Today I designed my Hogwarts reading cave.

This is like a cardboard “fort” for March 2, Read Across America Day, not coincidentally the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Mine is one of about ten such structures being designed and built by various classes at Newnan Crossing. On March 1, we’ll assemble our reading caves, and on March 2, classes will come to the media center and snuggle into the cave of their choice to read for a while.

It ought to be very cool. We did this before, a couple of years ago when I just plain forgot about Read Across America Day. Usually media centers schedule people to come read to classes. I get friends and theatre folk, plus cheerleaders and high school athletes. It’s a big deal, and it’s a lot of work, so when I realized that RAAD was one week away, I had to punt.

It was about as cheesy a ploy as you can imagine. Carol Ward and I turned tables on their sides, dragged stuff around, and covered all kinds of spaces with sheets and bulletin board paper. We borrowed lamps and extension cords from teachers. We put out a sign-up list, turned out the lights, and the kids had a fabulous time.

The prototype of the idea comes from A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al., which is a 70s kind of grammar in urban/living space. It moves from “small towns separated by green space” (…oh well…) to “well-defined neighborhood areas” to ideas for rooms in individual houses. One of these ideas is “Child Caves,” because children like to have places they can hide from everyone.

So it doesn’t matter that what we provided last time was just bulletin board paper taped over overturned tables. It was a “secret place,” and the kids snuggled in just fine.

This time, of course, we’re using cardboard rivets and getting fancy. I’m putting two tables at opposite ends of an aisle and surrounding them with cardboard. Outside, it will have some semblance of Hogwarts drawn/painted onto it. Inside, there will be four “rooms”: the entrance hall and the Slytherin commons room beneath the tables, and the Dining Hall and the Gryffindor commons room on top of the tables.

I’ll collect the cardboard over winter break, and maybe get it drawn out and painted as well. If not, then I can always con the members of the 100 Book Club into helping out in some kind of “special meeting” that week.

Tonight I finished putting together the DVD of all the UGA Period Dance Group photos I have. Next Monday night, we’ll gather at the home of Paul Gendreau and watch the 20 minutes of slides and period dance music. And we’ll cry. Too many people gone, and too many people unaccounted for. And damn, we were beautiful.

Today we went to the Louvre exhibit at the High Museum. It was the first time we’ve been to the High since they’ve added the new buildings, which is bad of us. Very spectacular spaces, indeed.

As usual when faced with the products of Versailles/Louvre, I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of commitment represented: talent, work hours, materials. The amount of money involved, I suspect, was not as vast as you might think, because the artists and artisans who created these things were not well paid, except for the stars.

The first floor gallery was devoted to drawings from the kings’ collections. Drawing was not the art form it became later, because it’s a personal art form, just the artist and the pencil, then just the viewer and the paper. Most of these drawings were sketches or studies for more public works: portraits, murals, etc.

The thing that fascinated me most about these works was the draftsmanship. Unlike many recent works on paper, these drawings were not about the surface of the paper. You rarely thought about the line qua line, or masses of color vis á vis the edge of the surface. Instead, you see a shoulder, a chest, a calf, a face, and you truly have to force yourself to see lines of chalk at all. And I tried. I tried to reduce the drawing to chalk-on-paper, but I couldn’t. I tried to see areas of light and dark, but all I could see was perfectly formed musculature. This never ceases to amaze me.

It also reminded me that I must create a visual for Wednesday night’s workshop, some moment from Sun & Moon Circus.

I burned through some assignments today.

I updated the GHP parent orientation video, which was kind of quirky, since (as I mentioned previously) the old Final Cut Pro 3.0 didn’t make the transfer to the new laptop with its authorization intact and I no longer have the installation disks. So I had to use my old laptop to do that. That barely took an hour, and then I was able to set the old laptop to the side and get back to work on the new one. I had the old one rendering the updated sections of video while I moved ahead in other projects on the new one. I could get used to this multiple-computer lifestyle.

I went ahead and blocked out the new Lacuna website. That went smoothly as well, until I made one tiny change to the color of links in one section, and suddenly the links weren’t that color but white, which renders them invisible. I cannot find anything wrong in the CSS file or in the HTML files, and in fact the links look fine in DreamWeaver. It’s just when you get to the actual browser that you can’t see the links in the stories.

To make it even more squirrelly, there’s one page where the link does render correctly. Ah, you say, compare the code between that file and the others! Yes, that would seem to be a good idea, except that all the files are from the same template. I’ll check, but there ought not to be any difference in the HMTL markup.

I’m ready to be composing again. Today’s Writer’s Almanac had Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies” as its poem, and it reminded me how much I want to set that to music. I copied to my Texts folder.

I did a little more futzing around with the new Lacuna website, working with the logo and that kind of thing. In the process I discovered that some key fonts (Avant Garde, for pete’s sake!) had not been copied from the old laptop. That meant booting up the old one and digging through all kinds of weird places to find the missing fonts, and even to figure out which ones were missing.

At any rate, I’m sort of stuck with the site. I don’t really know who it’s for or what it should be saying. The membership, at least when it was active, thrived with just the blog. We don’t really have an “audience” yet who would need some kind of newsletter approach on the front page. So the structure of the site eludes me.

I’ll have to sit down and answer some basic questions about the site before I can proceed. Not a problem. It will make for an interesting Saturday.

Still sick today, so I didn’t do a lot of anything that required a brain. I did manage to get the new laptop running almost up to speed. Two setbacks: my wireless keyboard does not work with the new keyboard, and the manufacturer “has no plans” to release an updated driver. I’ve stolen the keyboard from the iMac downstairs, but that’s a temporary fix.

The other one is also temporary: every year I have to update the video we show at the GHP parent orientations during the interviews. Just the year, dates, deadlines, that kind of thing. I figured that my new Final Cut Express HD would not open the old Final Cut Pro files, and it doesn’t, but I was a little surprised when Final Cut Pro told me it had to be reinstalled with the original disks. Those were the disks that disappeared on the plane back from Scotland four years ago, of course.

Again, not a real problem. I just edit the video on the old laptop, and then make plans to completely reshoot the video this summer. It’s about time for an update anyway.

I also played around with Lacuna’s new website. Part of the puzzle here is trying to figure out what I want the whole site to look like. The blog idea served us well last spring, but do we still need it? Marc’s part of the blog could very easily be its own sub-partition of the entire site, not just a blog.

And if the blog(s) are not part of the site, then what is? I’m still figuring that part out. And then I need to figure out whether I can make a CSS page a template in DreamWeaver.

And I still have to plan next Wednesday night, the first night of workshop.