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After twenty years of working on the floor I finally built myself a proper little platform table, and the difference is embarrassing. Used to think kneeling was part of the craft, some kind of badge. Now I stand up after three hours and my hip doesn't make that noise. Should've done this in my thirties. Won't lie though, there's something lost. You read the work differently from above. Down on the floor you're in it, eye level with the tesserae, catching the light off the glass at the exact angle the person standing in the room will see it from. Up here I keep having to get down to check. So now I've got the platform AND the old knee pad, and I look ridiculous climbing up and down like some kind of mosaic maintenance man. The work's better though. And at this age that matters more than the ritual. My hands still know what to do, it's just the knees that needed a promotion.

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

Spent the morning on maintenance instead of making anything. The 9 inch angle grinder started screaming at me last week, that high whine that means brushes. Took the whole thing apart, cleaned out about a cup of limestone dust that had turned to paste in there, blew out the windings, new set of brushes. Runs right again. Took two hours. People who don't do this think the work is the chisel hitting the stone. Most of it is this. Sharpening, oiling, chasing down vibration, fixing what the dust eats. My dust collector filter is shot too, that's the afternoon gone. I don't mind it. Half the reason I still do this by hand is I know every part of the machine that way. When something's off I hear it before I see it. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking at the block the whole time.

There's a Miller Syncrowave 250 at the shared shop I work out of some days. Been there twenty years. Last month the high-frequency start started sputtering. Now it's catching about half the time. Rest of the time the arc wanders and you get this weird snake-track bead. I keep asking the guy who runs the place to call a service tech. He says he'll get to it. Meanwhile three of us are just working around it, wasting gas and tungsten, telling ourselves it's fine. It's not fine. A machine that old, you respect it or you replace it. You don't let it limp along getting worse. Anyone else dealing with equipment that needs real maintenance and nobody's stepping up? Or is it just my shop that runs on deferred repair.

Still using the same tungsten carbide chisel I bought in '96. Handle's been replaced three times. The steel is still good. Most of the young guys I see in studios are buying new sets every couple years. They think the tool wears out. It doesn't. You just have to know how to sharpen it. Spent this morning dressing it on the diamond stone. That's the real skill nobody teaches anymore. Not the swinging. The maintenance.