the cardboard cutouts

Today we rode our bikes to school, took about 15 minutes. Not bad, timewise, but there's a serious quantity of hill around here, which makes me really think about prioritizing a route that doesn't involve so many hills vs traffic. Worked for a few hours this morning. I'm slowly getting the hang of Rhino, although I'm still using a trial copy with 23 saves to go. It really is like autocad crossed with SketchUp. Much more powerful than sketchup, but also lacking the simplicity and intuitiveness of sketchup.

Anyway, we're on to our first project- an observatory. Very open ended, very free and open to whatever we want to do with it. We were asked to form groups of 2-3 people and by the end of next week have a 3D model and a basswood model at quarter scale. I was approached by one of the Chinese students to work together, and then we got another Chinese student who missed yesterday so now our group "the Cardboard Cutouts," has three people.

I'm currently missing the second day of studio, sitting at home for a few inopportune hours, waiting for the delivery of our large futon. When we bought it online, we didn't think the processing and delivery time would be that bad, and at that point we didnt know what we would be doing for the pre-semester workshop. The delivery company called me up and basically let me know that they only deliver during business hours, M-F, and only starting today for availability. With a project DUE next week, our cars unable to fit the futon, we decided to suck it up and stay at home for the "delivery window" of four hours (of course, which ended up coinciding nearly perfectly with the studio desk crit time). So we're alternating. I'm taking the first shift and if the futon doesnt show up in the next half an hour, it will be Saori's turn to wait for it. It's very annoying. 

Yesterday we had our shop orientation, which gave me a very good impression for the school and faculty. We were split into small groups of a few students and taken around to each major piece of machinery to be shown how to safely operate it and to actually do some test cuts with wood to make sure we really were comfortable with it. The school provides free screws, hardware, and tons of pieces of scrap lumber, MDF, plywood, you name it, just lying around. They also gave us our own pair of safety glasses, ear plugs, and a small tape measure, which was a nice touch.