Shooting pickups in my mom’s backyard, a photo by Tymcode on Flickr.

Elisa’s son needed a somewhat less remote location to shot pickups for his capstone movie. Even though my mom had a date in the house that night, she was gracious enough to let Keli’i and the actors and crew take over her backyard for the evening. Her property had all the right ingredients; space, plenty of electrical outlets outside, some trees to match the existing footage passably, plus a bathroom. Even a place to do the ADR.

New Workshop

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

After trying for my entire adulthood, I finally have a workshop. There’s more to it than this, but the fact that my tools and supplies are visible, organized and accessible at the same time is unprecedented.

The white cabinet is actually an Ikea kitchen cabinet — I bought it to use up a bunch of Ikea drawers left over from the remodel (don’t ask — seriously, don’t) and then I made a countertop for it. The drawers are nice and deep and hold my tools that don’t have cases.

I wish I had a whole bunch more of those steel Wall Control pegboards — my girlfriend got them for me for Christmas and they are absolutely badass.

Offscreen to the left is another tech bench with organizer drawers and a top shelf with a neat row of tools in cases. I still have a bit of work to do, some more bins to consolidate and some duplicate tools to get rid of. It was deeply embarrassing how many things I had multiples of; a whole bin of picture-hanging hardware and hollow-wall anchors, five stapleguns (!) eight measuring tapes (damn things just disappear all the time) four dustpans, five hammers, two jigsaws, three circular saws, enough plant hooks to turn the library into a forest, several pounds of drywall screws, enough pegboard accessories for about another whole garage (I’ve been gearing up for this for over a decade). It was just ridiculous.

But it’s here and now I can finish so many of the projects that remain around the house. First project will be the knobs in the kitchen at last, then I will make two windowsills so that I can call one room in the house completely done (the master bathroom), Next will be the kitchen, then its time to focus on the library I think.

At Least It Didn’t Come On My Birthday

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

This was my ten year service trophy from Adobe. Since I got sacked last month, they had to send it to my house. That was fun to open.

You’d think they might have arranged to have something more appropriate on the little cards that came in an envelope with it.

What do I do with this? Keep it until it doesn’t stab me? Just get rid of it? What do people do with these after they don’t work at a company any more (for ANY reason)?

Office Shelves

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

The accursed office shelves are finally up. Not having these has created chaos for three years. I still have to finish one plank in the top left corner that needs special treament due to the roof slant, but the hard part is finished.

They’re seriously overbuilt because I plan to load them with the various paper stocks we’ve accumulated, which currently occupy several very heavy boxes. And you can’t just build a couple shelves heavy duty, you kind of have to build them all that way.

I tried to build them cheaply myself; it didn’t work. I built them myself but it was not cheap. I ended up with like 26 brackets at $7 a piece (the cheaper ones looked wimpy), and like $130 in melamine shelf planks. Plus I replaced the weedy little bracket screws with big ol’ ⅜” x 2½” lag screws and washers to go right into the studs (I am now emotionally attached to the Makita cordless impact driver I bought recently) and I bought tie plates for the joins up on the tops to keep them even and distribute the weight a bit. All this bought me a whopping 30 square feet of strong shelf space. I think these shelves could hold me.

(The fun part is knowing that all this is probably making somebody out there feel stirrings in naughty places.)

I had a cool little system. The impact drill for the heavy work of screwing in the big lags and drilling pilot holes all over the place and the little Bosch cordless screwdriver for everything else. I used a laser level on a tripod to get everything even, which worked GREAT, and a little mini level to cross-check and straighten the bracket. I could rapidly go from bracket to bracket alternating between the three hand tools. Sweet.

And finally, after three years, I was able to install the in-wall speaker you see there. I’ve been waiting for the shelves to go in so I knew where I could install that; the ugly wire has been hanging out of a tiny lump in the wall like a persisent umbilicus for this whole time, mocking me. Now I can go around putting the rest of them in (which will clear space in my wiring closet) and reach a new kind of nerdvana. I’ll have music in my room, the kitchen, this office and even my bathroom.

I confess I had somehow forgotten how astonishingly pervasive drywall dust is, especially when you use a Rotozip, and the room got kind of trashed. Oops.

We’re giving up on trying to get all this in an 8×11" studio. She’s going to get rid of a bunch of this, but even so, the fact is that she is a multiple-discipline, mixed media artists and jeweler. In addition, the whole family needs studio space. So everything she’s keeping goes in our library, and the outbuilding will be used for the Hannah Grey inventory.

Hopefully we’ll finally have all the art supplies we use in one room (that is not the kitchen, which is constantly defending itself from being taken over by — currently — beading and jewelrymaking supplies), and the garage space will be used for garage-type stuff instead of the library.

Having disgorged all of this onto the lawn we are now going to try to make it work for the HG inventory — a dicey proposition but kind of our last option.

Caltrain Sketch 02/04/09

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

For this one I copied some Vaseline ad (along these lines) from a magazine using one of my Christmas pencils, a Daler Rowney "Sanguine Sketching" pencil. Thought it would be interesting with skin tones. (It was completed on a very bumpy Baby Bullet between San Jose and San Francisco.)

Can anyone tell me what this ruddy pencil is ordinarily used for?

This vote is really close and protectmarriage.com is throwing around a lot of silly lies about what will happen if it doesn’t pass, esp with regard to education.  It’s all untrue — California law prohibits any health or family teachings from being taught against a parent’s will.  Similarly, the stuff about churches losing their tax-exempt status is impossible by specific wording in the law.  There’s more, but the bottom line is that all Prop 8 does is write discrimination against one group of people into the state constitution.

No matter what you think about what the word “marriage” means — it does not belong In the California constitution.  Trying to say “civil unions can be just the same” is not only legally untrue, it’s also an example of the separate-but equal limbo that blacks endured until it was determined that it’s just another kind of discrimination that doesn’t improve anyone’s life.

If this law passes and you voted for it, you will have helped consign people who love each other to a lifetime of struggle for equality and isolated unhappiness.  I don’t understand why you would want to do that to people you don’t know and who have no effect on your life.

And what if Grey turns out to want to marry another man?  He’ll be the one who has to fight for every benefit that marriage already enjoys.  He’ll the the one with the second-class union, permanently stuck at the card table during the Thanksgiving meal of marital bliss.  He’ll be the one wondering why his grandma did not want him to have a happy stable life with someone he loves.

I don’t understand why you would risk doing that to people you love just because you think marriage should only mean one thing.

Please vote no.  Vote no because doing so won’t change your life in any way at all, and it can change the lives of others unimaginably.  Vote no for Grey — just in case. Vote no for me, because it’s really important to me.

Ray of Light

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

This illuminated shrine is dedicated to Steve Irwin. Goofball delivery and ironic death aside, he was a great conservationist and used his popularity and his money well.

The shrine was created in Jane Wynn‘s Illuminated Shrine class at Art Unraveled 2008. It features a fetal ray, a stingray spine, a chipboard gear and alcohol inks that came from Hannah Grey. The frame was a gaudy thing from Ross or somewhere like that and the shadow box is made from an Altoid-style mint tin (treated with alcohol inks and a blowtorch), and the rice lights were procured from the wedding aisle of a hobby store– these were all provided to the class by the instructor for the project.

I ended up using the back of the frame since the rhinestone-studded front didn’t suit the imagery. (Besides, the back took alcohol inks wonderfully.) The stage (the chipboard gear) is fastened to a little bezel cut from a copper pipe and soldered directly to the mint tin as a standoff. I believe I might have had to add a couple washers in there to clear the tips of the tiny lights poking through from the back.

Art Night

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

For the health of my marriage, we are instituting a mandatory weekly art night, wherein we ignore all the stuff we SHOULD be doing and just work on art stuff.

Here’s a mask I built from paper clay that will be used for a piece I’m working on. It’s heaped on there pretty good, it’ll be drying for days. At the last minute I added a light dusting of dry paper clay for texture, but when the heat gun hit it it blasted the stuff all over the kitchen. Our cat Torque Smackey was supervising nearby and subsequently had to have a lengthy tongue bath.

I also experimented with my new coiling gizmo and whatever wire I had laying around. The coils with the super-fine transformer wire feel really neat.

(I also put a few finishing touches on the piece I made in Jane Wynn’s class at Art Unraveled, but it’s a real challenge to shoot and it will take me a while to post that.)

This is my first time with paper clay. I have to say that it’s probably a lot cheaper to use the crap they blew into our walls as insulation. Seems like it was the same stuff. If I start doing a lot of this I might try it.