While I was undressing a few months ago, a knot jammed and trapped me in a garment I was eager to get out of. All the knitting needles in my pencil mug were needle sharp and too thin to pry with, but there was also a hardwood dowel of mysterious origen, which I mistook for a bamboo chopstick. I grabbed the dowel, stuck it into my spouse's electric pencil sharpener, and undid the knot.
My impromptu fid has been invaluable for picking out stitches, particularly when I wanted to unravel silk thread from an overlocked seam in a silk rag because it matched a garment I needed to darn.
The awl in my Swiss Army knife is sharp on one side, which would have ruined the belt. The phillips screwdriver looks a bit coarse. Either of the two slot-head screwdrivers might work, and if I hold the scissors firmly closed it might be possible to work them inside a knot.
Oh, how marvelous that knife was when I bought it -- I took every chance to show it to people. Today, I was slightly surprised that I knew exactly where to look for it.
I have a blade or two on every keychain, and there is another blade in the handle of the pliers that I carry in my wallet. This blade came in very handy when I got a bungee cord wrapped around my rear axle right in the middle of the intersection where one had to turn right and left simultaneously in order to go straight. (A few years ago, a repaving job made the offset streets much less troublesome.)
If I needed to untie a knot while out and about, I'd use one of the two pencils in my front pocket, or the one in the change pocket of my wallet. Oops, I replaced that one with a pen/penlight the last time I rebuilt my wallet.
I keep a pencil on top of the bike-pump cupboard, under the scissors, the box-opening knife, the frost-removal mallet, and so forth, just to untie knots in plastic bags when I'm unloading the bike.
So I felt around in my change pocket, then threw in a #2 pencil. A pen is nice to have, but a pencil always works -- if it breaks and you haven't got a knife on you, you can sharpen it on a concrete walk.
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Yesterday, I set this note aside intending, when it was daylight, to take a broken pencil outside and verify that last remark. Now it's dark again, and I've forgotten exactly where I found the broken pencil.
I noticed the broken pencil on my dresser this morning and took it outside to check. Concrete does work, but I'm glad that I always carry a knife.
Also, the concrete has been there at least forty years and rain has exposed the sharp edges of the sand.
I was about to remark that there isn't any new concrete around here, then I remembered that the garage floor has never been rained on, and sure enough, it doesn't grind worth a nickel. But if one is indoors, one can find a knife or a pencil sharpener or another pencil, and I noticed on my way home from church that all new walkway concrete has fine brush marks intended to improve traction.
That's quite clever; the surface will have weathered before the brush marks wear off.
Next question: what was the broken pencil doing on my dresser? Golf pencils are kept in the top drawer and are apt to land on the dresser top, but this pencil, now that the lead is exposed, is the stub of a blue wax-lead pencil, and colored pencils are kept in the parlor.
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