Making the cut

Monday morning, I drove down to Harbor Freght tools and picked up a micro circular saw. The choppers and cutters that other people have with a fixed blade on a lever arm cost about $25, so I got a great deal with my $30 power tool. The sawblade is 2 inches in diameter, which makes it perfect for cutting the scale basswood I'm using, and it comes with a positionable jig for getting angled cuts. The walls of my bridge are clad with a 3"x3" post spaced 3" o.c. As my bridge is over 60' long, this is a lot of posts. I was able to measure and mark one peice of basswood, tape it to 8 others, and run it through the saw, saving me about 80% of time and energy. Another good thing about it is the fact that the lenths, since they're being cut at the same time, are exactly the same length. When my studio instructor saw it, he was so impressed, he went out and bought one.

Anyway, fun new tool for the week.

The bridge is coming along ok. I'm done with the truss structure and I've started laying the deck and side pieces. The project is due monday, so its going to be a crunch weekend. For the first time, we're going to present boards instead of pinning up drawings. This means the restrictions and requiremets have changed to whatever we feel is necessary to showcase the project, a move which also brings us closer to what is actually done in the field.

For some reason, my library supervisor thought I was mad at him the other day. He kept asking me if I was mad at him, and asked me if I'd tell him if I was mad at him. No clue where that came from. Anyway, occationally the library bought pizzas for the day crew, and the night people would get stuck with leftovers, which is great anyway, but he felt compelled to let us get us pizza too to show that he was not being partial just to the day shift workers. He gave us $20 to split between Molly and I.

We got a regular pizza, a 2 liter bottle of pepsi, cheese bread, and cinnamon dessert sticks. It was amazing. The pay is nothing to shout about, but you have to love the benefits this job provides.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, mostly in the latin american writers. I read the Cuban Alejo Carpentier's novel The Harp and the Hand, a fictional account from the view of Columbus "discovering" America. (This intruiging hypothesis claimed that Columbus had heard of the new world through the vikings trips there, and then made up the short route to Asia in order to solicit funding. The book also made Columbus a lover of the queen Isabella.) I also started to read some short stories of George Luis Borges (Argentinian), very bizzare but intricately layered surreal stories. I also re-read Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries a few weeks ago.

The weather here has been warm and sunny. It's past sunset here, and its still in the high 70's. It's going to be a infernal summer, but right now it's absolutely beautiful. I've broken out my sandals.