is finished and hanging on a wall. it took most of last week. i think he tired himself out with it though, he’s got two other fish he’s been working on for weeks now, if not months. a cookiecutter shark and a trumpeter. we’re going to make more but i want to wait until he’s had the operation on his heart valve and had a bit of time to recuperate. i’m not sure he’ll see it the same way but as the days went by last week he was able to do less and less and was steadily getting grumpier. i think if i weren’t there then judging by the progress on the other two fish i’d say the amount of work we did on that rainbow trout would’ve probably taken him a month.
he has a bunch of different types of fish molds and i’ve only seen the end process of mounting a fish since the trout we were working on was one he’d just never gotten around to finishing. i’ll go through the pile of molds at some stage and pick out another fish to make, likely just a salmon. i know salmon. a salmon would be manageable for me to make myself. there’s some big fish in there, including what looks to be a 2-3 metre long marlin and if i point to it as a joke for my first fish to make then knowing him it’s 50/50 as to whether he laughs or just nods.
i’ll give him some rest though. on thursday we had the fibreglass fins ready to set into the body of the trout. the whole thing is made of different types of epoxy but the fins, being thinner, are easy to crack and right after telling me to be careful with letting go of them after gluing them to the body he reached over the fish to grab a tool and caught the fin on his sleeve. it cracked. and so did he. and not for the first time either. i can’t remember what day it was but we were both sitting on opposite sides of the work bench when all of a sudden he’s swearing so i look up thinking i’d done something wrong but he’s not looking at me, he’s picking up tools and dropping them. then picking them back up and throwing them out the way. then grabbing a piece of foam and throwing it backwards over his shoulder. and more swearing. a lot of swearing. and more throwing things. then he finds the tool he’s looking for and goes back to what he was doing. ten quiet minutes pass. then he says, “you might have noticed that i lose my temper too quickly, it’s getting worse as i get older.”
i just said that he’d never told me he was a sailor. “ha-ha. you funny cunt.” deadpan. a while after that he seems quite upset and i figure he’s just tired then finally he says he doesn’t want to be getting older, it’s not fair, we have so many more projects we could do.
he has a check-up appointment with a cardiologist in christchurch on the 3rd of july. then if that goes well i think the operation is set for either the 25th of july.
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