The BOB recipe is defying me.

When I first saw the Body Opponent Bag in Flying Tigers Dojo, I understood how useful it was for practice. It could be carried easily, rather than the striking dummies that mount into the ground. It moved as I hit it, like a real opponent might. And it looked a bit like a male hyur, with the head and body shape and the rough skin color. I have heard some people use them by imagining they are particular enemies; it is probably easy to see the face of someone one does not like on it, or to simply put their picture on it.

But it is a more complicated recipe than I expected. Striking dummies are simply made of wood, with some decoration, while a BOB is some combination of hard plastic and soft plastic and I think metal and Husband thinks sand. When Husband wrote a recipe for a bicycle, he took an old one apart first to see how it was made. We do not have an old BOB, and a new one costs a lot of money to simply break it.

We have iron and wood aplenty, but neither of those are good for the BOB...it would not move the same way. Perhaps steel for the "skeleton," but much of the rest should be plastic. We make plastic from corn oil, which needs corn. A lot of corn. A lot of harvesting. Especially since we have a lot of other projects that may need plastic too.

The soft plastic "skin" on the outside of the BOB is easy, at least...I can simply use leather. But the rest means trying different materials, different designs. Different recipes. It is not working as what Husband calls "immediate gratification." I think it counts as irony that this makes me want to hit something.

So, since we have wood aplenty, we can easily make wooden striking dummies and set them up outside the workshop. After tiring of working on the BOB recipe I set up a dummy to unleash wrath upon. I kept to my Earth normal gear to try not to break the dummy too quickly.

We do not make the dummies of the finest wood, since we have not yet found the finest wood, so it was not too long a time of using punching and kicking combos on the dummy before it broke. I was very focused, or perhaps lost in my annoyance, and therefore did not see Sam standing by the workshop before I had smashed the dummy.

"Yes...?"

"...Uh...Amazon delivery for you at the bar."

"Thank you. I will be there shortly."

He stayed and watched as I carried the broken dummy into the workshop and returned with a new one. I did not feel like performing any more for him, so I went with him to get the box of books I had ordered.

So now I have other distractions. And I conquered a striking dummy. But the BOB recipe still refuses to yield.