The Close of another chapter

I’m officially done with my first semester of grad school, and in fact I’m already a few days into my vacation.  I’ll be bopping all over the east coast in the next few weeks, and I didn’t bring my laptop for security reasons, but I’ll probably still be writing more often than when I’m in school.  Especially since I have a lot to ponder after this first semester.

Since I last wrote, I finished the paper, went to the tournament, scrapped the design I was working on for an entire redesign of the cube house, completed the final design including model and three sheets of ink on mylar drawings, completed my sketchbook, had my exit interview, and started these intercession travels.  There’s a lovely picture of Herman and Ruth at the tournament that you should check out as a teaser to further stuff…for now I’m going to go enjoy pizza and conversation with the fam, who just walked in the door – Liz and Ricky and B.  Lovely!

Study Break

Taking a quick break from writing a paper to say hello to myself, remember that I am a real person, not just an automaton that goes from task to task, doing whatever she is told.

Actually, I’m quite enjoying writing the paper – the one about the Glasgow School of Art – as I did a sizable amount of research and got a feeling of actually being there. Strange, though, that I know how different it must be to visit than to look at photos and imagine. It’s a good exercise, though, because it’s fairly analogous to the design process. Yes, I make models, but a fair bit of what I do is sit and look at what I’ve drawn and imagine the reality it implies. Each drawing brings me a step closer to what that reality might be like.

Drawings become like notes on the imagined places in my head (in fact we have a book called Visual Notes which I recommend, and want to get more thoroughly familiar with, but which addresses more the notation of actual real places). Yesterday, I did just go outside and sit with my eyes closed, imagining that I was approaching the site of my Cube House (the third part of the compound we’ve been designing). I felt kind of dorky, but it worked. I’d become familiar enough with my rough plans and sections and my sketch model that I could start imagining the places that they enclosed, complete with patterns of light and material choices. Pretty cool!

The drawing class we had was very helpful, and perfectly timed to make that envisioning exercise totally worth the slight embarrassment I felt. They told us how to trace over pictures to get perspective shots of an imagined building. It’s sort of like a collage, you just take the lines you want and then add the rest from your brain or from another underlay of a different photo. I made some very convincing drawings of my buildng, and called it a day.

This whole thing was in part inspired by Mackintosh’s moves on the facade of the Glasgow School of Art, and by that building in general. I do hope that I always have a history class to feed me inspiration! I’m planning to really start a scrapbook sometime soon…

Speaking of inspiration, I bought plane tickets for a trip home to Florida, then up to visit Grandparents in Massachusetts and friends in Vermont. The South Main gang will be on the verge of moving out of their house by the time I head their way, so I should be in for another lovely, melancholy saying good-bye party. The trip as a whole has been inspiring me to keep plugging away – I’m so close to being done with my first semester! I’ll finally have time to change addresses and close my old bank account!

Also, I’m heading to Kleinman, a tournament in Portland, this weekend, which is my main inspiration for trying to finish my paper tonight. We all know how much work one gets done at frisbee tournaments.

Also, I just added a link to Practical Action, the British group that works to get appropriate technologies out there, in use. Check out the gravity ropeway on their front page. All my designs should be so elegant.

So, I was thinking that I’m not feeling challenged enough by the school, but then, I was thinking harder, because that’s what Rachels do best, and I realized that I need to meet the challenges they are giving me head-on, and then I can see how I feel from there. Basically, that means no more whining about anything, ever, and the resoluteness to stand up for what I believe to be true and right, coupled with the intelligence to know when I haven’t got a clue and the flexibility to hear and enact valuable changes to my opinion.

Doesn’t that sound like a set of traits that everyone would be better off displaying?

And Away We Go

Tuesday morning, the big morning, was full of last minute packing, and – big sigh of relief – everything fits in the car! In fact it fits really well, and I probably could have brought a few things I left behind, but they are behind now. I had to run to the Co-op for a scone because I couldn’t think straight and had no breakfast food in the house. But, all of my stuff went in, then I picked up Jake, whose is really traveling lightly, and we ran a few errands and were off!

Thank goodness I have a traveling companion – I started heading down Rt. 30, when in fact I needed to go down Rt. 9, and Jake gently reminded me than we couldn’t get where we were going if we continued the way I was pointed. Crisis averted!

We had a good first leg – over on Rt. 9, down on Rt. 7, all through beautiful New England countryside and picturesque towns. The purple mountains provided a lovely backdrop, and I got the feeling that we are going to have a great trip. We arrived at the Grandparents’ house at about 1:45 and took a turn around the grounds. It’s idyllic here, with the gardens and songbirds and this comfortable old house.

Seeing Grandpa and Grandma is such a treat, and it’s reassuring to know how well they are doing. Grandpa kept saying how discouraged he has been by his hearing loss and memory loss, and I hope that it doesn’t turn into depression. In fact, having not seen them since Thanksgiving, I expected much worse, but I think they are doing very well. Grandpa is again leading a discussion group, this summer on Shakespeare. Grandma was out at a Garden Club luncheon when we arrived, but came in with all sorts of news. They are ushering for Shakespeare and Company this summer, and it sounds like their schedule is no less busy than ever before. Now I know where I get the ambition to fill up my life with worthy and exciting things.

At dinner, conversation turned to the political, and comparatively, the things I fill my life up with don’t seem quite as worthy. We talked about the 1963 March on Washington where Grandpa and my dad saw Dr. King, and also about some of the other actions that both Grandma and Grandpa took during that time to encourage civil rights. I believe my causes just as worthy, but I just got the distinct awareness of the apathy of the current populace. I do think that solutions must be local, but that might mean that we never do something as meaningful and effective as that March, and I think that would be a tragedy. That March changed things, albeit with a lot of local action to back it up, but without that March and that speech we would not be where we are today. So, charged again for action, we’ll see what develops once I arrive on the left coast.

I’m sitting here Thursday morning typing this at the kitchen table in Alford. Grandpa and Jake have gone into town for bagels and Grandma is sleeping in. We’re planning to head out at about 11:00 today, all the way to Oberlin to arrive there this evening. It will be our first big chunk, but for now I’m just going to enjoy this calm and sunny morning. I’ll take the book I picked up here out into the back garden until the guys reappear, and then we’ll see where things go from there.