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Small thing. The piece going out Thursday is a welded steel thing, about 900 pounds at the base plate, and I've been doing the lift math in my head for two weeks. Normally I'd call Dale, who ran the shop when I was a kid and taught me to rig, and run the numbers past him. Dale's 78 now and half deaf and I've been leaning on him for thirty years. I didn't call him. Sat down with the pad, worked the sling angles myself, checked the shackle ratings twice, and it's fine. Two-point bridle, 60 degrees, well inside the working load. Doesn't sound like much. But I've never trusted my own numbers on a lift without somebody older nodding at them first. That's the win. The piece is still ugly in one corner and I might cut it off tomorrow, but the rigging's right.

Daughter talked me into posting the installs. So I post them. That part actually works, in a way I didn't expect. Two commissions this year came from a guy who found me through a photo of a finished piece in a courtyard in Vermont. What doesn't work is everything after the photo. I posted a shot of a limestone piece I finished in March, 400 pounds, four days of rigging to get it set. 1,100 views. Two comments. One was a bot selling something, the other was a guy telling me I should do reels. I did one reel. Thirty seconds of me chasing a chisel with a mallet. Took an hour to edit and I still don't know what a hook is. Nobody watched it. The commissions come from the phone calls, the guy who saw the piece in person and called me. That's still the whole business. The photos just remind people I'm alive. I don't think that's a problem with my account. I think it's the medium. A photograph of a sculpture tells you almost nothing. You can't walk around it, you can't see the scale, you can't feel the weight of the thing. What I'd want to post is the sound of the grinder or the way the light moves across a rough face at 4 in the afternoon, and I can't put that on a screen. So I keep posting the stills because the daughter asks me to, and because twice now it's paid for a truckload of stone. But I'm not going to pretend it's doing more than that.

Nothing to look at, but it's the first thing in a while that made me feel like myself. 148 pound Peter Wright, been sitting on a pallet since I moved shops in the spring because I couldn't get it up on the stump alone. Two guys half my age got it off the truck for me and then never came back, that's how it goes. Today I rigged a chain fall off the beam and walked it up an inch at a time. Took me an hour and a half. My shoulder is telling me about it now. Rang it once with a hammer after, just to hear it. Good sound. The shop is a shop again. Wasn't before.

Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin. Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell. That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book. Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

There's a fella in the market who sharpens things for a living. Kitchen knives, secateurs, shears, he's there every Saturday with his stones and his strops and a little whetstone wheel rigged up to a bicycle chain somehow, and sure it's an education to watch him. I brought him my best carving gouge last week because I'd nicked the edge on something stupid, a staple I'd missed in a bit of lino, was raging with myself, and he handed it back and just said "whoever taught you to sharpen taught you right." And I thought about that more than I expected to. I learned from an old printer up in Sligo, man who could carve a heron's wing feather in a single cut and make it look like breathing. He taught me to sharpen dry, no oil, on a fine arkansas stone, and to feel the burr with your thumb rather than look for it. He'd say "you're not grinding metal, you're coaxing an edge out of it" and I used to think that was gas altogether till I realised he meant it. Anyway it got me thinking about how much of how we make things is just passed hand to hand like that. Little rituals. The way you hold your knife. The angle you trust without measuring. Someone showed you once and you've been doing it their way ever since, maybe without even knowing. I still sharpen dry. I check with my thumb. And I think of him every time.

Three months wrestling this block. Seven hundred pounds of limestone. Had it laid out on the shop floor all summer, working it from the top and sides because I couldn't tip it without a rig I didn't have. Finally borrowed a neighbor's gantry this weekend, got it upright and onto the base without cracking anything or losing a finger. It's not finished. But it's standing. That's a different thing than lying down. When you work flat you're making a drawing in stone. Standing up, it starts talking back to you. Whole different set of decisions now. Took a photo of it in the afternoon light through the shop door. First time it's looked like a real piece. Might post it later if I don't talk myself out of it.

The studio got so cold this week my coffee went cold before I drank it. Twice. I stood there holding a lukewarm cup looking at a piece that's been waiting on the right bit of metal for a month and thought maybe the heating bill is the real reason this installation exists, it's the most consistent collaborator I have. I finally said fine and rigged a second heater out of an old reflector I found in the trash behind the theatre. Doubles as a light. Now half the room is warm and blinding and the other half is freezing and dark, which honestly is the most honest description of making anything I've ever come up with. The piece I was waiting on? I found what I needed in my own scrap pile the moment I stopped looking for it. Of course. Every time.

Should have called someone. But I've been moving stone since I was twenty two and the guy who used to help me is gone, and I got stubborn about it. Come-along, three pipes for rollers, a lot of levers and swearing. Block's sitting on the shop floor now where it needs to be. My back will be angry tomorrow and my hands are shredded. Point is, a block that size, you don't get a second chance if it goes over wrong. Slow is the whole trick. Most people rush the rigging. I didn't, and it's fine. Sixty one years old. Still doing it the stupid way. Would do it again.

Old one finally gave out. Cartridges were harder to find than the mask itself, so I bought a new rig. It fits wrong. The straps pull across the top of my head instead of the base of the skull and after about forty minutes the seal starts to walk. I've spent two days grinding basalt with a mask I have to stop and reseat every few minutes, which means I'm stopping every few minutes, which means I'm not finishing anything. The old one was a 3M half face I bought in the nineties. Ugly, cracked lens, the exhalation valve whistled. I knew exactly how it sat without thinking about it. That counts for more than people realize. A tool you don't have to think about is worth twice a better tool you do. I'll break this one in eventually or I'll go hunting for the old cartridges. Either way the work doesn't care. Dust is dust.

I now have four clip-on lights aimed at my little painting corner because the overhead light in the basement is somehow both too dim and too harsh. My husband walked by and asked if I was doing surgery. But honestly the one I keep going back to is this cheap $12 daylight LED clip lamp from Michaels that's like six years old and held on with a rubber band. It's not the best color rendering, the arm droops, but it's the one that's actually aimed where I need it. The expensive ones are too fussy. I keep telling myself I'll set up a proper lighting rig when I clear out the other half of the basement. That was the plan in 2021. The other half of the basement now has a treadmill with clothes on it and a full set of my kids' old art supplies from when they still wanted to paint with me. Anyway. Tell me I'm not the only one painting under a nest of clip lamps. Or better yet, tell me your actual setup so I can feel properly inadequate.