All right, I’m not promising a new self-portrait every day.
But here are two from Wednesday.
Pretty good portrait of what I hope I look like in another 25 years. Am I vain to think that I don’t really look this old? Several portraits like this seem to me to look more like my late grandmother than me.
Getting all sketchy. In terms of portraiture, I think you can tell it’s me, but it doesn’t look like me. This is my main goal in working on this: verisimilitude.
I came across this.
Should I? I should, shouldn’t I?
That’s what it was, a simple plan.
I had ordered a new 500GB hard drive for my laptop, since I’m down to less that 5GB remaining space on my original hard drive. It came on Wednesday. All I had to do was:
I’ll start the process on Friday, the start of the holiday weekend, plenty of time to do a pretty long task. So I go to One World Computing’s website to look at the video about installing the hard drive. Not even scary, but I realized I didn’t have any of the tools required. Should have watched the video first, I suppose, and then I could have ordered the 11-piece toolkit.
Not a problem, other than OWC not having it in stock. I order it from another company, and it arrives on Saturday. Fine, I’ll start this on Sunday.
Only I can’t find my Leopard install disk. I think it’s at school, where I’ve been trying to figure out how to install OS X on an old blue-and-white G3 that doesn’t have an internal DVD drive and doesn’t want to boot off an external drive.
Not a problem. I ask Marc to load me his install disk. He brings it to me this morning, Monday.
Only my DVD drive isn’t functioning. It’s been wonky its whole life, but now it’s failing utterly to read disks. I should have known this last weekend when I planned to play a new HD music DVD for the Lichtenbergians, but the computer kept rejecting the disk. Hm, bad disk, I thought. Nope: bad drive.
So now I have an appointment at the Genius Bar at Lenox Mall on Tuesday, 5:00 pm. My AppleCare plan is still in force, so perhaps they can just switch one out right there on the spot. Perhaps.
Arrgh.
And after spreading all that wheat straw on the labyrinth yesterday, my allergies have kicked in full force. I am miserable. Poor me, all round. I’m blaming Glenn Beck. And James Inhofe.
I know how the nation feels about secession, but is there any reason we can’t just expel Texas?
Again, having searched the internets and found nothing, I am forced to claim authorship of the following:
UNNAMED DRINK
Shake with ice, pour into a martini glass. I tried it with both Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice and regular lime juice. Both are yummy. You might try upping the lime to a full part, too.
If you couldn’t tell, I bought a bottle of Canton ginger liqueur yesterday. I also bought a bottle of Nocello walnut liqueur. It’s problematic, with a muddy, dark, bitter flavor. I did a few combinations, applejack, the ginger, but nothing satisfactory yet. The closest so far is 1 part Nocello, 1 part Godiva, and 2 parts Bailey’s. More work is called for.
Name the ginger drink for me.
I was cleaning out my computer satchel and came across these pages from last year’s Forgotten English daily calendar. I clearly never got around to blogging about them. Since I’m waiting for the sun to come up before I get to work in the labyrinth, I’ll just do that right now.
Pseudodox: false, not true opinion. Well, that’s one easy one. The phrases “death panel” and “health care rationing” spring right to mind. Thanks, Sarah Palin! Oh, and anything James Inhofe has said for the past week and a half. As we say in Feydeau, Christ on a bicycle!
Ambiloquy: the use of indeterminate expressions; discourse of doubtful meaning; double-speaking. Vid. sup.
Carriwitchet: a hoaxing, puzzling question, not admitting a satisfactory answer. As in, how do you craft legislation when half your establishment is made up of determined nihilists?
Balitorium: riotous proceedings; the boisterous merrymaking which often accompanies a bonfire. Hey, one I can actually use, and more often than one might think, except for those who actually read this blog, who are usually involved with said boisterous merrymaking. Let the balitorium begin!
Vlonkers: sparks of fire. Let the balitorium begin, but beware the vlonkers! Those things can burn you in inauspicious locations.
Flammivomous: vomiting flames. This has nothing to do with my balitoria; I just liked the word.
Sprunch: the sexual advance of a male, a much stronger term than spark or wing. Another one just for fun. The original calendar says that some hillfolk use sprunchin’ to mean copulation. Let sprunchin’ thrive!
Foot-muff: exactly what it sounds like, a fur-lined thingie for your feet so that you don’t get chilblains on your tootsies when you go sleighing. But it sounds naughty.
Let’s go check in with the labyrinth.
My lack of productivity has reached shocking levels, so much so that my concern over it has invaded my brain like a worm and awakened me at 4:00 a.m.
I have not sketched, composed, or blogged in weeks, and I don’t see any such activity in my future, either. The other day I was seriously considering a moratorium on all such endeavors, just being honest about it and saying, “You know what? I don’t have it in me right now, and I’m hanging it up. See you guys later.”
But I can’t be honest about it. I have to delude myself into believing that I will make the time to sit down and work on something. Sometime.
Part of my problem is the old Leaf by Niggle dilemma. I have “responsibilities,” and those tend to multiply. For example, tonight I will have Lacuna (yes, that’s creative; but productive?). Tomorrow is the Newnan Crossing open house. Friday is sort of open and I may get some sketching done. Saturday I am hosting my fellow Lichtenbergians.
Monday is Masterworks. Tuesday… I need to meet about the Masterworks website and publicity. Wednesday, Lacuna. Thursday is open. Then it’s Labor Day weekend, and we’re wanting to travel.
Over on the Lichtenbergian website, we had an assignment to list the five rules for creativity. One of mine was “Defend your time.” I think I have failed at that.
Inertia, inertia, inertia.
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?
