: I'm afraid it's too late. He's already bitten. Soon he will be
: homeless standing on the street corner with a sign stating,
: "Will work for cedar."

And then there are the social, er...antisocial ramifications he will have to cope with. Consider what happened to me last night: Linda takes Friday off and let's me know a day ahead that she is doing that. She knows I am free during the day until 2 PM when I report to work. I kindly informed her during the PREVIOUS week that we (Keith and I) were getting down to the crunch for the two builds and I would be spending the last two weeks of June at mom's trying to get her kayak done. We want to launch the kayak on July 01, we are both tired of building and want to be paddling. The fact that she still hadn't burned the deck only made me more anxious. Well, when I told her that I planned to meet Keith early Friday morning (8 am) to work on the kayaks, she got fairly mad at me and claimed that (quote), "All I think about is kayaking and kayak building. What about MEEEEEEEEE? When do I get your emotional time? Now we are talking ONLY one half a day here....I spent all winter taking weekends off to be with her and suddenly the kayak doesn't matter any more. Well, that really got under my skin...no one...NO ONE implies the kayak doesn't matter to me. She nagged me, I nagged her back...she nagged me more, I insinuated that perhaps she just didn't care about the kayak. She suggested quite blatantly that she wished I didn't buy it for her. I took that real personal and suggested that I could paint over the wood burning work and call it my own. She claimed that I never do the things she wants me to do, that I put everything off until she finally hires someone to do the work. She also said I plan ALL of our holidays around kayaking, never take her into consideration at all ever. I was still sputtering under my breath about the "didn't buy it for her" comment and then she makes it seem as though I am a selfish n'ere do well when it comes to other work. This went on for an hour before I rolled over and went to sleep while she stomped off to sleep in the spare room. It continued during the morning for some time before we went into the garage to smoke. She started looking at her wonderful work and started talking to me about what next to burn into the wood. We picked out two more patterns which she should have burned into the wood by the time I get home tonight. She was smiling while considering her work.

You see what is going on here, Malcolm...she doesn't completely understand the magic of building, the feeling one can get when one sees his/her work amount to something beautiful. Personal time? Pah! She has the bug for wood burning as much as I do for building as long as she actually sits down and does it. Her work is beautiful. She wants emotional time with me: let us split a Guinness, stand arm in arm at the lake and stare at the finished kayak and its deck art and get all emotional about that. The social ramifications of an addict can be tough, but if you can get your significant other addicted as well, then there's no problem...no begging for emotional time because we can both be emotionally attached to the work and forget the rest. She wants some other kind of emotional time...she should go watch Young and the Restless.

I think Keith is in trouble. I am glad to be there to support him as he is sent off to the dog house by his wife and instead phones me to meet him at mom's

Robert N(eeds no help) Prude