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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