Category: Life

Oh, you know, the usual…

Labyrinth, 8/23/09

Posted on by Dale

Our problem, if you will recall, was that the channels I had cut into the omphalic bowl did not line up precisely with the bricks in the center of the labyrinth. On the advice of Andy, my ceramics guru, I bought a grinder and cut away the unnecessary portions of bowl. (Actually, Andy advised me to find someone with a grinder, including him; I just decided to buy one.)

Here’s the north channel, cut.

It is interesting to me that you can see the original layers of clay from its coil construction back in June. Anyway, I decided to seal the open clay with what was left of the marine epoxy.

Not very pretty, but this is underground so it doesn’t have to be. Here’s the bowl with both cuts made and epoxied:

And here’s the bowl once again in situ. Yes, there’s mud and leaves in there. There are always going to be mud and leaves in there. Despite my best efforts, the bottom curled up as it dried.

However, there will not be water in there. I don’t think you can see it in this photo, but I drilled a hole NNW of the center hole, near the wall of the bowl. Everything drains out now. Of course, there’s a hole of raw clay, but it just has to be.

There was a small problem with the inner bricks sagging downwards, since the bowl does not fit right up under the granite. I suppose it could, but I’ll have to deal with that some other time. For the time being, I propped up the ends of the bricks with small ceramic scarabs that I bought at the King Tut exhibit last spring. I liked the idea of that.

I also used the scraps from the work table to build a mini-me version to hold the sound table.

I discovered that my multi-outlet has little holes on the back for hanging on walls, so my next little project will be to suspend it from the back of one of the legs. Actually, I’m going to get a second one to suspend from the back of the work table as well.

You can see in the background the packaging from the new miter saw I bought. I’m just accumulating power tools right and left. What can I build next?

A new drink

Posted on by Dale

I think I’ve invented a new cocktail. At least, I can find nothing that matches it on the anywhere on the intertubes.

Announcing…

HONEY PLEASE

  • 1 jigger American Honey liqueur
  • 1 jigger Galliano
  • 2-3 shakes orange bitters

Shake with ice, pour into martini glass. Garnish with strips of basil.

Labyrinth, 8/15/09

Posted on by Dale

Sometime in the night, the center of the labyrinth was visited.

This individual is sitting on the eastern bricks. He clung tight as I removed the bricks, but sometime during the day he flew away to sit above us in the trees and scream for sex.

Here we are before I got started.

These are pieces of 1-inch thick corrugated cardboard that I snagged from the Carnegie Library renovation site. I figured they’d be good to set the pieces of granite on without scratching them.

Here’s the granite removed. I marked each piece on the bottom with its position, e.g., NE, SW, etc. The pieces were not cut in accurate 90° angles, so it’s important for future generations to know where they go.

Here’s the center with the granite and the inside bricks removed.

Essentially I was digging a post hole without a post hole digger. It would not have done me much good to have such an implement; the clay was full of construction detritus. I just chipped away at it with my spades. Eventually it got too deep to remove soil with the spade. I resorted to a former citronella candle pail to scoop it out.

My goal was to dig deep enough to hit the topsoil under all the clay which had been dumped there from the excavation of our addition in 1993. It was about two feet down.

Here’s the final hole with water that I poured in for a percolation/drainage test. It drains just fine.

The bowl seated atop the hole. I traced around it and began to carve out a bed for it.

The bowl in situ.

I measured the depth of the hole to the bottom of the bowl. Then I cut a piece of 6″ PVC pipe. Anyone need six feet of PVC pipe? Here’s the drainpipe in place. Then it was time to go find some large gravel, which I did at Mulch and More out on Hwy 34.

Here’s the “river rock mix” filling the hole. I thought about just filling the outside part with the dirt and leaving the drain empty, but then I thought that future generations might find it easier to remove the pipe if it wasn’t lodged in silt and clay. To that end, I drilled holes to attach rope to the top of the pipe. (You can see my written instructions to future generations inside the pipe.) Also, I figured mosquitos might find a pool of water too attractive, but they probably wouldn’t bother going down under the rocks.

So I got maudlin. Sue me.

And here we have the Problem: the north and west channels in the bowl do not line up with the bricks. Since the granite is not cut accurately, the channels are non-negotiable. I will have to find a way to cut into the bowl for those two areas.

And here’s where we left the thing on Saturday afternoon.

Labyrinth, 8/14/09

Posted on by Dale

Here is my poor labyrinth yesterday as I watered it. Notice how absolutely brown it is. All the grass has died, save a few poor blades in small pockets. I shall have to reseed in a couple of weeks.

Here is the bottom of the omphalic bowl, patched. It’s going to be forever out of sight, so I don’t have to clean it up.

Here are the epoxied cracks, all gold leafed. It’s actually kind of nice. I may come back in on the little white spots and gold leaf them as well. Sort of a night sky there in the center of my labyrinth. Up close and personal, there are plenty of bare spots, but as long as you’re not really paying attention, it’s lovely enough, especially in the dark and under water.

And here is where it is going tomorrow, if I’m lucky. It turns out to be a good thing that the grass has died; now I don’t have to feel any qualms about turning the center into a construction zone. It’s not as if it’s going to destroy anything of permanent growth.

Labyrinth, 8/9/09

Posted on by Dale

Busy, busy, busy.

Yesterday, I started building a new work table for the back yard, based on old farm kitchen tables that I’d seen at antique places. Simple, sturdy construction. I would have finished it yesterday but I ran out of screws halfway through putting the top on.

Not to worry: ran out to Home Depot this morning, picked up some super cool weather-proof screws and actually replaced those I put in yesterday, then finished the table. Here it is in situ, waiting to start its first project:

It’s rather clean looking, if I do say so myself.

First project: patching the omphalic bowl. You see the bowl on the table. You also see a small piece of plywood and a pane of glass.

The idea was that I would put alumnium foil on the bottom of the bowl to keep the epoxy from running all the way through and out the bottom. The problem is that the bottom of the bowl is not flat, but concave.

Solution? A pile of sand on the plywood:

That way, the foil will be pressed up against the bottom of the bowl. That too is why I had the piece of plywood there.

Here are my tools assembled:

The two cans of JC-11 marine epoxy component; plastic spoons for scooping equal portions of the epoxy; spreaders for mixing and spreading the goop; a pane of glass for the mixing. Just at the edge of the photo is a can of denatured alcohol for cleaning.

Here’s the bowl half patched, or rather, completely patched and half cleaned. I was a little concerned when the whole bottom of the bowl looked like the goopy mess on the right. But I began wiping with paper towels soaked in denatured alcohol, and eventually I ended up with:

This is only the first application of epoxy. It will cure overnight, and tomorrow afternoon I will apply a second coat.

I am thinking that I could gold leaf the epoxy: a gleaming hieroglyphic swirling around a dark pool, flowing like lava out through the center of the universe.

Labyrinth, 8/4/09

Posted on by Dale

A full day in the labyrinth.

First of all, I had a full truckload of firewood delivered yesterday afternoon, so the first thing I had to do this morning was to move it all over to its usual spot. Here you can see it where it got stacked yesterday afternoon:

As you can see, the Lichtenbergians are set for the fall. We can drain many a bottle of absinthe without worrying about the fire going out.

I also had this heavy limb to deal with:

Some of you may remember it as the huge limb perched atop my neighbor’s corrugated metal shack. I had tried to get it down earlier in the year, but it was just too big and the upper branches were over the top of the roof.

Somehow, however, it got loose this past week while we were gone and slid on down, knocking the lighting fixture at the southpoint awry. Now I could get at it and saw it into three largish pieces, which were then chopped into more firewood. The lighting fixture was easily restored.

Just for the hell of it, I toted the omphalos bowl out to the center. The blue of the bowl is a little lighter than I would have preferred, and it’s a lot more violet than I would have preferred, but it’s ready to start the installation process.

Of course, the first part of the installation process is to patch those cracks. It turns out that Home Depot does not carry PC-11 marine epoxy, and Sewell Marine has never heard of it. So much for shopping locally. Still, Ace Hardware does carry it, and even has free “to store” shipping, so I’ll be popping by Turkey Creek Road in the next few days, and then we can begin what I’m sure will be many interesting escapades with epoxy.

Just FYI, here’s what I plan to do. I’ll take up the granite and the bricks, carefully marking the cardinal points of the compass, and carefully marking the granite on its underside. As I’ve said before, the granite was not cut on precise 90° angles, so everything has to go back where it came from.

I will dig a hole about 20 inches across and about 3 feet deep, or until I reach the former topsoil under the red clay dumped on top it during construction of our addition. Into this hole I will put a 6-inch wide piece of PVC pipe. That will be filled with rock/large gravel, as will the space around it. The bowl will rest on top of the pipe, and then the brick and granite can go back in place.

Let me know if you see any flaws in this plan.

Last week at the Highlands Arts Festival in Abingdon, VA, I bought this little hand-blown oil lamp:

My thinking was that I would find a vase with a heavy base, and that this would rest in the center of the bowl when it was filled with water. Fire and water, see?

Lo, the very next morning at the antiques show, there it was:

Here it is with the oil lamp in it:

Heavy glass bottom, and that odd shape with the insert. Perfect. I could put dirt in the top, and have earth, air, fire, and water all in one at the center of the labyrinth.

Because… that’s what I will have around the periphery:

These are the cutouts from the bowl, glazed with some pretty awful colors. But hey, it’s a start. I got a quickie gold leaf kit from Michael’s, and in less than 30 minutes:

From the top, clockwise: North/brown/earth. East/white/air. South/red/fire. West/blue/water.

Definitely a successive approximation. I’m thinking I could find some paint/stain for the actual paving stones in the labyrinth, stain the four stones, and gold leaf the alchemical symbols onto those. Or when I return to GHP in 2011, I can make nice markers. Any other ideas?

Goals

Posted on by Dale

Here we are, end of GHP and vacation, the beginning of the school year, one of those cusps that seem to demand that I set some goals, to figure out what I want to do next. I don’t know why, especially since these are no-brainers. It’s not as if I’m going to not do these things if I don’t write them down, but writing them seems to give them some legitimacy.

  • get back into the 24 hour project work. I have #12, #13, and #14 still to set, and they’re all three doozies. I really ought to try to come up with two more movements to go with the string quartet/bassoon piece.
  • get serious about my “Field” series of paintings, especially Seth’s commission
  • schedule Tai Chi time, and stick to the schedule. Grayson gave me a beginner CD for my birthday, and I’ve only looked at the first section once. The problem is finding time and space. But I must.
  • get serious about my ELP sketching, especially faces. Soon it’s going to be time to start sketching in paint as well. It has occurred to me that proficiency in graphite does not automatically transfer to gouache.
  • do some writing in the Neo-Futurist vein for Lacuna. The GHP theatre kids used the Neo-Futurist mold for their work this summer and it was a fascinating way to do theatre.
  • and of course the labyrinth needs attention: mowing, reseeding, repair, installation of the omphalos

That’s not too much to think about, is it? It does not include routine stuff, like cleaning my study or doing the final reports on GHP, or updating the WordPress software everywhere, or starting back up with Masterworks Chorale and Lacuna Group.

More bits & pieces

Posted on by Dale

I spent most of this past week in West Virginia, a lovely state, although where we were was a bit lacking in those things which I tend to enjoy while on vacation, such as fine dining and access to art in any form.

However, there was this, the New River Gorge Bridge:

That’s a four-lane highway on top; for scale, a car could drive on any of the girders of the arch. It is immense. It’s the longest single-arch bridge in the western hemisphere, and the second tallest in the U.S. As you can see in the photograph, there was a slight haze to the air that day, so the whole mise-en-scene was a bit CGIish. Confronted by something like this, the brain rebels. It can’t be real. It’s too big. Somehow a computer did it.

Before the bridge was built, folks used a smaller bridge down at the river (still there). It took 45 minutes to get from the top of one side of the gorge to the other. Now it takes less than a minute.

I was impressed.

I was also more than a little bored, not being the outdoorsy type who jumps at the chance to spend all day rafting down said New River. It rained nearly the whole time we were there, so I couldn’t even take naps in the sun, and there’s only so much hot tub one can take.

I was also largely internetless, having left my laptop at home. I was able to keep up with email via my iPhone, but there are about 13 major emails to which I have yet to reply because they need some thought and depth to them. I’ll get to those tomorrow.

So I amused myself by not shaving. Here I am after a week without a razor:

One always hopes that one looks raffishly sexy, but I know I’m just unkempt. It all comes off tomorrow morning, lest I scare the rest of the leadership team at school.

I got home from GHP last Sunday, left for West Virginia the next day, so I didn’t really get a chance to check on the labyrinth, other than to take this photo late last Sunday afternoon.

As you can see, the dry summer has not been kind to the space. The grass is mostly dead. Today I was able to pick up all the little sticks that had accumulated, and I spread a “weed & feed” fertilizer on it. I also have to get the lawnmower fixed, and then there’s a host of other little things I have to swing into action on. I’ll take more photos tomorrow afternoon and blog about them tomorrow night. I also hope to have a full report/plan on the omphalos bowl and its accoutrements and installation. Big doings in my near future.

Various updates

Posted on by Dale

I brought the bowl back to the dorm this morning. It’s awfully heavy. I continually fear I will drop it.

The cracks are now a feature, not a bug. When I think back on the puzzle of what to do with the interior, I am reminded of the line from Casablanca: “It seems that destiny has taken a hand.”

I spent an hour with a string quintet this morning reading through and working on Waltz for string quartet & bassoon. A cello subbed for the bassoon. It was great fun, and I was able to help them hear what I heard and to play it. I think that with actual rehearsal it would be a very presentable piece indeed. My friend and colleague Stephen Czarkowski plans to program it this fall, so maybe we’ll get a YouTube video performance of that.

There were three places that I wasn’t sure were effective, and I found that I was right about those as being weak. I was able to fix one of them on the spot, and the other two are simple doubling issues, i.e., I need more oomph at two spots that sounded bare, so all I have to do is copy and paste some notes. Done, for a ducat!

I haven’t blogged about this because it’s been touchy, but for the past week here at the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice we’ve been under “social distancing protocol” restrictions due to the flu. No one could sit directly next to each other, everyone was issued hand sanitizer, etc., etc. (There is no hand sanitizer in the city. Tomorrow there will be no Sharpie markers.)

The “no touching” thing had some interesting repercussions. We canceled Field Day and the Saturday night dance. (Everyone dressed up in their 80s finery anyway.) I canceled my Grand Ball. We had to cut seating at peformances in half, which meant we had to double the number of performances, which meant increased monitoring duties for me, which meant less time to get the program ready to close out. It was very stressful.

The worst was facing the fact that we were going to have do the final Prism Concert twice, cancel the Friday night Graffiti Dance (the kids sign each others’ t-shirts in a last paroxysm of bonding), and somehow split up Saturday morning’s Convocation. What kind of good-bye is it when half the people you love are not there? And the idea that we were going to keep these kids from hugging each other was ludicrous. The increasing anxiety about this very real downer was getting to everyone.

Last night, however, the word finally came that since we had not had anyone register any symptoms since our only case ten days ago, we were free of restrictions. We could end our summer as we should. And there was much rejoicing.

All in all, we were magnificent. We responded quickly and appropriately, and the kids were fantastic in their good-spirited compliance with the protocols. They were actually grateful that they were still at GHP, and many said so. All the final events were kept on the schedule, and as far as I know no one was turned away from something they wanted to see. We deserve much praise.

Two days, one hour, two minutes until GHP is over.

Omphalos, 7/21/09

Posted on by Dale

All right, who didn’t light a candle?

Yes, those are cracks. They are large cracks.

See??

We are not to worry. We will patch these cracks with a marine epoxy, perhaps even with some colorant. And actually I kind of like the pattern they made.

I don’t know when I’m going to do this. Maybe between midnight and 2 a.m. one evening between now and Saturday.

Tomorrow morning I sit in on a rehearsal of my Waltz for string quartet & bassoon, although I’m not sure whether they ever recruited a bassoon.