventually made his way to a county adjoining ours. A county where the deputies knew nothing about this armed man other than that he may endanger their officers and their residents. He began to drive erratically, swerving into oncoming traffic at high rates of speed. The deputies had to stop him. I know they did. It doesn’t make the end result any easier to bear.

With his command officer still on the phone, and all of his friends and co-workers at dispatch listening in, he made one last plea for the deputies to stand down.

They did not, and a good man, friend, and police officer ended his life with the weapon he had used to serve and protect. It devastated all of us, his friends and co-workers at dispatch and in the field.

I’m not sure there is a moral to this story; there is certainly no silver lining that I can see. He is gone. He will never again come to see us, armed with a pizza and a smile. Never again call on duty with a laugh and a friendly quip. He succumbed to the feelings of despair and sadness that were in him, and passed them along to us with his dying breath.

So, maybe this, like all suicide stories, does have a moral. Think before you act. Your actions never affect only yourself. It is rarely as bad as it seems at the time. And even if you don’t know it, there are people there for you. If nothing else, there is always a soul at the receiving end of a 911 call. We may not be the person to give you answers, but we can send you help. And never think we don’t care. Never think your actions affect no one, because they always affect us.

Secret Project

J. P. W. Griswold

For years I have played guitar and bass for personal entertainment and to relax my hands after working in the forge. The hammer and tongs strain the fingers and forearms quite a bit, and if you do not do something to loosen them up, the next day will be worse.

So, after many nights of work, I pick up the guitar. I've had one around the house for about as long as I can recall. My grandfather played guitar when I was very little, but by the time I have memories, the arthritis in his hands kept him from playing much. I still have that guitar, and many others as well. My wife also had a few acoustic guitars when we were married, and we have purchased another since that wonderful day.

My wife likes me to play as well, even though she is probably a better player than I (my internal meter seems to be off, so my phrasing is sometimes choppy - hers is much better, as is her voice). But it makes her happy, so I try to learn new songs she likes, and play things she likes. It has expanded my ability, and playing on a steel string acoustic is not as forgiving as a steel string electric can be.

Now I've had electrics for many years, getting my first in High School. I have had bass guitars nearly as long, and even played pro for a while as the bass player in a polka band on sundays while little old ladies played bingo. Lately, I have even begun to build a pair of new electrics, both in interesing designs.

Why do I bring this bit of history up? Ah, there is the fun part!

A secret project is perking, rapidly comming to a boil. Recently, we picked up the last few new tools we had needed to complete the home studio. This has finally opened the door to full blown recording once again. I have had the computer to do so for quite some time, and have done some music in the recent past, but with the last few bits we will be able to really do pretty much anything. And the secret project is just the first. Once the first rough tracks are finished, we will put up a link so everyone can hear what we have been up to.

Thanks to my Mom for making the studio possibile sooner that we expected, and always having music around the house, and even tolerating it if I was the one making it!

Happy Irish New Year

Redheaded Blacksmith

Howdy invisable readers, just a quick note on this Irish New Year's Eve.

Drinkin' and Leprechaun chasin' is not really what Irish New Year is all about you know. Sure, the greeting card companies and beer merchants want you to think that it is, but in reality it's all about beating snakes with sticks.

You see, Saint Patrick is credited with driving the snakes out of ireland. Now, of course I realize that what they mean by that is that he brough Christianianity to the isle, and drove out the older pagan religions, but I would like to see a more 'merican take on that old parable.

We should have a day where we just send our kids out with sticks to try to find snakes and drive them out of 'merica. Now don't get your trousers in a knot, I am joking of course. Beating on real snakes is not very healthy for the serpents in question, and we need those to keep the rat and mice population down so we don't get a major infestation of ratflu going around again. But in the same vein we have screwed up lots of other holiday rituals, we should make paper mache' snakes and club them like Piñatas. Or at least hide some garden hoses in the bushes and watch the little ones go at it. Why? Cause our parents did it to us, and their parents did it to them. They had often forgotten the reason for the ritual, but they carried it on anyway.

I fondly remember a bright, warm Easter Sunday as a very small child, looking in my Grandmother's flowers for brightly colored Easter eggs. As I was quite young, my understanding of the holiday was a little vauge, and I entertained everyone by finding the largest easter egg ever, and tried to haul a bowling ball sized pink granite rock out of the flower bed and out into the yard. It probably weighed as much as I did.

Would it not have been fun for the wee ones to have been given sticks and sent out to find the bits of shredded garden hose left over from a lawn mower mishap of the past? I think it would have! Then I might have grown up believing that snakes were full of candy well into my adult years, just like I believed that snow came with holes in it for quite some time... but that is another story.

Off to make something!

Soon to be "POD casts"

Let the POD casts begin

Howdy again, etheral readers. Again, we stumble toward the 21st century with bleary eyes and heavy feet. Though I have yet to post my rant on the lowbrow term "blog", I will refer to that here for a moment...

Like "Blog", there is another dumb net word made up by semi-geeks and latched onto by the talking heads of the world. Podcast. It's a friggin MP3 you can transfer into your MP3 player of choice and listen to while jogging, traveling to work or in the bath tub. Sort of like radio shows of old, but on your schedual.

The only reason this word irritates me, is the iPod is a marketing hook for an MP3 player not unlike the hundreds of others out there, including the ones that came before the apple version. Now I wish them luck, and am quite glad to see that someone other than Sony or Microsoft is doing well (though Apple is 51% owned by Bilbo Gates, holder of the One Disk to rule them all). Anyone who has dealt with the happily colored but under useful iMac's was probably a little wary of the iAnything idea...

So why the hell could we have not called this a WebCast or that 90's classic "CyberCast"? I do not know. Oh well.

There is another device out there, made by a company called Line6, called a POD. It is a red, kidney bean shaped box, about a foot wide with lots of knobs and buttons. It is intended to process an electric guitar for recording or a live performance. You have heard this device if you listen to any modern music at all, as they are everywhere in studios being used for guitar, bass, keyboard and even vocal processing. Mostly the POD digitally emulates famous guitar amps, but it does a whole lot more.

So why do I mention this? Soon we will start putting out PODcasts; music and spoken word works processed entirely through our mixing boards and POD's, for people to listen to on their iPod's.

Or any other MP3 player they might want to use.
Stay Tuned!

Bonehead move

Bonehead

Well, well. I learned something else today. That you have to change the title on each post, so someone browsing back over the blog can more easily understand what that entry is about, and have a direct link to send ad infinitium to their friends all over the internet.

So, yea. I was a bonehead to not have noticed that in the last few posts...

However, any day you learn something new and end the day above ground and still breathing is a pretty damn good day.

Still alive and doing fine

Still alive

So much to build, so little time... And who turned the calendar back to Novemburrrr!??!?

I suppose, at this writing, very few people are reading this, as I just noticed that there is no link from the main site to this log... something else to fix on the next update.

Bob Vila has nothing on us

IronAngel Forge

Bah! It's not that I have nothing to say, it is more I have no time to write or my hands will not work well enough to do so. At any rate, we are working on orders, getting stock ready for the upcoming season and trying to remodel the bathroom. Did you ever see the film "Evil Dead"? Well, even if they did not show you what the bathroom looked like, you can imagine, right? Yea, that is our old bathroom. The rusting walls of the aged steel shower made it look like dried blood. Nice touch when you are trying to feel clean.

So at any rate, we are alive and making stuff. And that is the important part of life; living it.

Forgot how to work this danged thing

Yea, yea... long time no post.

I forgot how the danged controls worked, yea, that's the ticket.

More soon...

For the Miners in West Va.

As a metalsmith, and a blacksmith in particular, I use coal as a heat source. I understand where my raw materials and fuel come from, and I am very thankful that others do their job so I can more easily do mine.

We here at the shop have been watching the developing story about the 13 trapped miners missing in WV. and they and their families have been in our prayers.

Through a bit of happenstance, I was in front of the Television when the first, erronious report of finding 12 of them alive came in. I was elated.

But a few hours later, we learned the true outcome, which while sad, was better than most people really expected. Governor Manchin made the statement "We have one Miracle". He is not far from the truth. That anyone could survive is amazing. It is sad, and our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who passed on in this tragedy. But there are far more than one Miracle there. 13 come to mind, as those lives were lived before the mine tragedy, and effected others around them.

But there are so many more. All those people who prayed for them, and worked so franticlly to rescue them. And you reading this now. And millions of other people in the world who will never hear of this, and have their own triumphs and tragedies to live through.

Be thankful for what you have in your life, and work to better what you can. Call you mom if you still have her. Smile to a stranger today.

Life is a Miracle, even if it will always end in Death. That is what makes it so damn important to enjoy it, celebrate it and live it!

-J.

First Post

Payphones, and telephones in general hate me. Case in point:

My wife’s car has had a breakdown near her place of work. She sent word via a courier that she was ok, and at her mothers’ house, which is also near where she works. So I set out to call there, and see if there was anything I could do to be an immediate help, or if I needed to go get the car from along the roadside, or whatever else might need to happen.

This sounds like a far easier endeavor than it turned out to be.

My wife had our cell phone, which contains most of the numbers of our friends, social associates, family members and pretty much every decent restaurant within a 150-mile radius from our home. My memory for numbers has never been good, and for the most part the wife and I are almost always together when a phone call needs to be made. Except in a time like this. Keep this in mind, its going to come back to bite me in the behind as we progress.

So I dug around for my emergency number cheat sheet. I wrote this up because I know that I can not remember most phone numbers on a good day, and under duress I will totally blank. Want proof? Ask me for our phone number sometime. I cannot even recall what that is. I have several phone numbers memorized, but sadly, I do not have those phones anymore, nor do I live at those addresses.

So I used white pages dot kom (linked Here) and looked up the number. Nothing found, of course. So I expanded the search area. My In-Laws have an unusual English transmogrification of an old German name, so there are not all that many of them in the region to sort through, and I believe that I have met at least half of them over the past couple of years. If all else failed, I could always call a cousin and get the correct number. I finally found the correct number and wrote it down (recall that problem remembering numbers, and transposing them in my head from before).

Out to the trusty shop van to head off for a pay phone. Ok, rusty shop van is probably more accurate. The shop van is another whole entry on amusing mishaps and odd fortunes. It is a rear wheel drive, hollow metal box, which handles only acceptably on warm, dry roads. Today is cold, with a layer of freezing slush on the roads and more snow falling from above like the dander of the angels. Make that greasy dander of the angels. The van finds humor in going down the road sideways, as only rear wheel drive inanimate objects like cars and vans know how to do. So we slid and slipped our way to my old nemesis, the pay phone by the stoplight.

Now, I have never had good luck with phones in general, and payphones seem downright out to get me, so I approached this task with some trepidation. I picked my way from the trusty shop van to the evil pay phone over ice and snow banks. The first phone of the three in the bank was dead. No signal, no lights or anything. The second, while freezing cold against the ear, at least had a dial tone. I dialed the number and was informed by a pleasantish robotic voice that I needed $2.45 for the first three minutes. This seemed a bit excessive, but I wanted to make sure my wife was ok, so in went my coins. The phone rang three times and then a voice I did not know answered. I asked for my wife, then if I had the correct number. I did not. Though I was sure I had dialed correctly. Perhaps whitepages had an incorrect listing? So I hung up, and then tried to call the operator to get my money back. After several minutes standing in the cold, pushing buttons through the voicemail maze that is modern phone communication, I got to speak to a real, live person. She rattled her name off machinegun fast, and I only caught that is something about 20 syllables long. Her southern accent was thick, and I expected I had been connected to a call center far from here. I explained that I had apparently dialed an incorrect number in a polite, pleasant business like tone without being condescending or snide, as so many people tend to be on the phone. She was not quite as pleasant, nor as professional. After a short diatribe about people not being able to press the correct buttons, I was informed I would not be getting any sort of refund, and she was of the impression that I was simply trying to scam the phone company out of $2.45, as if I had a great system to get rich a few dollars at a time. Then she hung up on me before I could ask if there was someone else at her end I could talk to about this matter.

I was unhappy, but not yet angry. I tried the operator voice maze again, and once I found a person I was informed I could not get a refund, unless I knew which operator had answered the inquiry the first time, as it apparently cleared the phone record. That sounded like so much bull to me, and I told her so much so. In this day of computers that can keep track of every website I have ever clicked on, you should be able to tell that someone made a phone call from this particular payphone fifteen or twenty minutes ago, and I could provide the number dialed if that would be of any assistance. I was told in no uncertain terms I would not be getting my money back and was again hung up on. Now I was much closer to the aforementioned anger. This is typical with payphones; almost every time I use them ends in anger, sometimes of the “David Banner turns into the Hulk” kind. I replaced the handset in the receiver with some force. About 14 times. Some of those missed their mark a bit. And I recall saying some loud words. I understand and speak just a little bit of German, and the thing I learned from that language was the wonderful custom of glueing old words together to make new, better, longer swear words. I used this skill for the span of time I was “trying” to “hang up” the phone.

I picked my way back to the trusty shop van far less carefully than I had made my way to the phone in the first place. And that was a mistake. I slipped on a flat section of ice, and in trying to keep the ground from kissing my ass, I managed to land on my right ankle. The last “good” one, that sort of works as the owner’s manual says it should.

Long story shorter…:

Had the right phone number, fell down the ladder in the house between the living floor and the computer lounge and got mangled further only to realize that my wife had our phone all along. Duh.

Yea, Yea, I ran out of rant time and energy.