Filling in the blanks

Astute readers of this blog will notice there is a significant gap in time between my posts last year and my post this year. I would like to shed some light on that period of absenteeism. The first sentence in my post from Thursday, August 20, 2015 says “It has been a while since I posted here and it’s time for that to change.” Well, it seems as though I may have spoken a bit hastily. I wrote that with the firm belief that I was going to focus more on smithing; building up my skills and possibly my inventory. Little did I know that in 8 days, my whole life would change.


When I’m not pounding out things on my anvil or pounding out work for my employer, I’m pounding on drums in a hard rock band called 50 Breaks. I’ve been a musician far longer than I’ve been a blacksmith and playing gigs is quite a regular thing for me. Meeting the person I wish to share my life with is considerably less common though. There I was, calmly sitting in the bar where we were playing a show, when Jessie introduced herself and with an off-handed and quite obscure quote referenced from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, our lives were welded together.

The early stages of any relationship will usually take precedence over one's hobbies and social life and we spent a good amount of time getting to know one another. I would still doodle in my shop here and there but not with any amount of progress. My time was not only occupied with learning everything I could about this wonderful new person, but also with the full length album the band had decided to record. We began working on the album and progress was made, however, as time elapsed and I was getting the need for some deliberate hammer time (and not the kind with baggy pants).


December 15, 2015 was a normal Tuesday right up until the chain I was installing on a Terex 5TC-55 Aerial Device slipped out of my grip, caught the middle finger on my left hand and pulled it sideways; hyper-extending and severely spraining that area of my hand. At the moment the injury happened I was wearing gloves and I was up on a scaffold. I pulled my hand back from the machine and just held onto it until I could gather enough courage to remove the glove and inspect the damage. Eventually I did just that. I was delighted that there was no blood and that I was able to move everything so nothing seemed broken even though it felt kind of weird. Yet slowly I came to realize that not only did my hand feel weird, my middle finger wouldn’t stand up straight and, in fact, sort of lolled off towards my ring finger if I didn’t deliberately spread out my fingers. I could move everything so I didn’t think there were any breaks but something was obviously very wrong. I notified my supervisor and headed off the the clinic where after some poking, prodding, pulling and x-raying, the doctor explained what she believed had happened.

I was then splinted, bandaged and sent on my way with directions to keep my hand immobilized for the next week after which i could begin a prescribed physical therapy routine to build up strength in that hand. It was four or five weeks before I could make a closed, tight fist and quite a bit longer before I could hold it that way without pain. Eventually I was able to get back behind the drumkit to help record the album and behind my anvil to enjoy the creation but the effects of that injury will likely be with me for the rest of my days.


I have had other things that took priority over the forge during the early and middle part of 2016 including various family duties, some health issues that have developed for Jessie but also a cohabitation with Jessie and her cat Jezebel who I’ve come to adore even though allergies make this a challenge sometimes. Really though, if you like animals at all, how could you not adore this cuteness!

Recently, and with encouragement from Jessie, I started to refocus on what I want to do with Fox River Forge and have begun working in that direction. This includes a rearrangement and organization of the shop, acquisition of some much needed tooling, setting up a proper PayPal account and putting together a spreadsheet to track orders, inventory and all that other glorious data. Being the tech oriented woman she is, she bought the Fox River Forge URL to make it easier and more professional to get people to this blog and included a dedicated email address which is chris@foxriverforge.com.

I want to thank everyone who has traded a moment of their life with mine in reading this blog. I also want to try to post a minimum of once a month here (hopefully much more) in order to share what's going on. I look forward to seeing what this new determination will deliver in return. So until next time, may your fires burn clean and your hammers strike true.