Siege - Days 43 and 44

The last couple days have been enlivened (en-gloomed?) by sickness in the house.  Not (we hope, we're pretty sure) the virus, but the recurrence of something from over a year ago.  Good timing, huh?

So the last couple days and nights - long nights - have been in Gatorade Land.  You've visited there, you know.  Tell you what, tele-medicine is a bit weird.  It seemed to work okay.  Well, no, the teleconference had those inevitable teleconference problems, in this case picture but no sound, so that doctor and patient ended up seeing each other via internet, but talking via phone.  But the essentials were fine.  Crude but effective.

Set design book progress has halted temporarily... simply because I can't concentrate.  Instead I've been hand sewing more face masks from old scenic fabric scraps.  I've found a pleated pattern that seems easier when sewing by hand.  

And I've starting painting the front door.  

Thank goodness for projects!

Siege - Days 40, 41, and 42

It suddenly occurs to me that we have been doing this for longer than Noah's cruise.

Slightly less damp is all.

It's been a weekend of heads-down projects: beach house drawings, stripping paint off of the front door in order to repaint it, and adding paint to the new flower pot that was the best thing I could find.  (In olden days of 6 weeks ago - I'd have visited 3-4 other stores to find exactly what I wanted.  Now I say, "Close enough.")  Today was planting in that newly painted pot.  I'm also sewing several fabric face masks... this time with a classy pineapple print fabric.

It's cool.

public domain image

Siege - Days 38 and 39

Yesterday was interesting.

We staged a bit of a jail break here... at least as far as our favorite pizza place for take-out.  (Well and my car got its battery charged, because it's been a week and a half since last used.)  

So we got take-out and then very daringly ate it while still hot in the nearby park.  All the while expecting Authority to tell us to go home.  It was delicious.  And then we went home.  We were careful not to throw the box away there but to take it home, not to get our pizza joint in trouble.  

Wild excitement!  The pizza crew were so glad to see us - recognized us, which I didn't expect - and gave us a free salad and the tip to ask for the "locals discount" in future.

Grimaldi's.  Best pizza.  Coal fired and worth the drive from here.  (Besides, the car needed charging.)  Our next restaurant take-out, like our very first, will have to be from our Momo's Italian Kitchen on Forest Lane.  So far, for obvious reasons, we've been strictly limiting trips out of the house, so when we do go, we make sure it's to places we love.

public domain image

The other excitement-ish yesterday was a tele-vid interview for WaterTower Theater.  Not quite sure what they're going to do with it.  It continues to amaze me how long it takes to set up lighting, clean up the background etc. etc. to get ready for these things and still the app jambs up in some way (choice of sound / no picture or picture / no sound this time).   

Today so far is new-routine: breakfast, newspaper, greet the plants (the mint shivers when it sees me now - I've taken up mint julips), email, blog, write on the book  (rewriting "Chapter 7 - Documentation" because who knew computer drafting would remain a thing?).  Later, lunch.  (Meals have become big 'round here.) More writing.  Dinner  (See?)  A walk.  Read.  Bed.

Not a bad new routine.  

Siege - Days 36 and 37

It's come to this - not only do I only know what day of the week this is because yesterday was Garbage Day, but I can't find my calendar.  When did I even look at it last?

(Walking in the neighborhood across the street I saw a whole row of recliner / movie chairs set out on the curb.  Either to be hauled away as trash... or to comfortably watch The Trash Truck Show, the biggest excitement in our stuck-at-home lives right now.)

Projects in progress are progressing... 

I finally escaped from rewriting Chapters 5 and 6 of the second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium (I'd been trapped there for days, adding material, but mostly trying to impose order and logic.)  Chapter 7 is not fighting back as hard... so far.

The imaginary beach house is spawning imaginary additions and gardens.  Feel very satisfied to have located the imaginary rain collection tank (for imaginary rain) so neatly.  Next, I will imagine imaginary decorative and Rube Goldbergian downspouts, gargoyles, gutters, strainers, water-dumpers, and completely unnecessary spinny, twirly, wind-socky, weathervane-y, rain-gage-y accoutrements  for it.  I want a crazy water contraption / sculpture!  With a side of sea food, please.

Basically, a marine life version of these crazy birds at Houston's The Orange Show.

The Orange Show - photos by G. DeVries

Aren't they great?

No imaginary castles to map at the moment, but a friend's very real garden needs mapping.  That'll be fun!  (Almost as much fun as those wild birds.)

Siege - Day 35

Oh man! I wish I had the imagination/patience/washable floor to do this!

Remember "Pass the Salt" on Day 25?  HERE

Well, here's "Pass the Pepper: Social Distancing is Nothing to Sneeze At."

Madness! Crazy imagination!  These guys are the best kinda nuts!

Siege - Days 31, 32, 33, and 34

Boy

This thing just keeps on going, doesn't it?  It's the Energizer Bunny of Home Alone(ish) Pandemics.

So what's been going on here at Studio Seclusion?  

Continuing work on the second edition of my Alice set design book.  My momentum is increasing...  Several new illustrations, including this one, for a section talking about theater soft goods like this cut-drop:

(I like that I managed to work into that sketch both Tenniel's famous image of Alice pulling back a curtain AND his rose-painting card.  (Five of Spades was always literally painting scenery - roses - so he was always a scenic painter.)

Currently hacking at a study model of a beach house.  Still doing worksheets of various Social Security filing strategies.  Still cooking, eating, watching tomatoes grow.  Watching - Friday Night - Kitchen Dog Theater's online production of 62 coronavirus 1-minute plays.  Very interesting.  The plays varied, some sad or angry, many worried, some funny.  Most striking to me were the plays about the late mother's recipe... what soup did it use?  Never thought someone saying "Cream of Celery Soup" would tear me up.  The one played by two roaches (played with glee by two of KD's best actors) was very funny.  Most memorable line of the night was, "I never thought the apocalypse would be so domesticated."

Me neither.

We did have one out-of-house experience, a trip to officially observe a fire station under construction (gloves, masks, hard hats) and a trip to the fancy grocery store (where the hard hat might have been a comfort - shopping is so weird now).  At the construction site there were huge bilingual signs commanding you to have your temperature taken and to wear masks etc. - plus a clever hand-washing station - but only a few of the sparse Saturday work crew seemed to be bothering with all that.  At the fancy grocery store the metered line for entry was a block long, masks were mandatory, and grocery staff saw to it that rules were followed.  We bought a bag of mussels, so dinner was those mussels with a yellow curry sauce and good bread and possibly the perfect wine.  Very tasty.

On the reading front, I just got a copy through the mail of Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write.  Just started dipping into them, but so far it's both thoughtful and funny.  I got to design a couple of her plays:  In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) and Stage Kiss.  Both turned out well, but Vibrator is the one I'm most happy with.

In the Other Room (or the Vibrator Play) at Kitchen Dog Theater

Here's a close up of the inglenook area:

In the Other Room... I sure do like details...

I like detail.  On the how-to side, those bricks were all carved by hand (by me) with a flexible snap-blade knife into sheets of stiff, fine-grained foam (not that expanded polystyrene beer cooler stuff). 

On into the week ahead... 

Siege - Day 30

Mostly recovered from my funk of yesterday.

It is no coincidence that today I am wearing my happiest yellow socks!

(Okay, okay, but yellow socks can't hurt.  Sometimes any mood enhancing measures that can be used should be used, whether that's pizza for dinner, favorite shirts, or upbeat music. 29 days of this weird hermit-life is a loooong time.)  Thank goodness the sun is out today.

Public domain image, modified... he's probably wearing yellow socks too

  Another hour of professional continuing education - this time on Building Envelopes.  Plus several productive hours updating my set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium.

I guess Today's Lesson Is:  Keep Going...

I should embroider it on a sampler.

Siege - Days 28 and 29

In a funny mood here...

Pretty much sick of my own cooking, but can't muster the energy to go out for or send out for someone else's... it'll get cold and unappealing... it doesn't even sound appealing...and don't know what I want anyway...

Yet the last couple days of quarantine have been just fine: fighting an epic and successful battle against aphids to save my little eggplants (soapy water rules!); coming up with a possible elevation for an imaginary beach house (and after I swore never to use a rain screen too); surviving on Minecraft in a hostile world; surviving yet another struggle with the growing bamboo (if it quit raining it would quit growing); and battling successfully with the Social Security website until they were forced to let me sign in!!!

If that's not success, what is?

Still I feel... 

....How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't!  O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed...

Public domain weed

Tomorrow I'll see the the beauty in it again - just this minute I just see the weeds.

I would love to just go out to dinner, you know?

Siege - Days 26 and 27 Eastertide

Happy Easter!

It's a perfect Easter morning here: overnight showers have stopped and blue sky peeks through fluffy white clouds, sunbeams make the new leaves glow impossibly green and sparkling wet.  The strange little flowers that have been returning from bulbs planted thirty years ago are blooming - they look a little alien - but the red-orange begonia looks homely and familiar.  The tomato plants are getting scary-tall!

It's Spring.  It's Easter.

Enjoyed a Quarantine-Easter brunch with dyed eggs (we were out of red food coloring so used beet juice for a pretty pink) plus just a few chocolate eggs.

What else has been happening?

Well, Kitchen Dog Theater put out a call for home videos for a project... letting our fans and theater family know what we've been doing in our unexpected off time.  Here at the DeVries Architecture, Theater, Design, and Video Studio we - eventually - pulled off our 30 seconds of cinematography.  (It would have been easier to have sketched my video by hand... as a series of storyboards maybe?  Seriously!)  But it's in the can.  A virtual can.

I don't think I want to become a vlogger.  But maybe Kitchen Dog's video will be as much fun as Tom Hanks' SNL quarantine video collage...

More satisfying than video...  Books!

Just read a very good, useful, even wise book on creative work: Keep Going by Austin Kleon.  I'd read a good review so ordered it (through Half Price Books, based here in Dallas), but I'll admit to feeling a little dubious when the mini-sized book dropped out of its mailing envelope.  Sorry, but its size and zippy graphics just screamed those gimmicky gift books you find by the checkout stand...  Fooled me!  Because this is full of good stuff: advice, observations, quotes, and (while recommending old books) this book is very of this moment .  Honestly, exactly the book I needed to find at this time.

I won't try to boil-down this already slim book for you - just read it - but tidbits?  One favorite quote:

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Annie Dillard

And the unexpected image of Salvador Dali taking naps... but with a teaspoon in his hand so that the spoon's clattering fall would wake him in the midst of a dream-like state, the better to paint his dream-like surrealist paintings.

Siege- Day 25

Well, first-thing-in-the-morning of Day 25.

I was reading the news (awful) and stumbled across this year's Rube Goldberg competition.  It's had to be canceled due to coronavirus, but instead there's a call for families to design and then video their contraptions for getting a bar of soap into someone's hand.  (Wash your hands people!)

ArtCritique has a good article on it HERE.

Even better, they highlight a hilarious, wonderful, insanely complicated and clever kitchen-themed contraption for passing the salt at table, while maintaining safe social distance...

Fantastic!

Siege - Day 23 and 24

Well, today I made some real progress on my theater set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium, Second Edition.  (Doesn't that sound official?)  Today I was explaining the rigging and soft goods of proscenium theaters... a subject I knew even less about back when I first wrote Alice.  I know more now, but still remarkably few of my shows have been for proscenium theaters!  

Today I also repainted the goat weather vane I used for Kitchen Dog Theater's Alabaster.  (The photo background is a little impromptu, just some foamcore board held behind it.)

Goat on a hill weather vane from the play Alabaster 

Siege - Days 21 and 22

Tomatoes!

A tiny handfull of tiny tiny green cherry tomatoes.

What else?  

The last two days have been mostly doing architecture.  First an online continuing credit course - Texas requires 12 credits a year to maintain an architect's license.  So, after only one solid hour, I'm now just a little bit of an expert on Rust!

Public domain image

Second?  I've been designing a few floor plans for a basement renovation.  Mostly just to establish that everything the client desires can, indeed, fit in, and also to start establishing a budget for construction.  Except for adding a window and a bathroom - which requires experts and permits - the rest of the work could probably be home handiman-ed I think.

Designing floor plans is fun.  And frustrating.  I swear, the architects of the Great Pyramid or the Louvre* must - like every other architect ever! - have gotten to that sticking point where you need just one more inch to make this thing work...

Public domain images mashed

Theater work is in abeyance just at present.  But a kind theater friend made and mailed me a cloth coronavirus mask with Minecraft themed fabric.  Friends are great!





*Architects Hemiunu and Pierre Lescot through I. M. Pei respectively (I. M. Pei designed the Louvre's glass pyramid).

Siege - Days 19 and 20

Weekends do still, somehow, feel more relaxed than work-weeks do.

Yesterday me and my housemate baked cookies together.  I'm not sure we've ever done that before, though cookies have certainly been baked and eaten around here in the past.  It was nice.  It added a sort of Christmasy vibe to the days around Palm Sunday.  And the chocolate chip cookies and powdered sugar dusted molasses cookies are tasty.

(And what a Lent this has been!  Someone quipped that they "hadn't planned to give up quite this much for Lent."  I feel that too.)

Leaves are breaking out on all the trees now, even our newly planted one!  Birds are noisy.

In a minute here I'm going to start an hour of architectural continuing education - online, of course.  Just to prepare for a future that might still be on... sometime.  Who knows?  It can't always be Lent.  Sometime it will be Easter.  Just as it can't always be winter and never Christmas.*

Public domain image from Pxfuel HERE

It seems right now like a very long slow walk to normal again.  A poem a friend found reminds me that we must make patient progress...

Grandma once gave me a tip:

During difficult times, you move forward in small steps.
Do what you have to do, but little by bit.
Don't think about the future, not even what might happen tomorrow. Wash the dishes.
Take off the dust.
Write a letter.
Make some soup.
Do you see?
You are moving forward step by step.
Take a step and stop.
Get some rest.
Compliment yourself.
Take another step.
Then another one.
You won't notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.
And time will come when you can think about the future without crying. Good morning

Elena Mikhalkova, "The Room of Ancient Keys"

(I'm not sure if this is a fair-use, well, use here... If the poet objects I will, of course!, remove this.  Meanwhile, thank you Elena Mikhalkova for this present comfort.)

*  And it's a good time to reread hopeful classics.  Narnia.  Lord of the Rings.  The Little Princess or Little Women.

Siege - Day # 18 Friday!

Why is Friday still a thrill when there's no practical difference between week and weekend any more?  

Curious.

Since Dallas has just been put into lockdown until May 20th... I'll have lots of Fridays to consider this question.

Yeesh.

Today my officemate had to go into his, like, actual not home office for a few hours.  Before I let him back in I almost made him sand himself down in the Virus Mitigation Chamber that was once our front hall.  Much decontaminating ensued.

(Now we'll wait two weeks to see if it worked 😁)

Also on the coronavirus front, I finished my first two cloth face masks.  By hand, because my sewing machine is broken.  We've only recently started wearing masks when going out, but the couple of paper masks I had left over from hospital visits months ago aren't supposed to be reusable - and aren't cleanable.  

There IS a theater connection to all this... I'm will be making masks from scraps of fabrics used on sets.  Ha!  (Especially looking forward to the future pineapple print mask.)  But the first two masks recycle an old shirt whose embroidery I like - mine's the fancy embroidered mask (why not?) the other wearer's is just plain.  The elastic cord comes from lanyards that once held credentials for an architectural convention. 

I'm using (more or less) a Japanese pattern from off the internet HERE.  There's also a no-sew, pleated version HERE.

Siege - Day 17

I find myself actually visiting Facebook.  

To see what the theater folks I know are doing...  And mostly they're trying to cheer each other up and cheer each other on.  Mind you, this cheering involves a strange mix of spring flower photos, nostalgic recipes, bad jokes, and for some reason photos of very scary people-in-rabbit-costumes.  

My favorite bad joke so far?

Voice of the spouse in the other room, "Honey?  Do you feel a burning, stabbing sensation, like someone's sticking a pin into a voodoo doll of you?"

Other spouse, "Um... no?"

"How about now?"

Theater people are strange and funny.

Public domain image - Is it me, or is Peter's eye just... wrong?

Siege - Days 15 & 16 Or, April Fools!

I don't think there will be many April Fools jokes today.

But a friend did send me David Hockney's spring art work, shared through the BBC, he said, to cheer us all up - HERE

It IS reassuring somehow to see nature just go on about her business.  Like swans in Venice, daffodils or cherry blossom are cheering.  Here it's the happy appearance of a whole 'possum family in my back yard and a pair of rabbits in the front... because the world is quieter now and safer... for rabbits.

So go out and enjoy the spring sunshine!

Almond Blossom by Vicent Van Gogh

Whatever happens in the short run, or to us each personally, know that the world really will keep on turning and Nature will do her thing.