Pictures from Boise

We call this old man, my Granpa. I think he's my mother's father.

These two freaks are my younger sisters. They get their looks from their fathers. They're probably embarrased.

Enjoy!!!!!

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So close to leaving Portland

Having had many flights cancelled and rebooked and cancelled again, then rebooked the Portland airport feels like a bad wine hangover. Like somebody frozen and thawed over and over again. The vacuous parking lots covered in snowy slush and ten foot high piles of snow plow pileup along the runways, suggest an organism scrambling to get it's shit together. But people are relieved, smiling a little and generally feeling like they might just make it out of here. We were in line for over an hour, and a woman fell over. Folks didn't know when they could approach the kiosks and the people behind the counter seemed happy just to avoid being shouted at for the first time in days.

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It's Christmas, and we're ready to board our flight. Being stuck in the house for a few days, with Tiff and my sister, who also has been delayed in returning home, is an opportunity to reflect and remember why I am with Tiff. We get annoyed with one another, yell a little bit, never really feeling mean and in the end it turns out that we still like each other - even when we're trapped in the house for a week.

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We did venture out after our friends lent us some chains for the car. Driving around in the snow is so much fun. It's too bad that Tiffani hates being in the car in the snow, cause I can pull some serious cookies when allowed. We had a nice little gift exchange last night and I received some new clothes. I always get clothes, even when I want motorcycles and bike parts and video games. . . I do like the clothes.

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2008 was a good year, my Mom beat Cancer. I started at PSU and passed a very difficult Japanese class. Tiffani has been very fit and happy, and I avoided death on the Hawthorne Bridge.

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It's snowing a lot right now, and everybody is sort of staring out the windows of the airport at the flakes with a laser glare. Maybe if we all hate those flakes enough, they'll melt and we'll make it out of here.

Cancelled. . .

Yep, looks like we're staying home for awhile longer.
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Snow!

We were supposed to be headed to Boise this morning at 8am. Our flight was cancelled, and luckily we found out yesterday. We were able to book tickets on the flight today that leaves at 4:15. Our car is frozen solid. My truck is buried under drift and it looks like we're walking to the bus stop. I am so glad that it's only 4 blocks. We don't have snow clothes, or boots and the suitcase that Tiff is packing is 3ft X 5ft X 1ft! I don't know why we need so much stuff in Boise, but I guess all of our families' gifts are in there. The folks on the news keep saying the same thing, which is basically that it's cold. All Southwest flights before 2:45 are cancelled. I sure hope we get out of town today! Hopefully my next post will be from Boise!

Damn you Orson, damn you!

I just watched Orson Welles' version of The Trial. It seems that shitty movie versions of great stories is nothing new. I hate this movie. You cannot change the ending of a story like this for the film adaptation without doing a disservice to the origin. GRRR! This is one of my favorite books. They added all this sexy bullshit and then change the personality of the main character and then the ending is a complete fabrication. Oh well. Not even the birthday is right!

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I've taken another snow day and I'm hoping tomorrow is the same. I slept late today and had steak and eggs for breakfast along with coffee nudges and this movie, which I've been trying to make it through for a couple days. I haven't ridden my bike in over a week and I'm thinking that I might have lost the skill. . .

Cold Weather Update

The freeze is here, and I don't need to talk about it aside from saying that I am thankful that I had a hundred pounds of sand in the car today. After work I was not going to make it out of the parking lot due to the ice. I poured that sand all over and made it out no sweat.

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Been holed up watching bad movies, worse TV and eating what we have left in the house. Listening to a lot of cold weather music. Low, Bon Iver and the 1st Testface record. Good stuff all of it. Brrr. School was cancelled yesterday on account of the snow and it's looking like it might be cancelled Thursday and Friday. I don't especially need to go to work tomorrow either. I've read everything I have in the house and I haven't ridden my bike in a week. I gotta say, I'm feeling shut in. So it goes. Time for some hot chocolate. Stay warm out there.

Work?

Sometimes it feels like my job is a complete waste of time. Sometimes it's great. Right now I'm standing in the hall to avoid being a disruption. In my youth I did this a lot, but because I was asked too.
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End of the term

Yay
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Death in installments. Three payments made.

I nearly died yesterday on my way home from school. I was riding my bike, approaching the Hawthorne bridge behind a "real cyclist", meaning he was wearing spandex, or lycra. . . As we approached the bridge, I looked up ahead and noticed that there was a man and his two sons walking our way. There was a lot of foot traffic in addition to the man and boys. We slowed as we made it up on to the bridge and were cruising along, when I looked past the cyclist to check where the boys were. They were probably 3 and 4 years old, so when I didn't see one of them, I thought to myself, "that's strange I could have sworn there were two kids with that dude." It couldn't have taken a whole second. When I looked back at the cyclist in front of me, he was stopped.

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The Hawthorne bridge is a steel mesh bridge with nice wide concrete bicycle/pedestrian paths on each side. The concrete path is about 12 inches above the surface of the road way. This keeps the cars off the path, but it doesn't keep the people off the road.

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When I realized the cyclist had stopped in front of me, I locked up my back wheel and hit my brake. Unfortunately, I was already too close to him and had to veer slightly to either side to avoid a collision. Worried about the boys, I turned left and ended up on the roadway. It all happened so fast, that I'm amazed so much went through my head. First I was worried that he had hit the kids, which was why he stopped so fast. Then I was concerned about running into his bike because it was much nicer than mine. Third I thought to myself, I'm glad I have a brake, because otherwise, I would be that douche bag on a bike without brakes that can't stop. The funniest part is that the fourth thing I thought, as I was headed into the roadway, was "fuck, I hope it's a small car right there when I land and not a cement truck." I might have thought "dump truck" I know the image in my head was a large vehicle. It wasn't a panicked sort of worry, but more of a resignation to the possibility that I might be in serious trouble.

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The other time I've felt this sense of calm is when I was on tour once, and lost control of my car on a truly treacherous stretch of highway in North Dakota. I ended up looking out the driver side window at the headlights of a semi truck carrying a load of pigs, though it could have been some other livestock. This time like that time, I managed to somehow avoid death or serious injury.

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The cyclist hadn't hit the boys, and just rode away. The kids were being scolded by their father for jumping in front of the him. The cyclists behind me rode away. The woman in the red toyota who had just screeched to a halt just inches from me. Covered her mouth and hyperventilated while I walked back over to the sidewalk. The two teenage boys that had been standing on the bridge right where it all happened looked like they might have shit their pants. The woman started her car, which had stalled from her slamming both feet on the brake and not deploying the clutch, and drove away. I rode home in a state of shock.

sheesh! That was crazy.

Tonight we invested! No, not in the failing stock market, or our futures, or in love; we invested in plaster. In fact it was roughly equal parts plaster, water and sand. The funny part for me, was when I decided to attempt to invest not one, but twenty pieces in a single investment. Another part that I thought was funny, was when after attempting to coat the inside seams of my investment with plaster, I splashed my wax forms and my professor says something along the lines of "oh shit, don't get plaster on the wax! it's going to be another hour before we actually invest the wax and that plaster will have set before the next plaster is poured." my translation: "oh shit, you just fucked up!" Here, I back up a bit. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a direct style pour in a trough system. The idea is to gate four pieces to a 1" bar so that we can pour bronze into the trough and it will flow into each piece. Then I thought, "why not put them all in one investment? Won't that save time, material and heartache?" So the irony, for me, is that after deciding to do something that very possibly might not work, and risking a waste of probably 8 weeks of work, I messed up in the early stage of a very technical process in a way that could very well have been prevented if my professor had ever done this sort of thing. So I'm a little bummed out, especially because I weighed the wax today for each of my pieces. Before I say what the weight of the wax is, I should mention a few things. 1lb of wax is equal to roughly 10lbs of bronze. We pay $8 per pound, which covers the cost of the investment, the wax and the metal. My wax figures weigh nearly 5lbs. I still have to cast 8 more pawns, 2 queens and 2 kings. So, yes if you've done the math, I'm already on the hook for nearly $400 in material costs without including the rest of the pieces. Including those pieces, I'm looking at nearly $600 in materials. I could pay off a credit card with that kind of money! SO if you know anybody that wants to buy a $1000 chess set that weighs roughly 200lbs(did I mention that the board is made of steel concrete and a tree stump?) Oh, but the board might have termites. . . I'll replace the board if that turns out to be true, hopefully before they eat through your floors. . .

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The investing process was really exciting. It was right up my alley. It was sort of like being behind the bar on a thursday night in a college town. Everybody had to be on, everybody had a job and everybody had something to gain by doing a good job. We were divided into groups and assigned to specific areas of the process. Time was of the essence so one person mixed the plaster while one group measured and provided the water, one group measured and provided the plaster and one group measured and provided the sand. A duo poured the mixture into forms constructed of chicken wire and tar paper. I was on the sand group. Out of all the groups, people would defect to maintain their piece during the process; as the plaster set, they had to hold their piece at the right depth in the plaster. Since I did twenty in one, we poured mine first and unlike everybody else, I didn't need to hold my piece at the proper depth(we invested it upside down). This meant that when we discovered that the mixture was setting very very slowly, I found myself hustling to fill 5 gallon buckets with sand, water and plaster while many in the class were stuck to their pieces. I was wearing a dust mask and sweating. Can I just say that panting into a dust mask is incredibly unpleasant. You know that thing you do when somebody attractive walks into the room? You breathe into your hand and try to determine whether you breath is offensive? As if halitosis would be so dull as to be discovered in the palm of one's hand. . . Well, panting into a dust mask reveals the nuance of one's halitosis. That's all, it's late. $1000 chess set.

Gated and ready to invest

These will all be "direct pour"-ed. Fun stuff. Guess i'll have to finish the pieces next term. The final is Thursday.
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Design homework

Been working on a styrofoam eggbeater for a couple days. Today we'll cost it with a super fine resin then paint it. The idea was to magnify an object which had dimensions of less than 8x8x8. This is 8 times it's original size. It measures 32 inches tall.
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