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a line of sufficient fineness
Friday, March 8 2013
Johnny set off early this morning as expected. He'd said he would take a self-guided tour of the greenhouse, and when I went down there this morning, I saw his small footprints in the snow indicating that he had indeed been down there (though I don't think he used the brownhouse; last night he'd expressed interest in using the laboratory urinal but had chickened out at the last second).
Johnny had been able to make himself some sort of breakfast and a french press of coffee, though shortly after he left, I heard the smoke detectors tweet the way they do whenever the power goes out.
Gretchen and I have a clause in our coffee drinking rules that stipulates that we are allowed to drink coffee on holidays and also on mornings when the power is out. So while Gretchen was walking the dogs, I ground the coffee beans with a mortar and pestle. Heating the water was easy, since all I needed to do to light the gas stove was use a cigarette lighter. Unfortunately, I hadn't ground the coffee thoroughly enough and it ended up being weak. So when the power suddenly came back on, we decided to make a proper french press of coffee using machine-ground beans (though this probably did violate the terms of our coffee rules).
Late this afternoon I ran some errands in Uptown kingston, mostly to restock the laboratory liquor cabinet, but also to get some odds and ends. I needed some sort of high temperature adhesive with which to reattach the woodstove's door's fibreglass gasket. Unfortunately, this is not an item that is available Uptown; I found two somewhat-imperfect glues, one at Herzog's hardware and the other across the street at the auto parts place. There are glues designed specifically for this that are available online, but I am loathe to pay $14 shipping for a $7 item (which seems to be the going rate for all the web-based woodstove part retailers).
One other thing I bought while in town was a set of 24 colored pencils at Walgreens. The only color I cared about was the white one (absent from the 12-pencil set). I needed it to trace projected images on a black surface, and I thought chalk wouldn't be able to produce a line of sufficient fineness.
Later this evening I took a photo containing compelling elements and used a VGA projector to project it onto a board I'd prepared with black gesso. For some reason I couldn't get Photoshop to refresh dead parts of its image once I dragged it from the netbook's screen to the projector's. So I was forced to use the Windows Photo Viewer instead, which (for this one application) was actually more useful than Photoshop. The tracings looked so good that I was tempted to call the picture finished without any further work. (I really like the look of white line drawings on black backgrounds.)
This evening Gretchen and I watched the documentary Looking for Sugarman about an obscure American folk-rock musician named Rodriguez who somehow rises to Elvis-league fame among the white liberals of South Africa. There are a lot of potential spoilers for this film, and Gretchen and I had been exposed to none of them. And despite our solid knowledge of American rock music history, neither of us had ever heard of Rodriguez or any of his music (it sounds like Bob Dylan with a better voice singing and playing guitar over lavish early-1970s orchestrated arrangements in the style of Glen Campbell's version of "Wichita Lineman"). Looking for Sugarman is a series of brilliantly-executed reveals. For a time, we're even kept from seeing Rodriguez's face, but then gradually we're let in on a mind-blowingly crazy story that wouldn't be plausible were it written as fiction.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130308 feedback
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