I keep two old box knives in the kitchen junk drawer. One has a regular blade on it, and the other has a hooked blade because I think they’re safer and run less risk of damaging the stuff inside the box. But sometimes, you just need a regular box knife. They’re both old and handle rough, but they have seen a lot of use.
Last night I was painting. While trimming some masking tape against a hard edge I realized the blade on the regular box knife was a bit dull, so I went to change it. While flipping the blade around to the unused side, I noticed there were no more spare blades in the handle.
Today I bought a new pack of blades. They purport to be better quality and will stay sharper longer than the original set of blades that came with the knife, but I guess we’ll see how that holds up with use.
While adding the new blades into the handle, I decided to go ahead and clean up both knives - get all the tape residue out, and clean the internals. Then I gave the slightly rusty patina’d slide mechanisms a couple drops of 3-in-1 oil. I also gave the blades in the handle a drop along their sharp edges for good measure.
They open and close very satisfactorily now.
I have (had?) an arms length friend that is prone to making bad choices.
He aspires to be a decent guy, but struggles with making the right choices. He made some pretty bad choices last year.
Cheated on his wife with a coworker that was, er, not someone I’d trust. Got caught. Coworker then got pregnant. A few months later he called me to ask if he could crash in our guest bedroom for ‘no more than three days’ while he cut things off with the coworker and worked on reconciling with the wife. While he was still that coworker’s supervisor and baby daddy, unbeknownst to his supervisors.
Seeing nothing but red flags there, I offered to pay for a hotel room for him for a week, and he never took me up on the offer. My wife’s eyebrows were almost at the ceiling when we got off the phone. She very much appreciated not inviting that mess into our lives. I haven’t heard from him since.