Today I overslept, and then I picked up Aaron’s brother Jeremy to go make bows and arrows with Mr Lorenz. Jeremy is still at Finneytown Secondary Campus – the poor fellow – as a senior. Mr Lorenz is the sole French teacher and the coach of the academic team, and in his spare time he makes bows, arrows, trebuchets, and other assorted awesome stuff. If you’d like to picture him, he’s the tallest person on the Finneytown Secondary Campus, and he has light brown hair, and no one I know has ever seen him in a mode other than happy. I drove us to his house, although I managed to take us many miles in the wrong direction first. I’ve got the driving thing fine; the next hurdle is navigation. I actually don’t think I’m that bad at navigation, it’s just that Cincinnati is complicated in places. I do take the blame for going west instead of east. Anyhow.

We got to his house, and went into his small backyard, where he had a table full of tools, a garage full of wood, and a few rock benches with more wood. He has a lot of stuff. He picked out a long stick of yew for Jeremy, who apparently had discussed earlier with him what kind of bow he’d like to make. Then he picked up a piece of walnut that he’d vaguely started working with, and showed me what to do with it. I started working on it with a planer, shaving it down to the right shape. With the planer it was some painfully slow going. Then he gave me a drawknife he had, and the work magically disappeared. I had the general shape of the bow fleshed out pretty soon after that, and then I spent a while fine-tuning it with the planer. Meanwhile, Jeremy sat on a Schnitzelbank and hacked away at his yew stick with a machete. Interspersed into all this bow-making action, though, we had fun. For example, we got to meet all the little Lorenzes. I think they’re 11, 6, and 5. The 11-year-old was Seth, who was working on a bow of his own. The others were his two daughters, who are pretty darn cute (and like to talk a lot). Also, he got pizza for everyone for lunch, and we ate that. Also, when I went to use his bathroom, I discovered that he has the old style of toilet with the tank up above and a pull cord to flush it. Basically, he’s awesome. We also made a few arrows today. I gave him one of the arrowheads I’ve been making on Fridays when I’m not too exhausted to go knap flint, and I used another to make an arrow for myself.

Unfortunately, there were too few hours in the day, and we didn’t get to the end of any bows. But we’re going to go back next Saturday and finish the job. We didn’t finish the arrows, either, because the glue holding on the flights (feathers) would’ve taken too long to set. Instead, Mr Lorenz is just going to fletch them all himself (he’s making a few with regular metal points), and they’ll be ready when we come back. Hopefully next Saturday will be enough time to finish these bows, because I do look forward to having a self-made bow. How awesome will that be?

That’s about all I’ve got for this post. Before you go, I want to mention this: Mom’s been feeling pretty poorly lately. Mom, I hope you feel better as soon as physically possible, and everyone else, wellwishes are appreciated.