Awl right now

I'm glad the snow is finally going away. I'm tired of it.

I have the urge to carve some wood, a root or a burl, but I have neither right now and they're not really the sorts of things that hardware stores stock a lot of.

Another thing I've found is that hardware stores don't really stock awls either. We went to three before we found one. Maybe no one uses them anymore.

I hate asking for help in hardware stores. I prefer to find everything myself because I get treated by staff as if because I'm young and female I left my brain by the door on the way in.

They fall into two major categories. There are the incredulous guys who second guess your decisions because you are female and therefore you know nothing about tools, wood, mechanics or whatever you are looking for. They are the guys who ask you things like "Are you sure you need an awl?" Yes, I'm sure I need an awl. If I didn't need an awl, I wouldn't have asked for one, and if I wasn't sure what kind of tool I needed, I would have described what I was trying to do and asked for advice.

Then there are the somewhat nicer, but just as irritating paternal types, who feel they have to explain to you how to use the tool you just asked them to help you locate.

Inevitably the problem for them is that you have asked for something that they can not locate, so therefore you are asking for the wrong thing. The problem is never that they do not have a good enough knowledge of the stock in their department to be able to locate something specific.

I found an awl at Home Depot finally, after asking two staff members who couldn't find one themselves and questioned whether I needed it. The awls were hiding near the rubber hammers, nowhere near where the staff chose to look.

I want to go canoeing too, but mine's covered in snow.



I feel the need to qualify this post by stating that the staff in the local Rona are pretty awesome and good at cactus husbandry and that Abby at the front desk would most certainly know where the awls were if they stocked them.