Found this sword in a tent in rural Indiana. I think it’s a xiphos? Fit and finish are pretty bad, it generally lacks presence and I don’t trust the heat treatment. My brother and I probably would have maimed each other with these as kids.
My wife and I recently spent the weekend in a picturesque small town. It was great—we saw all the sights, hiked a state park and visited an ENDLESS succession of antique shops. You know them—an overstuffed front room, and then there’s a hallway that leads back to three more rooms, and then you see staircases with a sign that reads “MORE TO SEE UPSTAIRS AND IN THE BASEMENT!”
I used to dread these places, but now I like swords. Now I can comb through all the clutter and identify overpriced, bad reproductions of cabbage choppers, Chinese katanas, nickel-plated cavalry sabers and fraternal order swords like a pro. So thank you. My wife loved that I kept wanting to go into more shops. It’s usually all garbage but you never know.
My son loves trains. For his 8th birthday, we finally got him the Kato N-scale Amtrak set that he was convinced he’d have to wait until he was 10 for. Building the table in secret was an ordeal, but he was totally surprised on his birthday. I laid the tracks as soon as I could because that’s all he wanted, but I spent a lot of nights after that adding and removing painter’s tape to sections so I could work on the landscape. I estimate that I'm about 1/5th finished (it's a 7X4 build). Trains have never been my thing, but I enjoy working on the landscape, so it's been good bonding for us as he directs me by saying things like, "Dad, we need more trees and buildings."
Then we got hit with 3 inches of rain in 1 hour, a pipe failed and our basement flooded with 1 foot of sewage. We lost almost everything, but the relief I felt seeing his pristine, green table floating above all the ruin was one of the very few bright spots. Also, disaster can be hilarious. There was a moment when I found an unopened pack of Woodland Scenics trees bobbing along and I thought, "I CAN SAVE THESE." And then I noticed that each of the little bubbles was full of sewage. Still, it could have been worse. After the cleaners spent 5 days cutting drywall, filling a massive dumpster and drying & sanitizing everything, the first thing I did was hook the train back up. Hearing him running it down there was the first moment that felt like a return to some kind of normalcy.
