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carving tools, rusty

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I learned a lesson about my new home town, today. A lesson in humidity (if not humility).

I'm from southern Ontario, an area with plenty of lakes, rivers, and wetlands. It's humid, and in the summer the temperature routinely reaches the low 30's.

But it has neither the weeks of 35C weather that Tokyo enjoys throughout the summer, nor the incredible humidity that ensures that standing water in the shower will be there twelve hours afterwards.

It turns out that the airtight sheaths in which my carving tools came are the perfect vessels for rust in such humidity. I had used my knife and a couple of the smaller carving tools during the rainy season, right in the midst of the worst of the humidity. I then dutifully packed up the tools in their containers, and put them away in a reasonably air-tight plastic tool box.

Inside, the humid air caused the tools -- and here I mean only the ones in their own individual containers -- to rust. Never seen anything like it!