I need to get back in the writing mode. I let myself have a few days off this past weekend and now my mind is out of it. Tomorrow was going to be an afternoon of writing, until my class schedule got rearranged. I’ll get home an hour later but that already feels like a huge blow to my productivity. I need to catch up.

Today’s task in my 30 Day Challenge is to learn a manual skill. I thought about what skill I could learn as I walked to school this morning and it wasn’t easy at first. I kept thinking of skills I already knew and thought it would be cowardly of me to suggest I was exempt from today’s task because I already knew something. Not the point, Danny. When I thought of skills I didn’t know already, I had to decide if it was something possible to work on while I’m living in Ukraine. Most weren’t. Then it hit me and it seemed like the obvious choice from the beginning.

I’m going to learn how to sharpen kitchen knives. I love cooking and a dull knife is about as useful to cooking as a dull person is to conversation. I have a knife sharpener that I inherited from Dan when he left over the summer and it does a great job of sharpening knives. It has two whet stones angled to give your knife a nice, sharp edge when you pull the blade across it. That’s cheating. I want to be able to sharpen a knife using one of those little sword looking things that comes with fancy knife sets. Fortunately, I just got one from Rose last week.

In the past, I’ve read a lot of theory about knife sharpening but theory only gets me so far. Today, in trying to further my wants of being able to sharpen a knife, I went to YouTube, and watched a video. Now I guess all I need to do is keep practicing until it becomes second nature.