Talkin' Shoppa with Mr Sloppa: Beaver 08
With the definition of art as "the arrangement of things in space" being the best I've ever heard, I stick to it. It's amazing how much ground that covers. In these lunar blogs I illustrate it best I can.
How do YOU say love?
November 18, 2008 Four days into the waning and finally a breather to document progress, or living, or whatever you want to call it.
I don't know if I ever mentioned it here, but this past Flower Moon I saw a 60s-era 20-incher with those thin 3-speed style tires at a rummage sale down the street. $25. It looked too cool to pass up, and my kid was gonnabe ready for a new bike soon, so I took her over there, bought it, and walked it back home.
Nice lookin' bike. Anyhow...took me a while to get the job done. I like to think I can get my head around everything about how my motorcycle works (a motorcycle is an amazing arrangement of things in a space), but it takes a longer attention span than I have to put all the pieces in place. A bike like this, on the other hand...get out a set of wrenches and couple screw drivers, and you can take the thing completely apart and put it all back together without too much trouble. In the case of this heap, I had to scrub out the bearings pretty good with a citrus degreaser and repack 'em. I asked the guy at the hardware store what to use and he recommended some pretty serious shit. I took his word for it, but after packing the bearings for the cranks and putting 'em back on, it was clear that something wasn't right. Sure enough it was some heavy-duty tractor grease or whatever designed for something a little more serious. So I had to go get a lighter-duty tube (a few blocks away, $2.15). Now it's sweet.
Sanded the whole thing down with 60-grit paper. Not entirely down to bare metal, but enough to clean it up. Tried spraying it on the back porch...this is funny. I was trying to spray the primer coat in a slightly more-than-gentle breeze on the back porch, which has a 10-foot tin-siding fence about 16 feet away from it, with a bird feeder hanging in front of a trellis I put up 3 years ago in hopes of having trumpet vines climb it every summer...never worked that way. Like I was saying, I was spraying this thing, getting frustrated by how little paint was finding its way to the bike, and then the next thing I know the nozzle starts failing, and now I'm getting really pissed off. In a fit of rage I declared, "Fuck it!" and whipped the God damned thing into the fence, where it sort of exploded, leaving a battleship spatter all over the fence and a bird feeder that looks somehow like The Deathstar. I'm leaving it up there to feed to the starlings. Took my kid back to the hardware store, returned all the spray paint we had picked out earlier, and bought a nice new selection of Rust-O-Leum, to be applied with a brush, in the basement. Spray paint sucks.
I told her I was going to paint the word "bike" on the downtube, and she goes, "No, Dad." So I gave her the drawing we made earlier to determine the color scheme, and she writes on there "LOVE" with a heart. What am I supposed to say? This is a pretty proud papa moment, but no need to go on about that...
Finished it up about a few weeks ago. You gotta love the slightly wobbly nature of the old technology. Not to mention the coaster brake. Her feet don't touch the ground when she sits on the seat, but she has ridden it a few times, once to school. And, I've been told, pulled off a rolling dismount without dumping it, so that's pretty cool.
So what's the point here?
If you can believe it, I got to thinking and thinking got me wondering and I wondered, "What if...' So what if I invited other people who have taken on similar do-it-yourself projects to post their own blogs about this kind of stuff? What if I arranged other people's examples of arrangements for the inspiration for other people to do more of the ssame? Fantastico! The thing is, if it was cool, and people started getting into it, it would probably take a lot of time to manage, and when it gets like that, you sort of need to think about the value of it versus your time...so maybe you could sell adverts on it for hardware and kits and junk... Too much to think about. But if you think about it and do it, let me know. I'd like to know about it. Come on. Who are we kidding here? It's probably already done.
Someboody google it already.
And now for something completely different...
December 3, 2008, 5:30 a.m. Having just passed a nasty flu bug or some kind of exorcism on Sunday night, wherein I puked and crapped every last thing out of my guts, I've been feeling a little weak lately, and struggling to get up an appetite for anything. Since Monday, it's been plain yogurt, oatmeal, water, a little bit of juice, and a few bites of scrambled eggs last night. This morning, up at 4 a.m. because I went to bed at 8:30 with the kids, I decided to make a saucepan of brown rice for the next couple of meals. Isn't it amazing that the ratio is exactly 1 cup rice to 1 3/4 cup water for exactly 45 minutes? It works perfectly every time. So much of what we cook is like that. The oatmeal, for example. It was the steel cut variety. 1 cup oats to 4 cups water for 30 minutes. I mean, really...isn't that a little too convenient? Seems like it could just as easily be 1 cup rice to 1 7/8 cups water for 38 minutes or something like that...but it's not. I'm amazed.
HUNTER MOON 2008 What's up and why do you care?
HARVEST MOON 2008 Hopping across Wisconsin
STURGEON MOON 2008 Summer #40: Check!
STRAWBERRY MOON 2008 The Floody Mona Lisa
FLOWER MOON 2008 Organically Speaking
PINK MOON 2008 Oh, the iron(y).
WORM MOON 2008 Reflecting on The Sphere(s)
SNOW MOON 2008 Have I failed?
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