Merry ChristmasI wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. If you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope this season is a joyous one for you anyway.
The picture below is of Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia.
Faux Finish #1Here is my first attempt at a faux finish. I did this in a class on Friday. The instructor was a local designer that has done a lot of work in the area. She is very accomplished. She calls this a "Weathered Faux Finish". Her sample could almost pass as leather, but mine could not the way I executed it. My sample had visible streaks, a look that I ended up being quite happy with. It suggests a wood grain to me. I loaded my brush too heavily in Step 3. She recommends Benjamin Moore paint, a very good high quality paint.
Step 1 - apply the base coat, "Classic Carmel" #1118. Don't scrimp. Two coats is alwasy best. This is a flat finish.
Step 2 - apply first faux coat, "Gold Rush" #2166-10 mixed 1 part paint to two parts glaze. Use criss-cross strokes. Do not load the brush. Dab off (soften) with sea sponge using slight twisting motion.
Step 3 - apply second faux coat, "Red Oxide" # 2088-10 mixed 1 part paint to two parts glaze. Use short vertical strokes instead of criss-cross. Soften with the sponge as before.
Step 4 - apply third faux coat, "Mcloscky's Burnt Sienna Glaze" premix. Apply as in step two.
Step 5 (optional) - apply final faux coat. "Mcloscky's Burnt Umber" premix. Apply as in step two.
Tips: Keep spray bottle handy for sponge and glaze mixes. Give the glaze mixture two squirts with the spray bottle to add a touch of moisture to the mix, use the spray bottle to keep it at this consistency. Always measure your paint-glaze mixtures. In case you need to mix more, your colors will be consistent. Buy only a quart of glaze. Keep your sea sponge moist and clean.
On our recent visit to Taliesin West, our tour guide told us some very interesting stories. On of my favorites is the story behind the Red Squares on Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
Red Square at Taliesin WestFLW would install a red ceramic (red was his favorite color) tile to the left of each home's entrance. The tile signified that the house and all of it's contents were FLW designed. Typically FLW would also design all the pieces that went into the house, from the furniture right down to the place mats. The tile also signified that FLW had arranged the placement of each piece in the finished house. This house is an FLW original in ever sense. He would return periodically to visit his creations. If he discovered on a return visit that you had moved, even a single piece of furnature, he would have the red tile removed.
Was FLW obsessive compulsive? My money is on yes. At the very least however, he was a man that understood his greatness, and wished to keep his work pure. I should have told Emma to move the Origami Chair slightly on our way out.
It seems he had some capacity, if only a very small amount, to compromise. When he was giving the owner of the Falling Water house a final walk-thru, the owner pointed out that he had specifically requested no red in the interior design - and there was red everywhere. FLW reportedly said, "you'll get used to it". When the owner got to the office, he pointed out to FLW that he had specifically requested a large desk, the desk that FLW had given him was only 2 ft. by 3 ft. When FLW replied that he would "get used to it", the owner said "I think that this desk is too small for me to write a check to the Architect on". FLW had wings installed on his desk, and then he was paid.
He took the $8,000 commission from Falling Water and bought the land that Taliesin sits on today.
According to Rebecca Blood, I am either a Luddite or I am Technically Advanced. From her book "The Weblog Handbook", "Unless the weblogger is technically advanced enough to implement open-source software like PHP or write his own weblog management system, this approach [hand coding, i.e., the Luddite approach] may entail a certain loss of efficiency since archives must be updated and posted manually.
Although I don't think of myself as technically advanced, I suppose by this definition, I am. I think I'll head down to Starbucks and treat myself to a Grande Drip.
What I'm trying to build with Lowbrow is in many ways a bit more than a weblog tool. But in making that statement, Rebecca makes a very good point. Managment of archived content, permalinking, should really be a part of my design. I don't have a solution for that at the moment.
Everything in Lowbrow is predicated on folders, and content existing within a folder. Links to content are (will be) a combination of path and filename, there is no database behind Lowbrow other than the native file system, what ever that may be. "Moving" content from one folder to another will break the "permalink" if that is based on path and filename. It might be reasonable to look in an "archive" folder of some standard name if the file is not discovered in the specified path, but that seems clumsy. Why should it be necessary limit archived content to specific named folders. (It shouldn't.)
At the moment, it feels like solving this problem should come later, I've still got a lot of development to do to make the tool usable for someone other than myself. If you have thoughts or suggestions please send them to badkins at badkins dot net.
It just occurred to me (stream of consciousness here) that if a file is not found, perhaps all that is needed is a friendly statement that the author may have archived that particular target, and encourage the viewer to use the site search to find the desired entry. Of course, now I need to implement site searching - which seems like it would be a good idea anyway.
We are in Arizona for Thanksgiving. Emma and I dropped Laurie off at the Mesa Plant, didn't see any Apaches in the air. We had about four hours to kill before we needed to pick Laurie up, so we drove up to the Usary Mountain Recreation Area for a little day hike. I found a nice little one mile loop trail and we set out on an easy walk. We strolled along, it was about 11:00 am and the weather was beautiful, sunny and seventy degrees. About half way thru the hike we came to a children's play area and Emma wanted to stop and check out the swings. So we did. After playing there for awhile, and burying some Pirate treasure for our next visit, we set out again. A short distance down the trail Emma looked up and said "I want to go up there". Well, the one mile loop trail actually circumnavigated a fair sized outcropping of rock, the peak about 200 feet above where we were. It looked a bit more challenging so we turned around and headed back via the high trail.
It was more challenging, but not at all dangerous, so we pressed on to the top, and sure enough, when we made the peak the view was great. We sat for a few minutes and admired a few landmarks, and just enjoyed the different perspective. Being a five-year-old, naturally, she said, "we're really high"! We started back down, and as all hikers know, going down is harder than going up. Sure enough it was a little slippery in places, so I held her hand here and there, and we made it down just fine. But (yes, there is always a but) just after I had the thought that we made it down without falling, and only ten yards before the end of the trail, Emma slipped and skinned her shin. She was very cool. She wanted to cry but she didn't. She did say shortly after we started on again that "this wasn't my idea", I smiled to myself at that, it was very cute. I reminded her that, in fact, it had been her idea. She didn't say anything, I could tell she was processing. We got back to the car and cleaned off her shin. To my amazement, she said that she didn't think she would need a band-aid. Wow, talk about your proud father. It's a red letter day when your five year old daughter says "I don't think I'll need a band-aid". Trust me.
We were hungry, so we went to Al's Hot Dogs on the corner of Power and Brown for some Chicago style dogs. They were pretty darn good. The only Chicago style dogs I've had have been at Matt's in Seattle, some day I'll have to try one in Chicago, in fact I think I'll put that on my list of 100 things. Commpared to Matt's, these were a touch better (sorry Matt) These had a bit more of everything, a bit more relish, pickle, hot pepper, and tomatoe than Matt serves. Is it true then that the farther east you go, the more they pile on the condiments?
We picked up Laurie and headed for Scottsdale via Fountain Hills. I was finally going to take a tour of Taliesin West, and Laurie and Emma were coming with me. The tour was fabulous, and our guide taught me several things I didn't know about FLW. He was a man truly possessed. He didn't sell his plans to you, he lent them to you. After your home or building was completed, he demanded his drawings back. In fact you had to agree in advance. FLW is the only artist in history that retained personal possession of all of his works. To this day, all 22,000 of his drawings are owned by the FLW Foundation. Truly amazing when you think about it. The best part of the tour was when we went into one of the living quarters in the compound, this one for entertaining, and I watched as Emma walked over to an Origami Chair and sat down. I sat down behind her and leaned over and whispered to her, "you know what"? "You're sitting in one of Frank Lloyd Wright's Origami Chairs"! She appeard to be duly impressed, I sure was. On the way out of the room I quickly sat down in it also. Now I'm as cool as Emma.
It's really true that you can learn all you need to know just by watching Kindergartners. Every day when my daughter comes home from school we look to see what color day she's had. Purple is good. Green not so good. Other colors more or less bad. At the end of the day she colors a piece of paper and it comes home in her backpack.
When we asked her more about this, she informed us that at the end of the day, if they haven't had a purple day, they have to go up by the teacher's chair and tell everyone what they are going to do to have a purple day tomorrow. That's terriffic. She's learning to own her attitude, her responses, and her future. Bravo.
And perhaps if we did that as well before we left work each day...
I've realized it's a state of mind. As a guiding principle, I've going to try and adopt the following taught by Sarah Ban Breathnach:
The beauty of this is two-fold. First it will help me get into the right frame of mind to organize, but more importantly, I'll be modeling the behavior I'd //really// like my 5-year old to learn.
I'm going to print this out and put it on her "word wall". There are some great words here for her to learn, but also, we can memorize this together. I'll ask her to remind me when she sees me breaking one of these principles, then after awhile, I'll be able to start reminding her.
Here's a great resource, and Marilyn Paul has written a terrific book on organizing too.
I was showing my wife the prototype for Lowbrow and trying to explain to her the utility of being able to browse your hard drive for text files and display them in your browser. I tried to explain the many purposes for a tool like this, but I knew I was in trouble when her eyes started to glaze over, about 30 seconds in to my demo. After about another 30 seconds, she cut me off in mid-sentence and looked at me and said: "You are the King of useless shit", and walked away.
I'm surviving. But If you agree with my wife, please keep it to yourself, Okay?
Today Angus was laid to rest. I'm having a little trouble with my reaction. I am really shaken by this event. My wife was out of town on business, so I made the trip to the Vet alone. She would have been there if she could have, but it was time, and she wasn't going to be home for another four days. The Vet spent about 45 minutes examining Angus and discussing his condition. She determined that he probably had only days left, even with the anti-biotics and special feeding that we had him on, so we made the decision to ease his passage, since he was probably in some pain anyway. Holding him as he passed away was an order of magnitude more emotional for me than I anticipated. Poor guy was ready to go, I have no doubt about that, but I certainly was not ready to see him go.
Author Brad Adkins Content served by Lowbrow Version 0.01 Pre-release
