If you look at my hands, you can tell that the money I bring home is not earned with my hands. Comapre them to my father's, uncles or grandfathers and there is no doubt who went to college and is privilidged to work in climate controled comfort. Though I keep nearly every spare minute filled with a variety of maintance and expansion projects around the homestead, my hands do not show it; mostly thanks to good gloves.
This weekend I had a lot of work to do and I took off the gloves.
While I love good gloves and will still use them for more dangerous work, I have decided to start building some callouses and scar tissue now. Developing thick skin now reduce by one the number of things that might slow me down when I need to work with these hands in a more consistently rough environment.