September Stone

9/11/23

I come up with these snazzy titles in hopes of drawing the zillions of viewers who are surely out there just waiting to hear what I have to say. Actually I've been getting a whole bunch of views, but they're all from Singapore. Singapore? I cannot imagine that anyone in Singapore gives a crap about some cranky old fart like me pecking away at a vanity blog here in So Cal. Furthermore, I have slightly less than zero interest in cultivating a readership there. The only way it makes any sense is if the visits from Asia are bots of some sort scouring the web for something to steal, or feed into some AI program, the better to respond to image prompts, or mimic American speech patterns. In any case, I'd block them, or tell them to piss off if I could.

 Now that that is out of the way...

This has been a good day, and it started with that most rare of occurrences, a very pleasant dream in the early hours of the morning. One of the things I like about smoking dope is that when you go to bed with a buzz, you don't dream, you just sleep. The dream energy is used up fueling the flight of  imagination when the weed kicks in. I like that aspect of smoking because most all of my dreams are some degree of unpleasant, and often fall into night terrors.

But I haven't had a buzz since June, and I really don't want to catch one. Kinda' done with it, y'know? To everything there is a season, and all that.

Anyway.

Today is the first day since I got sick that I feel like I'm running on something like my normal level of energy, so I got to work on a new stone. The pics up top are the raw material. It's a forty pound chunk of Anza Borrego Alabaster, mostly black but with some white layered in, and maybe even some red. Some of the white on the face has some translucence. Maybe the inner layers, too. We'll see. 

The first step is what I call the take down. I got out the angle grinder with a 50 grit disc, shaved all the weathered material off the face, and ground it smooth enough to sketch on. Then I stood it on end, found the point of balance, scribed a pencil line around the stone and cut the base with a bow saw. The base cut is done by sawing along the pencil line, going slowly around and around the stone.

Add a little water to bring up the color:

 

Next is the sanding board. The base has to, of course, sit perfectly flat on a table without wobbling. This next part is tedious, but necessary...