PREPARING a maple hatchet handle blank

Описание: Excuse the shaky camera. The next video will contain a few scenes showing how some of this stuff turned out.

For maximum delivery, please only read the following after watching both this AND the "picking cucumbers in the shower" video (don't read the following until prompted).

And here's the remainder:

But now let's come to the cucumber. Probably less than a mile from the center of all that noise is Ohiopyle's best attraction: a tributary to its river empties in a most spectacular fashion, by dropping and splashing itself some 40 feet into a beautiful curve-shaped valley, a feat for which it has been affectionately named ”Cucumber Falls.” What a treat to see! A waterfall you can play in! Swim in its pool, climb under it, rock-hop on its approach to the rapids, cautiously peer down over its top as it spills, or just explore the trails and rims surrounding it. This was THE magical valley to me as a kid. The scent, the sound, the color, and the vapors—indeed, just the feel of the place arrests the attention and commands a sensory combination of wonder with awe. As such, everybody wants a piece of it. So now, I will turn this story with my more cynical side.

At least twenty years ago, my girlfriend and I visited the falls and captured beautiful pictures with her new 35mm camera. We even had one image enlarged and framed. In contrast, our last visit was filled with disgust. When we returned as married adults, hoping to get a few HD snapshots with our auto-focusing smart phones, the falls were now covered with people and their pets. There were no longer photo ops. It was a zoo. A couple were being married in the fall's pool as two dozen non-wedding party visitors looked on with mouths open. Their photographer attempted to capture the magical moment between tourist interruptions, and—I sh*t you not—an overweight, late-middle-aged snorkeler stayed in the pool for the duration of the ceremony, seemingly without regard for the f*ck*ng astronomical amount of gall such a crime of intellectual omission must require. Photography, video, and rhetoric are some of the arts of framing, no doubt—but there is only so much magic any editor can do. Tough to photo-shop such a stain from humanity's tux, methinks. Nobody really cares about those rentals, anyway; that's why you get the optional insurance! Even if the pics turn out well, the moment was still indelibly marked.

So, why would I spend the time to develop the idea of such a nice feeling, only to swat it out of your mind as a bully might knock an ice-cream cone from the tender hand of an innocent? Because you are not innocent; you and I destroy what we love by embracing it too hard. Perhaps I present this thought in the hope that you will realize that we should only indulge insofar as we can afford to do so, and as such, love in reservation. You can't have the whole cucumber. See it for what it is when we try to do so—a clusterf*ck of greed-fueled ignorance, or ignorance-fueled greed. Vicious loop, the human centipede.

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Oh, and here's the original cheery description for this video, as it was before it was so rudely interrupted by that long, misanthropic diversion on that (other) video:

Late winter tedium does eventually give way to the pleasant season that follows. Part of the beauty of those 'long-term' goals is that realization; while it can be frustrating to not get instant gratification for miserable winter projects, digging a garden bed with cold, wet hands makes the summertime cucumber that much juicier. More than an adequate reward for such temporary suffering, showering under your cucumber trellis provides a pure joy that surely must rival those satisfactions brought by the most profound of human achievements. And unlike being a conquering hero or sweeping ideological reformer, cucumbers are available to the rest of us. Master of my environment! Or at least seemingly so, in my little world, for now. That's good enough.
Crunch.