More about that one-thing-leads-to-another style of studio renovation

Ha! Since the Good Prince hasn't been keeping up with my blog, I think I'll just let the renovation be a surprise! Besides, like everything else I do, it will take so long and the changes will be so gradual, he may not even notice. And if he does notice, well, I'll just say that it gives both rooms better air circulation (which is true). He always goes for that.

Will it be my dream studio? Well, my dream studio is that ultra modern addition that we will add on the top of the house in my next life. So this will just be the knock-down-the-wall studio; it will definitely be better than what I've got now and it will be terrific, if not quite dreamy.

In the honesty-has-its-own-rewards department

Remember that I decided belatedly last night that I needed more shelves? So I went back to the store first thing in the morning and got another bundle. The cashier rang it up and it was $34.99.

I said, "I think it's supposed to be $44.99."

The cashier checked and, "nope, it's $34.99."

"Really? I paid $44.99 last night."

"Oh, it went on sale this morning."

"Hmmm, well, that's a bummer, I just bought it last night."

"Take your receipt to customer service, you'll probably get your $10 back."

And as luck would have it, I did have the receipt, and they did give me my $10 back!

In the it-always-takes-longer-than-you-think-department

But of course I'm still not finished cleaning and reorganizing everything. The shelves are in. After much struggle. Those pre-drilled holes are convenient, but not always the most accurately aligned. The room is looking much nicer already.

And I found a bundle of old greeting cards from the 90's, some gocco printed, a few woodblock printed, and some color-copied. IPRC is having their auction and they said they'd be happy to take them off my hands; they might be able to auction off the whole lot and make a few dollars; better than them sitting in my closet and taking up space.

Fried brains, anyone?

I AM getting old. I was totally cooked after the 4 hour gocco class today. And it wasn't even full; I had just 4 people. It's true that I did not sleep very well last night, and the students arrived early so I didn't get a chance to have my coffee, but boy, I was definitely not up to my usual teaching standards and I was exhausted afterwards.

Just couldn't bring myself to gocco more after that, so didn't work on my senior's book. Instead, I decided to organize the studio! Didn't I just do that, you say? Well, yes, that was the other part. I actually occupy two small bedrooms, one of them was the guest-bedroom until I set up the upstairs spare room as the guest-bedroom earlier this year. So the downstairs ex-guest-bedroom then became the full time gocco room, but it still has the old bed in the middle of it. I'm storing all kinds of things on the bed. I'd like to get rid of the bed so that I can actually use the room to teach a painting class that I'm trying to set up, but first, I have to find somewhere else to store all the stuff that's on the bed.

So at 8pm tonight, I decided to build some shelves for the closet. Of course I got half way through and decided that I need more shelves, and now the store is closed. I guess I'll have to finish tomorrow.

But hah! After that, all the stuff on the bed and on the floor will be stowed away in the closet. Then I'll get rid of the bed. And after much thinking about the pros and cons, I think I am going to open up the wall between the 2 rooms.

While it's nice to have the one room to gocco so I can keep the smells out of the other room, both rooms just feel really cramped. And also, both rooms would get more natural light if I open up the wall. And if I'm going to teach painting in that room, I'll have to deal with the gocco smell somehow, like installing a vent and a fan.

So, shelves in the closet leads to getting rid of the bed, which leads to opening up the wall, which I'm sure will lead to ripping up the carpet, and god knows what else!

MiT book, purple foxglove

My Rock Star senior loves this shade of magenta purple, so with the foxgloves blooming now, I had to do one with the purple foxglove:



And this was from yesterday. I tried stitching the envelope pages to the accordion spine, and it was too thick. So I tried cutting a pattern with the accordion, thinking that if there was less paper there, it might lie flat. This was a simple pattern that I tried...no luck.



In the Bug Brains section

Not to be outdone by the Bird Brains, some bug laid a clutch of eggs on our metal front door. Like the babies are going to get a lot to eat when they hatch out there.



The Bird Brains

I didn't see the birds much yesterday, so I thought maybe they had moved on. But nope, this morning, they were coming back to the nest with soft and fuzzy stuff. I guess that's the last stage of the nest building.

The Dead Mouse

Now this is firmly in the One Thing Leads to Another Dept — I had this idea of reorganizing my gocco room by using a couple of old circuit board storage cubes I had scrounged back at IMS (now Credence, soon to be Credence+LTX). Manufacturing was getting rid of these, and I was first on the scene to scavenge. As I was checking them out, the VP walked by and asked me what I was going to do with them. "They'd make fine end tables," I said. He got this funny look on his face.

"You just can't live like a college student anymore now, can you?" I said.

He got an even funnier look on his face and said, "well, I probably can, but my wife won't let me." Ah, the old Blame the Wife trick.

But I digress. Those circuit board storage cubes. They are tall enough that I can use them to store matted prints, and with a board on top, I can put my SP-275 gocco flasher on it. However, they are currently being used to store bubble wrap, butcher paper, etc., and I started to clean them out, and I found these huge clear plastic bags!

The last time I went to the UPS store, I noticed that they accepted used packing peanuts in clear plastic bags. OK, there I was, in the basement, with some huge clear plastic bags and boxes and boxes of packing peanuts just a few feet away.

I started bagging the peanuts. And I bagged peanuts. And I bagged peanuts. And I started to breakdown the now empty cartons. Then I noticed a gray lump of something on the floor, underneath one of the cartons. And it had a tail.

Well, it must've died a long time ago, cause it's all bones and fur now (and lots of poop, it was lying on top of a big pile of poop).

To make a long story not quite as long, the basement is now cleaner, but the gocco room did not get very far. I still have the mouse, of course. It would make a fine companion to the other mouse; I just have to clean it, somehow.

The Random Movie

You Don't Mess with the Zohan. What can I say, I thought it was hilarious. It's the first Adam Sandler movie I've ever seen. None of the others had seemed all that appealing, but for some reason, this one appealed.

Leopard and Photoshop don't get along

A few weeks back, I decided to make a big effort to spend less time on the computer, and also to make sure to put the computer to sleep mode when I'm not using it. Computer use is probably one of our remaining 'biggies' in terms of our use of resources. We already bus or bike a lot, produce relatively little garbage (more about that later), reuse, recycle, compost, ripped up the grass, and planted a gazillion trees. Most of these things I've done all my life, or at least all of my adult life, so it's not a passing phase. Although I have to say that most of these things also don't seem to take a lot of trying either, but maybe that's just because I'm used to them.

When I started looking around to see what else we can do to reduce further, computer use was the first candidate. We run several computers at home; we both use them a lot; and they stay on all the time. Certainly for me, there's no professional reason why I need to be on the computer a lot, it's just a leftover habit from before. When I have a free minute or two, I check my mail, and then I get distracted by other things, and before you know it, I've been on the computer for half an hour doing nothing.

So I've been trying to limit my computer use to just twice a day (unless I'm doing real work that requires computer use) — once in the morning to check mail and to read news/blogs, and to respond to anything that requires immediate attention; and once in the evening to finish doing what I didn't finish in the morning, and write my diary. And in between, I put my computer to sleep and turn off the monitor.

Well, this has worked out well enough EXCEPT that the automatic backup no longer backs up my computer, because that runs in the middle of the night when the computer is asleep and can't be backed up. This lead the Good Prince to set up the backups to happen another way, which required upgrading my OS to leopard. And of course you already know the rest of this story.

Photoshop puts it quite delicately though. It says something like "I will now exit," instead of crash-n-burn and taking the rest of the computer with it.

This of course means I will have to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 for $200. I don't know how much electricity we'll be saving when my new less-computer-use routine, but I bet it's not $200 worth!

Anyhow, this was the long way of saying that I tried to work on the Portland Open Studios web site today, and discovered that I couldn't because I could no longer run Photoshop. I did finish trimming all the paper for senior #2's book though. (Oh yeah, and on the days that I'm doing real computer work, or at least trying, I also allow myself some fun time on the computer too.)

MiT, 2nd senior, day 9

After what seems like very long hiatus (2 weeks), my Rock Star senior and I got back to printing today. During these last two weeks, she made a bunch of watercolor flowers and wrote a few more verses to go with them. We printed one flower image with a verse, and a 2nd one just the plain flower, which I really thought was very elegant all by itself, without any words. I convinced her to just let it be without words, and I'm glad she went along. Here's the entry from our last meet.

On the open studios front—finished the score sheet database and I'm ready for tomorrow's final selection process.

In what is yet more of the one thing leads to another department—during which I cleaned up the upstairs spare bedroom, got rid of a lot of the junk accumulated over the years, got rid of the old sofa bed, and bought a more comfortable guest bed—I bought a dresser for the newly inaugurated guest bedroom today.

It's the tall thing on the left. The room is not very big so I've been looking for a high boy style dresser, which seems to be quite popular at the moment. I've been checking the thrift shops and 2nd hand furniture stores, and everywhere the same story, "oh, I sold one just like that yesterday!" Anyhow, saw this one on craigslist, and by the time I emailed, he had already had several responses, and it was first come first serve. I guess I got there first. It was pretty much the exact size I was looking for, perhaps just a tad on the taller side (the lamp now sits a bit high). But I'm not going to complain. It's in decent shape, although some dog obviously had a fun time with the bottom drawer pull!

Serendipitously, I think it goes quite well with the hand woven wool blanket the BiL & SiL brought for us last week from Ireland, which you see on the sofa.



And even more serendipitously, the blanket also goes well with the yardage that I had bought to make pillows for the sofa. The wall hanging is a Taiwanese aboriginal bark painting that my mother had for years and gave to me a few years back. I think they all go together pretty well, without having that 'matched' look.

MiT, 2nd senior, day 2

My 2nd senior ROCKS!

When I got there today, she had already made b&w copies of several different things she was thinking about gocco'ing. She was also thinking about the words she wanted to layer on top. Then the two of us spent the rest of the afternoon gocco'ing 2 prints. *I* was tired when we finished, and she seemed a little worn out. She was cheerful and interested, and very inviting and open.

Now, I did start the day pretty tired — I stayed up until 2am last night/this morning, working on the screen for the guest bedroom, which was why there was no entry from last night. I'm almost finished, just need to hem. It's starting to look like, hmm...how shall I put it...option 1) a Bollywood bridal chamber, or option 2) a belly dancer exploded in here (as the Good Prince likes to say about my home decorating style). I practice the One Thing Leads to Another style of sewing: something doesn't quite work, so you do something else to hide it, and pretty soon, it's embellishments everywhere.

And you know things are getting serious when a project you meant to do almost a quarter of a century ago is now getting to the top of the stack. (Yes, it's a stack and not a queue.)

When I left graduate school and started working, I furnished my apartment for $300 — a used bed, dining room set, sofa sleeper, chair, and a smattering of leftover college dorm room shelves. (It's true I did buy a brand new mattress for another $xxx.)

Here's the chair:



Bought it from a woman about to move into a retirement home; it, and its companion chair, were part of her wedding trousseau from 1940. I figured I'd use it for a couple of years and reupholster it. So that was 1984...

It's in a much sadder shape than you can possibly see in this photo. The piping has mostly worn off, exposing the ropes underneath. I think various rats and ferrets have done their deeds on there too. I've mostly used it as a studio 'comfy' chair in recent years.

Anyhow, all this redecorating had me thinking about this chair again and I dropped by The Whole 9 Yards yesterday. Picked out a few samples, and now I'm in a quandary — my most favorite fabric is just so nice that it would be a shame to use it for a 'studio comfy chair', unless I want to go with the I'm Worth It! route. It also happens to be the most expensive, by far. But the 2nd most favorite doesn't even come close to how much I like the first favorite, although it's nice enough, and it's fair amount cheaper.

I almost want to put off the decision, but then it might be another 25 years before I get here again.

And advancing along in the Cat Box Relocation Program: I moved the new box into its intended position, filled it with fresh litter, and put some of her 'stuff' from her existing box. Brought her to the box a bit after I fed her and, nope, no interest whatsoever. She did give it a good sniff and looked kinda puzzled.

Cleanliness is an infectious disease...

And it has infected my car!

I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed that my car, which has been in my possession for about 9 years now, got cleaned for the first time today. I don't mean just the removal of used kleenex or old parking stickers, spent coffee cups and google maps. I mean it got a vacuum and a windex.

In what was yet another one thing leads to another category — I mentioned yesterday that all kinds of things were staged by the door waiting to go to the Goodwill. Some of those were pretty large items, a chair, a suitcase, and they were really in the way. I went to load them in the car this afternoon, and figured, oh heck, I'm cleaning the house, I might as well clean the car.

When we bought the Carr, it came with 2 sets of floor mats (that's 8 of them). When I bought the Saturn 9 years ago, it did not come with mats, you had to buy them separately. I was outraged. So I figured, hey, the Subaru got totaled, it was about to get towed away, it wasn't going to need them mats anymore. So all this time, the Saturn had been using Subaru floor mats from 1980.

And now it has 2008 Subaru floor mats! It practically looks like a new car!

So yes, it's been days since I've done any work in the studio, but the house is looking preeetty good! Spent the afternoon and evening trying to make a screen from this old sari I have (I always knew I'd find a use for it!). Only problem is that it is stretched out of shape a bit and does not want to hang straight, but I think it will be fine for what it's for.

Cat Box Relocation Program has begun. The new box has a swing door, which is different from the current box, so we've just set it up with no litter in it, and have been trying to get the kitty to go in and out. Not sure about the psychology of playing with the box, she's probably thinking, "OMG, this is the best toy I've ever had, I'm never going to poop in it!"

More de-junk-ing

My frenzy of cleaning up the place has now infected the downstairs. It's starting to look a bit more roomy down here, what with all the things we haven't used (except to put other junk on) now staged by the front door, waiting for my 3 trip to the Goodwill in about 5 days. Even the Good Prince is becoming motivated to clean up His Corner (which is really more than a corner).

The kitty is a bit spooked by all this, especially since 'her room' is now devoid of all the boxes, bags of stuff, whatnots, that she's undoubtedly quite used to, and they probably provided excellent hiding places. Instead, the room looks so open and respectable. Two more things to shop for — shades for the window and some kind of a privacy screen for the entry. This room was originally NOT chosen as the guest bedroom because it does not offer much privacy. If the guest closes the door, then there's poor air circulation; if they don't close the door, well, there they are! So it will probably end up looking like a Japanese restaurant, with those fabric panels in the doorway.

Redecorating, did you say?

Having cleaned up the spare bedroom so that it's a usable guest bedroom, I'm now shopping for a new sofa bed. The one we have now is a traditional sofa bed, which is pretty uncomfortable and really isn't good for more than a day or two. So in between running some errands for Portland Open Studios, I stopped at the the futon place and checked out the options.

And of course, one thing always leads to another, and I started thinking about ripping up the carpet and putting in a wood floor, something we've talked about doing since day 1 (almost 17 years ago now). But sounds like my grand plans have been thwarted once again, this time due to the bad economy...

In yet another one thing leads to another category, I'll have to figure out how to deal with moving the kitty box. She's had her box in the spare room for 6 years now. But we can hardly make the guests sleep with the cat box now, can we?