Boy oh boy am I ever an efficient little son of a gun these days, if I do say so myself.
In addition to wrestling my stack project to the ground this week and basically putting 99% of the design issues to rest in the process, I also delivered two framed photos to the Art Gallery yesterday (a day early), was notified that I had successfully negotiated the gauntlet down at City Hall to get a building permit for my duplex conversion project, and to finish things off I also built the first scale models of my "Pyramids of Egypt" set pieces that will be featured at Brunswick's Glynn Academy football games this season with their marching band.
I'm a little disappointed with one stipulation that the City of Brunswick threw at me on my construction project regarding the side setbacks on the four foot rear extension of the existing building, but I guess bureaucrats by their very nature being bureaucrats that you have to expect at least one inane government intrusion into every private endeavor. Otherwise the status wouldn't be "quo" any longer....you know what I mean?
Any way, this "Pyramid Scheme" has been an interesting mental exercise just to get to the model making phase of the project, and the next step will actually involve building yet another improved model using PVC pipe and some pieces of one yard samples of spandex fabric that I bought on the Internet in order to test the functionality of the process--what I call the "Do-ability Test"--before we spend $500 of hard earned Band Parent's money on bolts of fabric and pallets of PVC pipe.
The spandex idea actually was my most recent revelation, the idea of a "stretch fabric" solving several aesthetic and structural issues at the same time.
Dang I'm a genius.
The spandex takes on a modified form of something called a "Catenary Curve" between it's rigid support points, but if you stretch it tight enough it looks almost flat. I'm also using some techniques (battens, etc) employed in making the sails for a ship to produce a flexible, lightweight portable structure that can cover ten yards of football field, extend to a height of twenty feet, and not fall over and get me dragged into a courtroom by irate parents because of the trauma caused to their little darlin's in the process.
Perhaps the hardest part of this project is the requirement that the set pieces be able to travel with the band to out of town football games and marching contests.
That specification is added on top of the needs for being weatherproof, wind resistant, and capable of being installed and handled by gangly mobs of fourteen to eighteen year-old kids wielding trumpets and tubas and possibly those wearing skimpy sequined majorette costumes.
As has become a usual occurrence recently, my blogging has suffered at the hands of commercial enterprise. OK, maybe a combination of commercial and philanthropic enterprise, but reduced writing has resulted none the less.
I'm just having a hard time mustering the energy to bitch about everything that needs to be bitched about in the world these days.
For instance, the ENTIRE time I've been sitting here writing this posting FOX News has been freaking out about a purported bomb plot being thwarted near Piccadilly Circus in London this morning.
This on the heels of Tony Blair basically being pushed from the office of Prime Minister as a result of his ongoing support for the war on
Go figure...
So now I have to get back to putting the final details on some smoke stack drawings, go over to Brunswick to pay for and pick up my Building Permit, stop by the cigar store to buy cigars and possibly wander back over to the swimming pool to contemplate my charmed existence.
I hope you have an equally satisfying day.
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