New labyrinth project, pt. 1

Posted on by Dale

You would think after eight years I would be done with the basic structure of the labyrinth.  You are wrong, of course.  It’s never done.  The trick is not to overload the space.

You already know that the classic seven-circuit labyrinth is basically four lines, each of which curves its way around the center and then ends, forming a turn in the path.

Viz:

Until recently, I capped each endstone with a small wooden block that was painted to look like stone and which had a circle cut into it—I sometimes would place cans of Sterno in those endpoints as little lamps along the way.

However, people kept tripping over them, particularly the southeast one by the firepit, mainly because I had drilled holes in the stones and staked them to the ground with rebar.  So I got rid all of them earlier this year and life has gone on.

I kept thinking, though, that the endpoints needed to be more pleasing visually, and that’s what I’m working on now.

Basic idea: replace the square paving stone at the endpoint with a round paving stone.  Naturally, no one manufactures a round paving stone, at least not in the size that I needed, and so I am casting my own.

Here are my alternate designs:

Pro tip: in Pages, create a layout document, then a circle and a square with white fill.  You can control the size of the circle in the Inspector, and Pages is very helpful about showing you when you have things centered, both on the page and with each other.  Above you can see my templates for circles of 6″, 7″, 7.5″, and 8″.  I decided to go with the 7-inch circle.

Here’s what it looks like in situ:

And from another angle:

Just big enough to tie off the end without being too much big.

Now let me introduce you to a fabulous material:

RAM BOARD!  It’s rough, it’s tough, it’s a huge role of heavy duty cardboard for about $30.  I think builders use it to protect floors as they truck stuff in and out of a site.  I bought it to use in art projects.

Cut out the base of the mold:

Use your handy flexible ruler to measure the length of the arc:

Measure strips for the sides of the mold, remembering to add a one-inch tab at the end:

Use your painters tape to form the sides, then attach to the straight edge of the bottom:

Finished:

All four of them:

And here we pause.  It’s begun to rain, and I have some æsthetics to work on.

The simplest plan is simply to insert these into the ground and fill them with concrete.  The cardboard may or may not disintegrate—who cares?

But wouldn’t it be neat if I embedded something in the surface?  I’m thinking the symbols of the four classical elements: fire/water/earth/air, just like the sculptures at the four points of the compass are now.

Here are two versions of the symbols:

One choice to make is between the triangular and the circular versions.  The problem with the triangular ones is that they are reversible—the seeker would never be quite sure if the turn he is making is around fire or water. That is a problem, right?  The circular ones at least remain the same no matter which direction you’re approaching them from.

However, depending on what materials I find when I hit Jo-Ann’s, the triangular ones might be easier to make.  (My original thoughts were to use brass or some metal items.)

Also however too, it occurs to me that it might be the best thing ever if I were to make the circular ones out of resin of some kind, glass even, and let those be the absolute top of the endpoint stones, i.e., you wouldn’t see concrete, just the glass symbol.

Hm.

New ring!

Posted on by Dale

You will recall that way back in January I lost my wedding ring.  It has never shown up.  We ordered a new one, the exact design, from our favorite jeweler, but a) it had to be special ordered; b) the company that makes them waits until there are enough orders to fill before filling them; and c) our favorite jeweler decided to retire.  So we canceled the order and went looking.

Specifically we went looking in Asheville, our favorite new destination for art, food, and fun times.  There was one artist whose jewelry I really liked the last time we were there, and so while we looked at All The Rings everywhere we went, I had a gut feeling that we’d find what we were looking for at this young woman’s studio.

Alas, when we went to Cotton Mill Studios on Saturday, Christie Calaycay was not there.  Her studio was locked.  I was truly bummed.

However, when we drove by later in the day, lights were on in the studio and I did a quick U-turn to go check.  She was in, and indeed, her work was what we were looking for.  I picked a squarish ring (like my old one), with a bark-like finish, in white gold.  (I had been wearing a replacement ring from Wal-mart—it was silver and I got used to the color.  Plus, it seemed appropriate to shift tonalities.)

It took about a month and a half for her to craft the ring and get it to us, and it is a thing of beauty:

Here it is on the newly sealed and polished center of the labyrinth:

It’s not as square as my old one, and I will always miss it, but this is a beautiful thing and I love it.  Thanks be to my lovely first wife!

For the record, I also bought a square earring with much the same finish while we were there.

I’m back!

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I know—but I’ve been busy.  I spent five weeks in Columbus, GA, as a guest artist at the Springer Opera House in a very lovely production of Born Yesterday, playing the drunken lawyer Ed Devery with as much professionalism as I could scrape together.  The struggle was real, and that’s not the kind of thing I document in public.[1]  My fellow cast members were boffo, and I think in the end I acquitted myself well.

Sure, I could have blogged about my continuing work on A Christmas Carol—I have made it to the “Finale” and will have it finished by the middle of June—but that’s dull blogging.

I could have blogged about the continuing outrages on the rightward flank of American politics, but Wonkette does that so much funnierly than I do.

Oh well—apologies all round.

So I’m back, and for my first post I’m blogging about a new cocktail, as is my wont.

This is the Molly 22.A, concocted for a dinner party honoring the graduation and 22nd birthday of young Molly Honea, who is now the proud possessor of two useless degrees from the University of Georgia.  She has always demanded requested that I create a cocktail for special occasions, and by “special occasions” she means any get-together that she’s attending.

She likes gin—and we must applaud her perspicacity for acquiring such sophisticated taste in the mere one year she has been drinking alcohol—and citrus, so I started there.  It was fruitful research.

MOLLY 22.A

  • 1.5 oz gin
  • 1 oz yellow Chartreuse
  • .5 oz lemon juice
  • 1 dash lemon bitters
  • optional: .5 tsp grenadine (the real kind); a few drops kava extract

Throw the gin, Chartreuse, lemon juice, and bitters into the shaker.  Shake with ice, strain.

If you have real grenadine, drop that into the glass and let it sink to the bottom.  If you’re a dirty freaking hippie and have kava extract lying around, it’s fun to add that to the mix before you shake it.

Now the fun part:

MOLLY 22.B

Use vodka instead of gin.  It’s a smoother drink, needless to say, without the interest of gin.

MOLLY 22.A.1

Use green Chartreuse instead of yellow.  It’s less sweet and to my taste more layered.

So there you go.  I do have a series of topics I’ll be blogging about, so you can dust off your link to the blog now.

—————

[1] To be clear, I have no problem documenting my struggles and failures, as longtime readers of this blog surely know.  However, I never want my struggles to appear to reflect poorly on others—theatre is a hurly-burly process, and to an outsider it might appear that I’m placing “blame” for my own problems on others in the process.  Nothing would have been farther from the truth.

Synchronicity

Posted on by Dale

I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this before, but the bizarrely synchronous events in my life seem to me to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.

For example, it’s a rare day when the New York Times crossword puzzle does not have an answer that reflects directly on something going on in my life, often a phrase, name, or word that pops up on the television show my lovely first wife is watching while I am working on that very clue.

Today in rehearsal during a break in the action, I was not involved in whatever was being discussed and idly opened one of the prop books on the table in front of me.  It was one of those bound volumes from Great Literature, and since I didn’t have my glasses on I could not read the text, but I could make out the headers on the left and right pages: CHARLES LYELL | GEOLOGIC EVOLUTION.

Well.

Flashback to teaching information skills to 3rd graders: one of my favorite activities to teach them how to use the dead-tree editions of the encyclopedia—because it was on the test that’s why shut up—was to have them look up their last name and see how close they could get.  I had an introductory presentation which demonstrated guide words blah blah and finally I would light on LYELL, CHARLES.  We’d scan the article and I’d show them how to extract the information they would need when they did their own name.  (I would also point out multiple times that I hadn’t found my exact last name so stop whining you little twerps.)

(We would also then turn around and use the online World Book and lo! almost every kid would find someone with their exact last name—and those that didn’t ventured over to Wikipedia.)

That was certainly worth a nostalgic chuckle, but then just now I was reading a Wonkette article on our next never-going-to-be-President, Rafael E. Cruz, and there in the comments was the following:

It turns out it wasn’t until the Alverez team published their findings about the KT Impact in 1981 that Mass Extinction was even talked about in the science community, all thanks to Charles Lyell, a lawyer who argued that catostrophism was absurd and advocated a more natural cyclical theory to life on earth.

With a link to the Wikipedia article even.  Mercy.  It’s harmless, but it’s certainly also unnerving.  I’ve learned to live with it.

update: Let’s add another one: using Slate’s Reincarnation Machine, I amused myself by following the chain of famous folk who died/were born on the same day, starting back from my birthday.  Eventually we arrived at Otto I, who was in the crossword puzzle yesterday.  (I also got Julius II in there somewhere.  Fun web activity!)

another update: So yesterday I mentioned info skills at Newnan Crossing.  One of the last lessons I invented was to teach a fourth grade class the difference between figurative and literal language.  They had to create a Keynote presentation on the new iPads that illustrated the metaphors in a Shakespeare sonnet.  I demonstrated with Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”); they had to go back to class and work on Sonnet 73 (“That time of year tho mayst in me behold”).  This morning’s Writer’s Almanac?  Sonnet 73.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

A thought

Posted on by Dale

An interesting aspect of re-jiggering old pieces, as I have done with Christmas Carol at least twice now, is that I have left a trail of modifications and improvements over the last 30 years and I haven’t taken care to go back and update all the previous versions.

This means that even last year’s 11-piece ensemble version is not the same in minor details as the current project.  In painting, this would be called pentimento, where the artist made changes and adaptations in the course of work and which can be seen through careful examination or infrared/X-ray/or other technology.

Past novelists of course kept their drafts for the most part, and it’s a cottage business in academia to scour these for the differences in the original artistic impulse, a kind of tracking of Successive Approximation.  (Christopher Tolkien has made a career of this.)

Composers, in the past, are the same.  Leonard Bernstein famously did an entire program on how long it took Beethoven to get the opening measures of his Fifth Symphony right, based on material from Beethoven’s sketchbooks and papers.

Nowadays, of course, revisions and editing and evidence of crashing and burning evaporate with a shift of the electrons of which everything is made now.  This has been a matter of some interest/concern for scholars—and artists themselves: how will the future learn of our creative processes when we leave no trace?

That’s one reason, actually, that I start a Finale file for Abortive Attempts and then transfer things to a “clean papers” file—usually—once I’ve settled on melodies and harmonies.  There’s still a lot that evaporates in the process, but I feel as if I have left a little bit of a path to understanding how I did what I did.

That’s it; no grand essay, just a thought.

What’s going on…

Posted on by Dale

I’m sitting here in my room in the Springer Opera House—yes, that’s a thing—waiting for the first rehearsal of Born Yesterday, the Garson Kanin comedy that closes out the Springer’s season, and I’m being very good, waking at 6:00 a.m. and actually working on Christmas Carol.

I questioned whether to bring my own coffee pot since there’s one in the communal kitchen here, but then I realized that if I open that door before 9:30, I’ll start being sociable with my fellow cast members and never get any work done.  So I’m glad I have my coffee set up in my bathroom; I’ve actually been productive this morning.

I’ve picked up where I left off some weeks ago, starting to get “The Cratchits’ Prayer” re-orchestrated.  As I’ve said before, none of this process is very hard since most of it is just deciding where to copy and paste the music that’s already there.  But there are issues—and always have been—with this piece, in that the harmonies twist and turn and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten them right.  I reworked them last year and I don’t think I solved the problem, so this is the time and the place where it all comes to an end.  Eventually.

This blog post is, of course, in the spirit of TASK AVOIDANCE, one of the nine precepts of Lichtenbergianism: I got to a certain point in the music and decided to stop working on it for a bit.

Today is Tuesday.  The first runthrough of this show is Sunday.  And then in another week and a half, we open.  Let that sink in: we have fourteen days of rehearsal (Mondays off) and then we open.

Let me be the first to say that, never having done this before, I have some anxiety about my ability to learn these lines in the allotted timeframe.  It helps that one of my fellow cast members, an actual professional actor, said the same thing at dinner last night.  It’s a matter of age, mostly.  Those lines just won’t stick like they used to.  In Into the Woods, I flubbed scenes in ways I never had before.  Of course, in my defense, most of my scenes began with the line “And so the Baker…,” so it’s no wonder that I couldn’t keep them straight.

Feh.  I will not only survive, I will prevail.  But I do see a lot of evenings spent chiseling those words into my brain.

Ah well, back to Dickens.

Little green things, identified

Posted on by Dale

I finally remembered that I wanted to make a serious effort to find out what the two vines are that grow so prettily in the labyrinth.

This one:

…with its delicate little stems and beautiful, fern-like leaves, is actually a monster: Lygodium japonicum, an invasive climbing vine that—from the photos in that second link—is every bit as bad as kudzu or ivy.  So far, it has shown no inclination to take over anything other than the wire structures I have provided for it.

The other:

…is Clematis paniculata, also known as Sweet Autumn Clematis.  It is also invasive, and I have to say that I have found a strong cable of vine running through the ivy.  I took the remaining seeds and planted them over by the fence in the hopes that I can convince the plant to take part in my eventual privacy fence.  I will harvest more seeds next fall.

More little green things

Posted on by Dale

Longtime readers may recall that I used to maintain a wonderful herb garden, but in recent years I curtailed it quite a lot, since I just wasn’t here in the summers.  Things would either go to seed or die from not enough watering, and it wasn’t worth the expense.

But since I am now at home, I find myself needing the parsley and the cilantro and the basil, and the expense has shifted to buying it in the grocery store and seeing much of it go to waste.

So here we are:

 

Several years ago one of us contracted with a yard service to keep everything edged.  They promptly covered up my brick edging and left it to ruin.  I have now uncovered the brick and even added to the path on the left so that we have an easier time getting to the garbage and recycling bins.  All the bricking got raised and leveled.

You will notice that the Dill Bush That Ate Newnan is back—and this is after freezing to death twice this year.  The other survivors are the parsley, chives, sage, and oregano.  And the lovage made it back!

New: basil, of course; cilantro (although I had a couple of plants emerging as reseeds); tarragon; thyme; a couple lettuces and some kale; a tomato plant; and a serrano pepper plant.  And catnip, which I’ve never planted before.

Around on the other side of the dill, I’m going to plant hummingbird/butterfly garden seeds and see what happens.  If it works, it will be fabulous.

Of course, it’s in the back of my head that there’s no better way to provoke the universe into finding you a fabulous summer job that will require you to be away from home than to make this commitment.

Little green things

Posted on by Dale

As the weather warms, little green things begin their return to the labyrinth.

See that tiny little fuzzy, curled shoot?  It is the reappearance of the fern-like vine—no, I don’t know its name—that appeared a couple of years ago.  All those brown sticks are the remains of last year’s growth, and it’s already put out more tendrils since I took this photo.  I had set up a wire cage for it to climb on, but this year I bought it its own home:

That should give it plenty of room to express itself.

Another vine that just sprouted last year has returned, this one sending out new growth from the old:

Now that I know this, I can cut it back a little bit next year.  This doesn’t look like much, but it puts out hosts of delicate little white flowers that have the loveliest smell, and then the flowers turn into these ghostly seed pods:

Those dry into fluffy seeds waiting to be carried away by wind and rain, although most of them are still in place.  (If you’d like some to start your own vine, let me know.)  I don’t know the name of this vine, either.

Ferns are beginning to return, including some male ostrich ferns I planted late last fall and which promptly succumbed to the cold.  I was very pleased to see them make it back:

I’ll post more photos as they mature.

The only place where growth is not happening is in those pesky bald spots in the labyrinth.  A couple of weeks ago, when it began to warm up and before it rained, I targeted those spots with specific loving care, raking out the areas and sowing fescue.  So far?  Nothing:

I shall persevere.