BEST MADE PROJECTS • Awaiting my Subzero Paradise, by Bill Wetherholt,...

Awaiting my Subzero Paradise, by Bill Wetherholt, Best Made Guide

Happy New Year fellow BMC community! I hope that this finds you well and in good spirits. I send salutations from the sepia-toned Flint Hills of Kansas in what I had expected to be the dead of winter. But as many of you are well aware, we still await winter in many parts of this fair land. The brass at Best Made sent me Calvin Rutstrum’s 1968 novel Paradise Below Zero: The Classic Guide to Winter Camping a couple months ago for a review that is still forthcoming. The inspiration to read about Calvin’s roamings around Lake Winnipeg via sled dog in brutal weather I know all too well does not find me when it feels more like the approach of spring with warm spells flirting with the low 60s. I will provide all the details soon, but I deem it obscene to finish the novel (which is great so far!) before I have had to clear at least some snow off my walkway. Stay tuned.

That does not mean I haven’t been busy. Before the holidays I finished my first semester of PhD work and have just begun the second. I assure the academic community that doctoral degrees are not being handed out willy-nilly by Kansas State. The workload is impressive indeed, as it should be. I try to find time for side-projects when time allows. One such project has been neglecting the remaining leaves in my backyard and sprucing up my garage, which has included not only the installation of pegboard organization but also the staining my Best Made Axe. There is something palpably intimate about interacting with such a fine tool that is yours alone. I chose a darker stain and have applied two coats of flat polyurethane finish thus far.

I have also been fishing since the weather has been mild, but the bite is pretty much non-existent with cold waters. That goes for the shore at least, apparently the crappie population is at its best in over a decade just up the road, but without a canoe or other mode of water transportation I cannot access the submerged brush piles out there and put my Shore Lunch to good use. I would be remiss if I neglected to confess I did catch a redear sunfish about the size of a half-dollar. And so it goes my friends.