Getting My Socializing In Now
Hello everyone!
I’ve been busy this past week, but not all my time was spent on projects. I even saw two different people in person, if you can believe it. Amazing, I know. I need to get my fill of other people before Covid shuts the world down again, which I still think is coming.
So what’s the deal? Well…
First, I visited my friend and fellow art student Azadeh. She’s continued her education after our mutual time at Langara College by going on to Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She recently shared a few pictures of some ceramic works, among other things. I was particularly taken with one of them and asked if it was available. She said yes, so we met to catch up and deal with the specifics of that.
The work in question doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s part of a series reflecting on the Iranian diaspora in Canada. The work also presents me with a project, since it needs to be made wall mountable. Here’s a photo of most of it laid out on a ceramics table:
The table wasn’t quite big enough to hold it all, but it was enough to let us get dimensions. The plan is to attach a sheet of steel to a panel and glue magnets on the back of the tiles so they can be arranged on the steel. The panel will be about 4' square. This is not a small piece, but it is beautiful!
I’ll wind up picking the piece up in the next week or two, and figure out the mounting as time allows. Yet another thing to do, but it’ll be worth it. Our visit was lovely as well. Covid ended our time at Langara just about two years ago and we had not seen each other since, so there was quite a bit to catch up on.
My other social visit was seeing Ducky downtown. We walked along the seawall, stopped for shawarma, and talked about nothing in particular. Oh, and I loaned her some DVDs since I am weird about collecting physical media rather than subscribing to a zillion streaming services. We had a good time, and getting out was fun.
I even took transit on both these trips, which is probably the riskiest thing I have done in a couple of years. A couple of the busses were pretty full, but we’re still not being hammered with Omicron cases yet so it was probably fine.
In other news, while I still don’t have windows or word from the contractor, I did do a bit of cleanup where an idiotic bit of wiring was going to make replacing the laundry room window harder:
What you see there is stupid, but not my fault. At some point in the distant past there were landscape lights in the backyard. By the time we moved in they were dead, and the line carrying power to them was cut and laying in the yard where it came out of the ground. That’s dumb, but it gets worse.
Eventually I figured out there was a switch by the back door that energized that cut line (!) so I removed the switch and capped the wires so no power could get out there even accidentally. But the breaker that drives that circuit is in the laundry room, which is pretty far from the switch. I tracked the wire down and found it goes to the electrical box shown in the bottom of the photos above, next to the dryer vent.
Turns out it ran up inside that conduit and off to the switch. Since the circuit is dead, I could get rid of it and I did so.
In the first photo I had already opened up the metal box at the top to confirm the power was off. Only then did I stop to think about documenting what I was doing. The second photo shows the same area after I was done and the wire and conduit were removed. It looks a lot nicer, but it really doesn’t matter much. This is on a side of the house almost no one ever sees. Still, the window replacement will be easier, and eventually I might have an easier time redoing the electrical completely so there is no box there at all. One thing at a time.
I also spent time this week working on getting my studio in better shape. This is for two reasons: either (a) it will be used to store some windows when they arrive or (b) I will be working on some art in there once a month when my friend and fellow artist Heather comes over to do the same. More space was needed either way, and better organization. Part of that was accomplished by getting rid of Rain Man, which you saw last week. This week I am finishing the assembly of the work table so I can move it against a different wall and have it use less floor space:
You might recall I bought two used chests of drawers that came from a hotel that was being remodelled. Here I am screwing them together into one solid base. Shortly thereafter I attached the top permanently as well. You can see it leaning against the wall in the background.
Soon I will put the drawers back in, load them full of stuff from the shelves, and then move the shelves to a slightly better location. In the end there will be more space to work and/or store windows.
There was also a bit of progress on the debris catchers for the upper roof, to help avoid the flooding issue in the future, but I didn’t manage to take any photos of that. I’ll keep after those, but we have a lot of rain in the forecast so it might be a while before they get installed.
And that’s a wrap for this week. Keep safe out there!