My 8 yr old son loves working with his hands and begged me to bring
him to a local carving club. Because of his age, I have to attend as
well and am actually having a lot of fun learning a new skill I had
never thought about trying.

Jonathan (my son) looked across the shop last night and said, "Look,
Dad." We went over to a guy was carving a caricature in a lab coat
with outstretched hands. The finishing touch was when the carver
placed a newly carved slide rule about 3 or 4 cm long into the
figure's hands. :-)

He was impressed my son knew what a slide rule was. Then we got
talking, and he said to this day he's still annoyed at a fellow engineer
who years ago came in and leaned on his K&E, which was under a pile
of blueprints, and cracked the cursor glass. He said, "I still have
it, and, boy, do I wish I could find a replacement cursor." He
forgot the model number but will look it up when I said there were
parts to be found still.

Back to the carving, he was trying to decide what color to paint the
tiny rule saying Picketts weren't his favorite because the metal didn't
feel nice to hold, so yellow was out. But then aesthetics came in,
and he thought yellow would look better against the white lab coat.
Anyway, you get the idea. It was a fun surprise for the topic to
come up there.

Mike Markowski