Bascombe Mania

How I Spent My Autumn--Travelogue: Part II Craters of the Moon

2011-10-08T01:56:00.000-06:00

A couple of months ago, my brother Bruce called me to ask if I wanted to present to a group of high school speech and drama teachers at a conference in Sun Valley. I told him I would, and today was the day. The conference was held in Ketchum, Idaho and we stayed at the lodge in Sun Valley. Chimene went with me and we had a grand time.

We drove over yesterday, Thursday, October 6th and for a goodly portion of the drive we were in blizzard conditions. Blizzard conditions in October! That was alarming because on Saturday we are supposed to have the 2nd Annual, Rexburg, Idaho Zombie Apocalypse. The weather report says it will be sunny and 55 degrees at the time of our march, so I think it will be okay.

To get to Sun Valley from Rexburg you have to pass through the town of Arco, Idaho and the INL which was recently called the INEEL, and before that it was called the INEL. Us locals just call it "The Site". Arco is famous for being the first city in the free world to receive it's electricity from nuclear power. Another interesting feature of this area is the Navy base in the middle of the Idaho desert. According to a friend who is a security guard at the site, there have been as many as three nuclear subs buried in the desert for training purposes. My guess is that they are sub simulators, but for all intents and purposes they are submarines buried in the Idaho desert. I find that kind of cool.

The town of Arco has the tower of the decommisioned USS Hawkbill in a small city park to commemorate the fact that there is a navy base there.

Tower of the USS Hawkbill, SSN 666

The road to Sun Valley passes through the edge of Craters of the Moon National Monument. I have spent very little time in the monument and I have always regretted that I haven't explored there more often. I have committed to do more of it. Nick, my son-in-law has inspired me to do so. He has hiked all over the monument and I wish to see it as well.

When we drove through yesterday, though, as I said it was blizzarding. I took a few photos on the way over. Even with the snow, it was breathtaking and awe inspiring.

Snow covered cinder at Craters of the Moon

Snow beginning to collect on the National Monument

Kipuka

A kipuka is a portion of an older lava flow that is surrounded by a younger lava flow. The flow that once destroyed the steppe vegetation now preserves it. Scientists from all over the world study the pristine kipukas that have not been altered by grazing domestic livestock or invasive plant species. These are left as God created them.

We arrived at Sun Valley around 5 PM and checked into our room. The lodge is a swanky place that has hosted just about every celebrity from the 1920's to the present. Sun Valley was founded by W. Averell Harriman, the son of the great railroad baron, E H Harriman. He was looking for a destination for the railroad and found an ideal location at Sun Valley. Today there is much to do there, hiking, skiing, ice skating year round, shopping, swimming etc...

They have a magnificent swimming pool that is circular and cone shaped. The staff keeps it heated to 95 degrees during the summer and 105 during late fall and winter. Guess where I spent some quality time...

Brass door handles at entrance to the lodge

The pool

I spent about two hours in the pool on Thursday night. The weather alternated between raining on me and snowing on me in the pool. It was amazing. I didn't mind a bit. It was neat to lay on my back in the water during the snowstorm and watch the snow fall. I got out, and headed for the sauna. That wasn't my favorite thing to do, and I don't know if I could get used to it or not. After my swim and sauna, I slept pretty well.

This morning, I arose at about 7:30 and headed to the pool again. This time it was a little warmer outside and no precipitation. I spent about an hour in the pool this time, mostly alone. What a peaceful place. Of course the best part was that I didn't have to pay for it!

There is a pond in front of the lodge that is host to a pair of swans. They were swimming around this morning so I was able to get a few shots of them.

Swan at the lodge

After Chimene and I checked out we ate breakfast and explored the town of Ketchum til it was time for me to present. There was an art gallery there that we spent some quality time in and there was a watercolor of a raven that I really liked and someday wish to have hanging up in my home.

My presentation to the drama teachers was titled "Theatre Props--Imagination on a Shoestring". I showed how you can take something that cost almost nothing and turn it into a first class prop. I showed several photographs and brought a bunch of props that I had made on the cheap. I brought things like the hacked Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Mephistopholes cane from the opera Faust, a couple of the Oedipus Metopes, several Holy Grails and a couple of my modified books. When I showed the props to them, I talked them through the process and showed them how none of it cost very much money at all. I hope they found it informative. I know I had a great time doing it.

Then it was time to depart. On the way home, it wasn't storming so bad and we stopped at Craters of the Moon and I hiked around the flow in the drizzle for a few minutes. I feel truly blessed to live in this part of the country where we have so much beauty. I wish to come back in the spring and hike the whole park. Chimene didn't get out with me, but she was gracious enough to let me walk around and view the park. I really enjoyed it even though it was raining.

Terraces cut into the hillside by the Civil Conservation Corps

Monoliths in the a-a flow at Craters of the Moon

Alternating pahoehoe and a-a flows

Amazing pahoehoe flow

Framents of an earlier crater that were broken and deposited to this spot by the younger flow

As a geology groupie, I couldn't get enough of Craters of the Moon. I will be back. I love this part of the world and can't wait to explore it more fully.

Fire Prevention Day in Technical Theatre Class

2011-09-30T13:08:00.000-06:00

When I took Technical Theatre in college, they didn't talk about safety. When I was in grad school, I was the proctor for the Technical Theatre Lab and they didn't talk about safety there either. Over the years I have been hurt and injured many times while practicing my craft. I decided a long time ago that if I ever became the Technical Theatre teacher, I would talk about safety, and that is what I do.

I spend about three weeks at the beginning of the semester each year talking about different aspects of safety, such as personal safety, chemical safety, public safety and fire safety. The last few years I have had the campus fire chief come and talk to my class for a couple of days. On the first day, he talks about fire, it's causes and prevention and how to determine whether or not to fight it. On the second day, he brings his training equipment to the shop and we go out and learn in a practical way about fighting a fire with a fire extinguisher. It's alot of fun and the students really enjoy it.

He teaches us the acronym, PASS which stands for, Pull the pin, Aim the nozzle at the base of the flames, Squeeze the handle, Sweep side to side. He also teaches us that you should never fight a fire unless you have cleared the area of people, called 911 or pulled the fire alarm or both, determined if the fire was still able to be fought with an extinguisher, and then never to fight a fire unless you have a clear means of egress to your back.

On fire extinguisher day, the fire chief lights the fire and the students each take a turn attempting to put it out. They usually have the extinguisher right in front of the fire, the fire starts and the student calmly walks up to the extinguisher, pulls the pin and puts the fire out. I decided that I needed to show them how it really was, so I always put the extinguisher away from the fire because they are never convenient to the fire in real life, then I attempt to disperse the crowd before I attempt to put out the fire. One of my students filmed me today.

What can I say? It's a theatre class.

Arsenic and Old Lace

2011-09-28T00:26:00.000-06:00

I have wanted to design Arsenic and Old Lace for years. I had seen the show before and had worked as a carpenter on a production in graduate school. This is one of those plays theatre people always want to work on. I got my chance fall semester, 2010.

The play is set in an old Victorian mansion in the early 1940's. The Brewster family is known for insanity. Grandfather Brewster was a doctor and always had a corpse or two hanging around the house when he was alive. The two Brewster aunties, Martha and Abby believe it is their Christian duty to assist tired, lonely old men into the next life. They do so by giving him elderberry wine that is mixed with just enough arsenic to do the job.

The Brewster nephews are equally crazy. Jonathon is a serial killer and Teddy believes he is Theodore Roosevelt. Mortimer Brewster is the only sane one of the bunch and that is suspect as the play proceeds. It is a grand old farce that Frank Capra made into a famous movie in 1944, starring Cary Grant.

The concept of our production was spiderwebs. The director wanted the suggestion of spiderwebs without actually having them on the set or in the costumes. We as the design team had to decide what that meant. I think we were quite successful.

Arsenic and Old Lace full set shot

To execute this design, I immersed myself in books about Victorian architecture and interior design. First of all, there is nothing conservative about Victorian design and certainly the characters in the play are eccentric. It is absolutely appropriate in this play to design it over the top.

There were several features I wished to show in the set design for Arsenic and Old Lace. Gothic Victorian homes often had a turret. I wanted one of those in this design. I can only imagine that a house like this would have a secret passage way or two. I had to have one of those. In the film, "Psycho", the great old Victorian home has a newell post light which is a sculpture with a light attached. It figures into one of the murders, so I thought we ought to have one of those as well.

Jonathon and the aunties in the turret

The secret door to the cellar behind the bookcase

Newell post light

When I found out who the actor was that played Jonathon, I asked him how tall he was. He was 6'-4" tall. Because of that, I designed the front door to be 6'-6" tall. He was much taller than any of the other characters, so they appeared to be in proper scale to the door. I wanted Jonathon to fill the door when he entered for the first time so he would appear to be even more menacing. The lighting designer lit him from the back and the effect was chilling.

Jonathon's entrance

The spiderwebs showed up all over the design. We decided that spiderwebs are characterized by connections so I looked for things that had intersecting lines. The windows were all small diamond shaped panes, the wallpaper all had connecting lines, there were hanging lamps all over that were very spiderlike. I also found some reproduction Victorian trim that had the shape of webs.

Spiderwebs

There were also spiderwebs in the veining of the marble, the swags of the curtains and the doilies and antimacassars (woven pieces over the backs of chairs and couches). There were spiderwebs everywhere.

I had a very definite plan for dressing this set as well. Victorian homes have walls covered with photographs of family members, plants on plantstands and wall sconces. Every square inch seems to be covered with stuff. We went for the crazy ancestor look on the walls, and found sepia prints of Victorian people and displayed them in gaudy frames. Three of the larger pictures were photoshopped portraits of the director, the lighting designer and me. My face was photoshopped onto a famous portrait of Martin Van Buren.

Most of the plants we used were spiderplants. As far as wall sconces go, we had at least eight. I believe this is the most practical lights I have ever used on a show. Eight wall sconces, three chandeliers and a newell post lamp. I built several of the sconces out of lamp parts that we had in the department.

The director

The lighting designer

And me

There were a few other quirky things in the set dressing. We built an elephant foot umbrella stand out of a piece of sono tube, foam, muslin and plastic water bottles. It just seemed that an eccentric man like Grandfather Brewster would have one of them.

Teddy often talked about his safari in Africa, and I imagined that his aunts gave him a BB gun and he took care of rodents and other varmints in the yard. In the areas associated with Teddy, I put a stuffed squirrel, a raven and two taxidermied racoons. I imagined that he thought they were lions and tigers and other game that Theodore Roosevelt had killed on his safari to Africa.

Elephant foot umbrella stand

This was a delightful show, and a very detailed production. It was a pleasure to work on and I'm glad I had the opportunity to do so.

How I Spent My Autumn--Travelogue: Part I Boiling River

2011-09-25T22:06:00.002-06:00

Yesterday was the second day of Autumn, and the weather is still nice. We decided to take another trip to Yellowstone. I'm not sure how many more times we'll get out this fall, but I know we'll have at least one trip to Craters of the Moon, weather permitting. Still, I'd like to do as much as I can and see as much as I can.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to sneak into Yellowstone at night and go skinny-dipping in the hot pots. We called it hot potting. Everybody did it. That makes it right, right? There were a few legal hot pots, but most of them were illegal. Mostly I frequented the legal ones. I really liked the ones where you sat in the river at the point where hot water from thermal areas drained into it.

In places like that you could position yourself to be as warm or as cool as you wished, depending on where you were in relation to the water pouring into the river. I really enjoyed the river near Ojo Caliente and the river at Midway Geyser Basin. Unfortunately, the river at Midway was closed because it became a real party place and the rangers grew tired of cleaning up beer cans, litter and underwear.

There was another place like this at Mammoth Hot Springs called the Boiling River. I had heard about it for thirty years and had wanted to go there but it was never convenient for one reason or another. We decided that the Boiling River would be our destination in Yellowstone this time. We would see many things on our way there and many things on our way home, but the emphasis of the trip would be the Boiling River. I must say, it did not disappoint.

On our way to Yellowstone we stopped at a place called Howard Spring. There is a natural spring just on the Idaho side of the continental divide on the way to Yellowstone. The Forest Service has tapped the spring and created a fountain where travellers can stop to picnic and refresh themselves. My children believe it is the best water in the world. We love to stop there when we travel, and my Dad used to stop there from time to time when I'd go to Yellowstone with him. This has been a family tradition for decades.

Howard Spring is named for General Oliver Otis Howard who stopped there during his famous pursuit of Cheif Joseph and the Nez Perce. I have always taken the side of the Nez Perce, but this is not the post to discuss that topic.

Garrett, Rhys and Chimene at Howard Spring

Last summer, the NPS (National Park Service) undertook an extensive remodel of the Gibbon Falls area. Gibbon Falls is one of the prettiest and most accessible waterfalls in Yellowstone, and one of my favorites. We almost always stop there when we go on the Northern Loop.

The original overlook was just a wide spot in the road where cars, rv's and tourbusses would park and people could walk along a narrow walkway for a short way along the falls. It never seemed safe there with vehicles pulling in and out, and I was always nervous about my children there.

The new overlook is a hundred times better. The Park Service created a parking area that is sufficient for even the peak times of the park. They have also created a short paved trail along the river that shows the brink of the falls, the classic view and a much longer view of the falls. The new setup is fantastic, and I think the views are actually better than they were in the past. I heartily approve of what the Park Service did here. They created a better situation where people can enjoy one of the great views of the park and made it far safer for children. Bravo NPS!

Gibbon Falls

While we were at Gibbon Falls, a very large raven decided that we were parked in his territory. He was fearless and none too happy that we were there. I was within ten feet of him and he still didn't fly away.

The Raven

Next, we stopped at the Artist's Paint Pots nature trail. This is another area that the NPS has improved. The original trailhead was another wide spot in the road. To get to the trail, you had to cross the highway and walk along a decrepit boardwalk through a swamp to get to the main trail. I suppose because of the volume of traffic at this site, the NPS decided to make it more accessible.

They installed a parking lot and improved the trail which can now accomodate strollers and motorized wheelchairs, one of which was there when we were. The trail winds through a mature lodgepole pine forest for about a half mile til you reach the geyser basin. There are pretty pools, a small geyser that was continually gushing while we were there and up the side of the hill were the mudpots. When viewing the mudpots, Rhys, Garrett and I had a discussion about viscosity.

While this particular geyser basin isn't as showy as some of the other geyser basins around Old Faithful, it is still worth seeing. The crowds aren't as great here as they are in other areas of the park so that makes it even better. Another good thing the Park Service has done.

Mineralized pool at Artist Paint Pots

The view from the ridge at Artist Paint Pots

Mudpot at Artist Paint Pots

One of our favorite places in Yellowstone is Sheepeater Cliff. The boys were anxious to go there and to climb again. I have a hard time not stopping at this site. It's easy to climb and very enjoyable. We love to go there. Sheepeater Cliff is an ancient basalt flow that cooled into jointed columns. I have always loved columnar jointed basalt. Sheepeater Cliff does not disappoint. We stopped long enough for the boys and I to climb the cliff a few times and then headed to Mammoth.

Sheepeater Cliff

Columnar jointed basalt

We love waterfalls and are on a mission to see all the falls in Yellowstone. We have a really good start. On the way to Mammoth, we stopped at Rustic Falls at the Golden Gate of Yellowstone.

Rustic Falls brink of the falls

Rustic Falls

Yellowstone's Golden Gate

The boys were anxious that we not miss the Boiling River, and that was our next stop. The hike was about a mile, give or take from the trailhead to the spring, but it really felt like less. It was level and an improved gravel trail. There were lots of cars in the parking lot and lots of people coming and going. This is a very popular spot in Yellowstone. I imagine it could be standing room only during the peak season.

The trail follows the Gardiner River without deviation until you get to the Boiling River. The Boiliing River is an underground hot spring that gushes out of the side of the hill into a very short stream until it pours into the Gardiner River. It pours into the river at several points along about a hundred yards of riverfront. Over the years bathers have used rocks to dam the river into shallow soaking pools and placed flat rocks in front of the best spots for soaking. We opted for the first such pool. There were fewer people there and it was very nice. The main soaking area was downstream from us. Whatever the allure was for the lower area, the privacy where we were was much better.

I have many happy memories of hot-potting, and soaking in the Boiling River brought them all back. Soaking in the Boiling River was an item on my bucket list and it did not disappoint. The boys were already making plans for our return trip next summer. They said it was the highlight of the whole trip. We will go back to Boiling River.

Headwaters of the Boiling River

Main bathing area of the Boiling River

Garrett and Rhys in the Boilng River

The boys and me in the Boiling River

There had been some road construction and delays between Norris and Mammoth, so we opted to go to Tower and swing around through Canyon instead. It didn't really save us much time, in fact it probably cost us an hour or two, but we saw alot of neat stuff along the way. We stopped to see several waterfalls and other attractions along the way.

The first waterfall we stopped at was Undine Falls which is just past Mammoth on the road to Tower. Undine falls is a beautiful three stage waterfall with sheer drops interrupted by cascades. The easiest way to view this falls is from the road, although there is a trail to the base of the falls which we hope to hike next season.

Undine Falls

The next waterfall we viewed was Wraith Falls. This is a hike we took a few years ago but didn't take a camera with us. I wanted a picture of this one as evidence that we had been there. I think the next time we go to Wraith Falls we will go closer to the spring when the water flow is heavier. All along the path there were plants with white berries. I don't know if it was poison oak, poison ivy or poison sumac. I wasn't about to find out. The trail to Wraith Falls is really quite pleasant, level except for the very end when it goes up a series of switchbacks into a small canyon. The falls is hidden until just before the lookout point.

The waterfall splits around a bulbous rock formation and most of the water goes to one side or the other with a little making it's way over the top. During the spring runoff, I think the flow is more dramatic. We will see when we view it next.

Wraith Falls

Along the road to Tower we saw a magnificent, lone bull bison grazing. We stopped for a photo and he didn't even acknowledge our presence. (Note: we didn't vacate the vehicle)

Bison

After that, we stopped at Petrified Tree because we have seen bears on that stretch of road before and were hoping to see one yesterday. We didn't, but we always like going to that part of the park anyway.

At one time, Yellowstone was covered in a redwood forest very similar to California's. A volcanic ash flow covered the forest and the trees petrified. Over the years, erosion has exposed the harder rock of the petrified forest and left standing tree stumps and tree trunks on the hillsides. The famous one at Petrified Tree is surrounded by an old iron fence to keep people from collecting and vandalizing.

I also think the fence is there to misdirect people as well because on the hillside to the right of the petrified tree is a virtual forest of vertical petrified tree stumps. We were with Nick and Cynthia a couple of years ago in the park and Nick saw something on the hillside and sprinted up. This hill is on about a 60 degree angle, so it is not a leisurely climb. I followed, and when I got to where Nick was there was a much larger, more impressive petrified tree stump. This one was at least fifteen feet in diameter and we were touching it. We counted on that hillside about twelve more equally impressive petrified tree stumps. The NPS doesn't call attention to them because I'm sure they don't want people to know about them. That's part of the hidden Yellowstone that I love so much.

Petrified Tree

As we were leaving the Petrified Tree area, I stopped the car because the sunset over the mountains was beautiful. Mist had gathered in the valley and it looked like the Smoky Mountains. I had to have a picture of it.

Yellowstone's version of the Smoky Mountains

By the time we got to Tower it was dusk, heading toward nightfall. There was still enough light to see the waterfall, but just barely. I didn't travel all that way to miss it, so I hiked to it and got a photo. In years past, there was also a trail to the base of the falls which we have taken. Unfortunately, the trail washed out this spring and I wasn't able to take it. I hope they rehabilitate that trail for next season. It's quite beautiful.

Tower Falls

This was a long day, but a good day. We saw alot of stuff and did alot of things on this excursion. I hope to get to Yellowstone at least once more before the season is ended.

Oedipus

2011-09-22T21:02:00.001-06:00

For my day job, I design scenery and lights and sometimes costumes for theatrical productions at the university where I teach. It's a good life. I love doing it and I love being engaged in creative endeavors. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Scene Design from Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University at Mankato). I also have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre with a dual major in Psychology from Brigham Young University. In addition to that I have an Associates of Arts and Sciences in Theatre from Ricks College.

When I was majoring in Psychology, I was amazed at how much the early philosophers and theorists in Psychology borrowed from the Greek playwrights and from Shakespeare. I was also astonished at how much the early 20th century playwrights were influenced from early psychologists, specifically Freud but also others such as Jung.

It was a great opportunity to major in both Theatre and Psychology because I was able to reconcile both interests and relate them to each other. I am a much better practitioner of theatre today because of my background in psychology than I would have been without it. I believe the two are absolutely related.

One of the great plays analyzed by Freud was Sophocles, "Oedipus Rex". I spent a great deal of time in undergraduate school studying Freud's Oedipus Complex and comparing it to not only the original play, but also Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie". I even wrote a scholarly paper entitled, "Is Tom Wingfield Oedipus?" My technical writing teacher thought I should flesh it out more and publish it in a professonal journal, but alas I had no confidence back then and didn't do it. I found the paper about five years ago and reread it. It's still a good paper.

I have always wished to design the set for Oedipus. I have been inspired by Josef Svoboda's design for it and wanted to work on this piece. His design was very symbolic and non-realistic. It was essentially a coast to coast stairway with some platforms built strategically for acting areas and beam projector lights shooting up in places through a haze fog to create columns. It was an amazing piece and it was done, I think in the 1920's. I had always envisioned doing something similar but not copying Svoboda.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to design the set and the lights for Oedipus here at school. The director, Hyrum Conrad thought it should be more realistic than the Svoboda piece. When I work on a script, I have to consider it from several points of view. I have to understand what the playwright felt when he wrote it, what the director felt when he read it, and what I felt when I read it. If I try to impose something on the director, such as the Svoboda piece, we'll end up with a non-unified production that won't make sense. I need to work within the concepts the director gives, otherwise the set or other design elements won't fit into the world created on the stage.

The theatre department already had two very large Greek sculptures made of foam rubber of all things. They were each about nine feet tall. They were colossal and I knew I wanted to use them, and in fact I designed the whole set around them. They were statues of Apollo and Artemus and had been used almost twenty years earlier in Antigone and hadn't been used since. They had been stored upside down from the grid in the theatre.

Apollo

Artemus

The play is set in Thebes, one of the Greek citystates. Hyrum didn't want the set to be reflective of Athens because that was too stereotypical of ancient Greece, instead he wished to go with some of the more obscure areas in Greece to find the inspiration for the set. In my research I discovered that in most Greek citystates, the public areas, the seat of government and the temples to the gods were set on the highest hill in the city. In Athens, that hill is referred to as The Acropolis. The other Greek citystates also referred to the seat of power in their communities as acropolis' as well.

In most Greek tragedies, there is a chorus, usually made up of the 'elders and wisemen of the village'. The chorus narrates, chants and interacts with the other characters. In Greek plays the chorus resides in an area called the orchestra, inbetween the audience and the main actors.

For my design of Oedipus I wanted to show that relationship, plus I wanted to create an acropolis for Thebes. My design consisted of a set of stairs, flanked by a pair of winged sphinxes, from the audience to the stage, Oedipus' palace downstage left, a smaller temple to Apollo upstage right, an altar and a statue of Apollo.

The set design

In order to make the set look less Athenian, I took my inspiration from all parts of the Greek world and was inspired by a Greek library in Ephesus. I based my design for Oedipus' palace on that. It was a large, multi-story building with very large niches in the exterior walls that held grand sculptures. For the temple, I found inspiration from many such temples all over Greece.

The temple complex

We hired an art teacher to carve the two large sphinxes. They were really more eighteenth century sphinxes, based on funerary statues. The riddle of the sphinx is integral to the story of Oedipus, so we translated the riddle into Greek and then carved it into the front of the sphinx pedestals.

Sphinx

Oedipus is set during the Bronze Age, so I wanted to show alot of bronze in the detail of the palace, suggesting that he who controls the bronze controls the kingdom. I designed two very large bronze doors for the palace that only opened once, when Oedipus has blinded himself. The doors were each four feet wide and ten feet tall. The large doric columns across the front of the palace were each three feet in diameter and sixteen feet tall. This was a very large set.

Set design tells you all the tangible things about the show, but lighting design tells the audience how to feel. The great cosmic irony of the play, Oedipus Rex is that those who can see cannot see and those who cannot see can see. Only when Oedipus has blinded himself does he really see himself for who he is. I wanted to show this cosmic irony in the lights as well, so as Oedipus zeros in on the secrets of his origins, and becomes more illuminated as to the truth, the stage grew darker. I did this by showing the passage of time. The closer he got to the truth, the darker it became onstage.

First cue-full daylight

Second cue-afternoon

Third cue-late afternoon

Fourth cue-late evening

Fifth cue-nightfall

In between each cue, there was a choral ode that we used to show the passage of time. The odes were to be lit as if they were on another plane or sphere, unworldly. I used strong blue side light with purple fill and amber in a pattern rotator. The lights were enhanced by a haze fog so at times they became almost architectural.

Choral ode

My two youngest sons, Rhys and Garrett wanted to be in the show, so they were cast as Polynices and Eteocles, Oedipus two sons. Things were going great until they learned they were going to have to wear "dresses", girl sandals and have their hair curled. We explained to them that they were tunics, not dresses and that they looked right for the part. After they got used to it, they were good sports and did a very fine job in the show. I was proud of them.

Rhys and Garrett with Seve Isaacs as Oedipus

I am fortunate enough to work in a theatre department that is interested in doing the classics. This is a play I have wanted to do for my entire career. It was a labor of love and I'm thankful to have had the opportunity to work on it.

The Fruit Room

2011-09-18T17:35:00.002-06:00

We've lived in this house for eleven years now, and I have to say the shelves in our storage room have been less than satisfactory. There was alot of wasted space and the shelves sagged because they weren't built very well. They weren't heavy duty enough to put much food storage on them, and they were weird sized so you either packed them full and couldn't get to anything or had to leave alot of headroom and wasted space. We made do for a long time but we were never very happy with them.

A few years ago, I acquired two custom shelf units from a friend that was leaving town. These units were basically each, four 2X2X3 cels with hardware for adjustable shelves. I eventually brought one down into the storage room and found that it held my canned fruits and vegetables perfectly with no wasted space. I started measuring and discovered that I could fit both shelf units and our standup freezer along the back wall. There was just enough room.

So this week, I deconstructed the original shelves and moved the second set of shelves down, moved the other shelves to the back wall and moved the freezer inbetween them. Personally I'd have put them next to each other and had the freezer on the end, but I had to compromise with Chimene. It's okay, though just a reshuffling of the same space.

When I was doing the demolition, I discovered that the people who had built them, had at the same time over and under built them. It was insane. The shelves had very little support, but where the cleats were attached to the walls they had used about three times too many nails.

Freezer and shelves

I'm only showing half of this because we haven't gotten the other shelves full yet. When we do I may post a follow up pic.

The shelves are nice because I can arrange them to hold 2 quart jars, 1 quart jars, pint jars, or jelly jars. Depending on how I adjust the shelves, I can hold the following on each shelf:

2 Quart........................25
1 Quart........................36
Wide Mouth Pint...........36
Regular Pint..................49
Jelly Jars......................64

Also across the top I can hold 44 three quart repurposed apple juice bottles full of water.
I'm pretty pleased with how this is turning out.

The Romance Theatre

2011-09-17T19:07:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, there was a movie theater* in town named, The Romance. The original building had been built in 1917 in the Beaux Arts style. In that building, there were prize fights, vaudeville and burlesque shows, live plays and of course silent cinema.

In 1935, Messrs. DeMourdant and Drennen remodelled the theater in the Art Deco style. In doing so, they purchased the bakery next door, knocked the walls out and expanded the original building to almost twice it's original width. Inside was decorated with beautiful plaster ornamentation that was brightly painted in the Art Deco style and colors. We have a photo of the theatre during this time period with the 1937 version of "The Prisoner of Zenda" on the marquee.

The Romance Theatre today

This is the theater I grew up with. Going to the movies back then was an event. Something you planned for, saved for and cleared your schedule for. The ticket office was just outside the front door and the line would stretch around the block. In those days the movie houses were always full. When you entered the theatre it was like entering another world. People spoke in hushed tones, the house lights were turned low, just high enough for you to see your way to your seat but not dark enough to be dangerous. In the front there was a very large curtain that covered the screen and lights in the floor warming the curtain so it looked beautiful.

At about three minutes to showtime, the main curtain went up, usually in an Austrian style (Austrian is a curtain that rises from the floor and gathers in symmetrical swags as it ascends). Some theaters had a second inner curtain that would page open like drapes in a home. As that was happening, the giant screen would roll down and the houselights would dim. When this delicate choreograhy of screens, curtains and lights was finished, there might be one preview and then a cartoon. Finally the movie would start.

These days, going to a movie is a vastly different experience There is no main curtain, the much more modest screen is exposed and usually has a digital projector playing really bad community ads. The patrons are loud, usually texting and otherwise generally obnoxious. When it's showtime, there is usually fifteen minutes of previews of upcoming attractions. Finally the lights go down and the movie begins. The old way was much better.

When I was in grade school, a kid named Dave DeMourdant moved here from California. Dave's dad inherited The Romance and I became Dave's friend. Saturday afternoons were spent at the theater watching movies. In those days you could purchase a ticket at the first showing and stay to the next. Life was good back then. I remember Dave and I watching "Tora, Tora, Tora" three times, back to back to back on a Saturday afternoon. Somewhere along the line, our church congregation split and he went to one and I went to another. Funny how imaginary boundaries like that can change things. We kind of went our separate ways after that. We stayed friends but were never close again.

In 1976, the Teton Dam collapsed and flooded Rexburg and the surrounding communities. The water level in downtown Rexburg was about four to six feet deep. The Romance Theater was flooded along with every other building in the downtown area. The high water mark of the flood is still visible on the stage right brick wall on the stage of the theatre. It is one of very few public places in town where you can still see the flood line. After the flood, the DeMourdants decided to update the theater and covered all the ornate plasterwork with curtains, put new seats in, put mustard yellow melamine across the front of the building and changed the name to The Westwood Theater. I saw "Star Wars" in The Westwood in 1977.

The line on the dark brick is the high water mark from the Teton Dam Flood in 1977

Early in our marriage, Chimene and I saw the movie, "Aliens" at The Westwood Theater. I have many fond memories in The Romance and then The Westwood Theater.

At some point, DeMourdant sold the theater to a major theater company and the mom and pop days were over. The manger they hired told the big company that there was still some old theatre scenery from the vaudeville days behind the screen. They told him to take it to the dump and discard it, tell no one about it. I believe they didn't wish to have anyone nosing about and trying to get the theatre listed on the National Historic Register. He followed their orders and a great treasure was lost.

Somewhere around the year 2000 the movie chain fell on hard times and began ridding themselves of theater properties. The Westwood was one of them. They had another theater right around the corner called The Holiday and didn't want anyone they sold it to to be able to open up competition, so they began gutting The Westwood. The city attorney found out about it and filed a cease and desist order and the theater was saved. It sat empty for a couple of years and the city coucil was trying to determine how to dispose of the property. One idea that gained alot of ground was to raze the building and replace it with a parking lot.

In the city council meeting where the disposition of The Westwood Theater was being discussed the citizenry of Rexburg descended upon city hall and let the city council know that in no uncertain terms, we would have another city council in the next election cycle if they tore the building down. The city fathers made a quality decision and decided it was in the best interest of all that the building be restored. I wrote a note to one of the council members I knew that I would be willing to donate my time to paint the plaster inside the auditorium.

I was named to the committee to restore the theatre, and we voted to restore not only the theatre but also the name, and The Romance Theatre Committee was born. Over the next several years we had many ups and downs with the citizens, the city council, inner strife within the committee, and a lack of committment among some of the members. For a short time, the city disbanded the committee and took over management of the property. The person they put in charge was disinterested and just about ran the thing into the ground.

About that time, the city attorney got involved. He's just a year older than me and has many great memories of the theater as well. He restored the committee and we were back in business. There was alot of construction that needed to be done, many repairs to the building before we could paint, and finally this year we have been able to paint the decorative plaster. It's been a long time, but finally it's here. We painted the proscenium in the spring and summer, and I went in today to paint for a few hours. The place is looking very good.

I insisted that we paint the plaster with casein paint and that we use gold and copper leaf in areas. I also insisted that we paint the deep recesses of the plaster with ultramarine blue instead of black. These were correct choices. As I mentioned it is beginning to look like a theatre again. Here are a few pictures I took today.

Detail of the painted plaster

All the interior doors looked like this once

The old houselight resistance dimmers on the linoleum floor

The old Peerless carbon arc projector

1930's vintage drinking fountain in the basement

Cracked plaster over brick in the basement

Window in the back wall

Unpainted plaster pilaster

Unpainted ceiling medallion

*Note: You may think I misspelled the words theatre and theater. That is not the case. I used the word theater when I was referring to it as a movie theater, and I used the word theatre when I was referring to it as a live theatre.

Metope Tutorial

2011-09-14T22:22:00.000-06:00

Last summer I had the opportunity to do a set and lighting design for the play Oedipus. This is a play that I have wanted to work on for twenty-five years. I actually became a real fan of Oedipus when I was a psychology major. But that's a topic for another blog post.

For the set design, I chose to create an acropolis, not The Acropolis. I found that most Greek citystates had the center of their government on the highest point within the city limits and they were called acropolis'. The palace dominated the set but the temple of Apollo was also present, upstage right. We also carved a pair of winged sphinxes to flank the steps down to the chorus. The theatre department already had two large Greek-esque sculptures, so I designed the set around them.

Set design for Oedipus

On a Greek temple, there is an architectural feature called a Metope. The Metopes on the Parthenon showed something like 92 scenes from the mythical war between the centaurs and the Lapiths. I wanted to create a Metope story similar to the one on the Parthenon for the architrave on the temple.

Sometimes the Metope was carved from a single piece of stone, and sometimes background elements were carved in the main stone and complimentery sculptures were fashioned and placed in front. These were the Metopes we chose to craft.

The first thing I did was create a prototype because I wasn't sure it was going to work. The prototype worked very well so I was encouraged and created eight panels of the centaur story. Here's my process.

Step 1. Create the story. If you haven't got a story the panels won't make any sense. Our story was to be broken up into eight panels. The story we created was:

Panel 1. The king and queen give the warrior the charge to slay the centaur
Panel 2. The king sends the warrior on his way
Panel 3. The warrior and centaur confront each other
Panel 4. They grapple
Panel 5. The centaur tries to impale the warrior on his spear
Panel 6. The warrior stabs the centaur with his sword
Panel 7. The warrior decapitates the dying centaur
Panel 8. The warrior presents the head of the centaur to the king and queen

Step 2. Acquire a whole bunch of GI Joe, Ken and Barbie dolls, plastic horses and such. I had to scour several thrift stores for about a month to come up with enough dolls to complete the Metopes. Our collection featured an Edward doll from the Twilight series. I figured we needed 17 or 18 male dolls, 2 female dolls and 5 horses to tell our story.

The raw material with the prototype in the background

Step 3. Prepare each of the dolls for demolition. This step consisted of cutting the hair on some dolls, cutting out the boards for the Metopes, designing each scene on the board and marking the dolls with a Sharpie Pen to get the saw cuts just right.

Giving Edward a haircut

Marking the Ken doll

Step 4. Cutting the dolls and doll parts. I wanted to show different angles of bodies so our Metopes were more dynamic. I chose to use a bandsaw to cut them because I felt I had more control. If you choose to make a project similar to this, you must always keep your fingers behind the blade and away from the blade, and pull your work through. You should also wear safety glasses when using power tools. Some of the bodies I trimmed to be shown straight on, but most of them I showed at three quarters or profile. It's all in how you cut them. The most important part of this is to make sure your cuts are straight so you have as flat a surface as possible to attach to your board.

I also found that you have to cut a flat spot on arms and legs to get them to look right when mounted on the boards.

Cutting up Ken

What Ken looks like inside

Cutting up a horse

Step 5. Attaching the doll parts to the base. This is where good composition comes into play. It's important to lay all your parts out before you begin attaching to make sure everything looks right.

On the prototype, I tried five minute epoxy and E-6000 first. They worked ok, I guess, but the plastic parts tended to break out of the epoxy and the E-6000 took forever to cure, so I tried good old fashioned Hot Melt Glue. It worked instantly and the best of the adhesives I tried. When we were attaching the doll parts to the wood, we discovered that certain parts, such as free legs and arms had to be shimmed up to keep them in place. Cutting a length of a hot glue stick worked very well. On several panels, I needed the warrior to have a shield, so we found some cheaply built escutcheons from some hanging lights and screwed them to our boards.

Attaching the doll parts to the base

Attaching the modified escutcheon

As you can see, they are naked

Step 6. Accessorize. During this step, we added the stools for the queen, the swords for the warrior, the spears for the centaur and clothing for all.

The clothing was made from air hardening clay. The stools were made from carved blue foam, random wood turnings and beads. The swords were made from popsickle sticks, cut out and the spears were merely dowels. These were going to be seen from afar so some of these details did not need to be completely rendered.

If I were to do this again, I'd probably attempt to find a substitute for the air hardening clay, as it tended to be brittle and also cracked a bit when it dried and cured. That being said, it worked fine for something that was static. If it were a moving prop it would have to be a little more robust.

Accessorized

Step 7. Mastic and painting. The plastic from the dolls takes paint differently than the wood on the stool. The wood takes paint differently than the blue foam. The blue foam takes paint differently than the air hardening clay. That is why I use a mastic for a substrate before I paint props like these. I like the product, Jaxsan 600 or Poly ViCryl, which I have referenced in other tutorials. The mastic is white and creates a Gesso like texture on which to paint.

The paint job consisted of three or four colors from the set, painted in a scumble pattern. A scumble is a spotty wet blend. After the scumble, the last step before installation was a raw umber wash.

Mastic and scumble

Panel 1: The queen and king give the charge to the warrior
Panel 2: The king sends the warrior into battle
Panel 3: He meets up with the centaur, prepared to do battle

Panel 4: They grapple
Panel 5: The centaur attacks with a spear
Panel 6. The warrior stabs the centaur with his sword

Panel 7: The warrior decapitates the dying centaur
Panel 8: The warrior presents the head of the centaur to the king and queen

Cosmetology Head Tutorial

2011-09-13T21:47:00.001-06:00

I walked past a beauty school in our town that had gone out of business and there happened to be some people there. I went in and long story short, I bought five heads for Halloween. Since that time, I've found several more at the local thrift store and I went to one of the other beauty schools and acquired a bunch more of the spent heads.

Over the last year, I have modified a few of them, and I have a blog post about them already. One of the heads has some of the flesh cut out and the eyeball and part of the jaw is exposed. One has an eyeball popped out. Another has an exposed brain. Garrett helped me make the eyeball one and I made the brain one for my son-in-law, Nick. Rhys wanted to help me with the next one. This time we took process shots so I could write a tutorial here.

All good projects begin with a good design. We decided we wanted to have a portion of her face ripped off and the skull exposed. We began by drawing the section of flesh we wanted to remove, then used a utility knife to cut away the rubber. We cut away part of the scalp as well. We always save the portions we take away in case we want to use them again. That was the case with the scalp.

Cutting the flesh away

Peeling the rubber skin

Next we removed the exposed foam and hollowed out a portion of the head. That was to make room for the skull.

Cutting away the foam

More demolition

Hollowing out the head

The head and the foam skull we just happened to have laying around

The Halloween skulls and the cosmetology heads are about 85-90% lifesize. They match up pretty well. The next step is to cut and place the skull until it fits just right. This is one of the most involved part of the project. There isn't a recipe or a pattern showing how it goes, you just have to cut and fit, cut and fit until it's just right. When I do a project like this I like to cut a little bit bigger than I think I'll need because it's easier to trim than it is to add.

Last year I acquired two cans of Liquid Nails adhesive from a paint store that had discontinued them. It's a bit of a pain because you have to scoop it out of a can instead of shooting it through a caulk gun, but cheap is always good, and that's the adhesive I used for this project.

Cutting the skull

Fitting the skull to the head

Final placement

Rhys and I decided we liked her better with hair, so we added the scalp piece back with some Liquid Nails. Then it was time to remove the base and hack up the neck so it would appear to be a severed head, but the act of severing wasn't necessarily clean. I used a saw for the base and a utility knife to distress the cut.

Hair restoration

Removing the base

Hack job

The next step is to add a substrate to the cut and carved foam. This is done for both protection and to provide a uniform surface that will readily accept paint. I have used Jaxan 600 and Childers CP-10 Poly Vicryl as mastics for coating foam. There are other products available for this purpose as well. Many theatrical suppliers have products specifically for coating foam. In my opinion, they all work about the same, so whatever is on hand or whichever is cheaper is the best option.

I coated the foam on the base and then the foam skull. Then I applied folded paper towels as a mache to create the meat on the skull. I used the ViCryl as the medium for attaching the towels. The nice thing about ViCryl is that it's water based and it dries very rapidly. Once it's dry it is odorless as opposed to some of the carpet latex adhesive mediums that some home haunters use.

ViCryl

Mastic on the foam, also covering the unfortunate "neck tatoo"

Mastic mache with model skull in background

The next step, once the mastic is dry, is to paint the head. I started out with a base coat of acrylic paint. The colors I used were Unbleached Titanium and Parchment. While that was still wet, I used a fan brush with straight Burnt Sienna and dragged it across the "meat" areas. Finally I painted Paynes Gray in the cracks in the eye socket and the nasal cavity. Then I thinned the Paynes Gray and painted a wash in the eye socket, the nasal cavity and around the teeth and gums.

Base coat

Base coat and work-up finished

Once the base coat and work-up are dry, the next step is to paint the skull with Design Master Color Tool. When building stage props or Halloween props, I have three colors I use more than any others in the Design Master. They are, Glossy Wood Tone, Cherry Wood Tone and October Brown.

Design Master

The process for painting the skull begins with Glossy Woodtone all over and October Brown in the eye sockets and nasal cavity. Finally the Cherry Wood Tone is sprayed on the "meat" and in the eye sockets. This step is repeated until the desired color and value are acheived. I like to wear a vinyl glove on my right hand and contort it into different shapes to create a frisket. I like to do it that way because it's quicker than masking tape and paper.

Design Master

When the design master is dry, the next step is to paint the blood on the neck and around the gaping wound. I use acrylic paint for my blood. I use a combination of the following colors, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Umber, Cadmium Red Deep Hue and Dioxazine Purple. I stipple these colors alternating the brown and the purple and basically stippling the crimson all over. Then I use the cad red as a bloody highlight. Once the acrylic is dry I then coat the blood with a gloss medium so it looks fresh all the time. Finally the last step is to paint blood spatters around the wounds. I do this with the crimson and cad red in a toothbrush and run my thumb over it to flick it where it needs to be.

Blood on the neck

Flicking blood

Voila

As I look at the picture of the finished project, I realize that the inside of the nose is too shiny and maybe the inside of the eye socket. I think a bit of clear flat medium would fix that.

So we have one more head for our Zombie Walk. These heads are very versatile. They can be modified in many different ways. The biggest ingredient in doing this is your own imagination. Go forth and modify!

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part IX

2011-09-11T09:43:00.001-06:00

Trip #10--Wright Creek, Father and Sons Campout
Every year, the church hosts a Father and Sons Campout. It is very important to my two youngest sons especially. The campout is usually held in the spring, but for some scheduling reason we did it during the fall this year. Both Rhys and Garrett asked several times during the summer if we had missed the Father and Sons Campout.

The last couple of years we have booked the camp at Wright Creek, which is owned by one of the local congregations of our church. Wright Creek is about thirty miles away from town and cuts through Green Canyon. The campground is peaceful, wooded and largely unimproved. The campsites are nestled in a grove of aspen and stands of juniper. The east wall of the canyon is dominated by hoodoos of welded tuff. Hoodoos are erosion features, carved primarily by wind. They tend to be wierd, otherworldly rounded boulders that don't appear to belong in the surrounding landscape.

Wright Creek

Aspen and Juniper

The Hoodoos

The moon over our campsite

I invited Nick to bring his boys and we all camped together. Tyler couldn't come because he had to work and Connor didn't come because he is too young to be away from his mother for a night. We arrived around 6, ate dinner and set up camp. For some reason, and this is as it always is, my sleeping bag was over a large rock so I didn't sleep very well. I spent most of the night adjusting and trying to find a comfortable spot on the rock. There wasn't one.

The Gang

Nick and I got up with the sun on Saturday and went to the main gathering area and built a fire. I like fire, and I like to build big ones. The Bishop suggested that I build, "White Man Fires." Not sure if I should have been insulted or complimented, but I took it as a compliment and everyone who huddled around it in the brisk morning air seemed to appreciate the warmth.

After that, I went around the campground taking pictures of pretty things while I waited for everyone else to arise. While I was about, I saw some Oregon Grapes that were ripe. I hadn't ever tried one, so I did this time and found it somewhat bitter, but with a surprisingly pleasant aftertaste.

Fall foliage in the mountains

Oregon grapes

Random aspen

After breakfast we struck camp and headed to the hoodoos. One of the highlights of the Father and Son Campout at Wright Creek is to climb the hoodoos the next morning. It doesn't require much technical climbing, but there are plenty of areas for scrambling. Lots of crevices, caves and chimneys to explore. It's something we enjoy doing.

Hoodoos

More hoodoos

Group shot on top of the hoodoos

Random hoodoo

The descent

The hardest part of the climb. I had to fit through there

After the rock climbing, we split company with Nick and his boys and made our way home. We stopped at the ruins of the Teton Dam. The dam failed in 1976 and destroyed a goodly portion of several local communities. The house we are living in was built in 1974 and survived the Teton Dam Flood. Around here, time is measured in terms of "pre-flood" and "post-flood".

The boys at the dam

We had a great time.

Cheesy Changing Portraits

2011-09-07T22:00:00.000-06:00

Every year, about this time, merchants start stocking their Halloween items. The Dollar Store is usually the first. At the end of the season, the vendors all deeply discount their wares to move them out of the store. That's when I like to shop. The selection isn't very good but you can't beat the price.

Every so often I have purchased some of the silly changing portraits. These are cheesy, come in plastic vacuum formed frames etc... The portraits are pretty cool though, it's just the presentation that suffers. The portraits look normal if you look at them straight on, but as soon as you move one direction or another they change to horrible monsters.

Straight on view

Viewed at an angle

For years I never bought any of these because the presentation was so poor, but the deep discount was so good that I finally succumbed to the temptation and picked some up. I'm a designer, though and I couldn't abide the poor presentation. I picked up some pretty decent looking picture frames from the local thrift store and reframed the portraits to make them look a little more legit.

Cool thrift store frames

Demolition

Reframed

In my home, during the month of October, it is my wish to have one wall that has a number of these portraits mingled with portraits of my family, but photoshopped to look as if they were old photographs. That way, people would be taken by surprise when some of the photos suddenly shifted.

A good start

Gearing up for Halloween

2011-09-04T14:36:00.000-06:00

I like Halloween, alot. It's September now, and it's time to really get the Halloween preparations into hyperdrive. I want to have a "Poets Cemetery" in my front yard. All the great Gothic Victorian writers like Poe, Shelley, Stoker, etc... We'll see how far I get this year. Chimene is trying to convince me to spend Halloween in Disneyland with the Airths and the Whitings. I'm not convinced yet.

Last year we had "The First Annual, Rexburg, Idaho Zombie Apocalypse". We sponsored it through The Romance Theatre of which I'm a committee member. The zombie walk was a huge success and we want to do it again. Last year we blocked off two blocks of Main Street and had a parade and street party. The Mayor showed up and thought it was a success and told me, "Now when you do it next year..."

Blocking that much of Main Street was too much, so with the Mayor's advice we decided to have a sidewalk only parade from Walgreens to The Romance Theatre, then turn the corner and have the street blocked off from Main to Carlson on Center for the street party. I invited the local US Army National Guard recruiter to set up a booth and bring some soldiers with rubber M-16's to keep order among the zombies. He's also going to bring his climbing wall and we'll give victims a head start up the wall and let the zombies climb up after and try to drag them off. Should be fun.

I'm a theatre prop guy, so for the zombie walk I've decided to have some props. It just so happened that the Career Beauty College went out of business and I happened to be there when the owner was and purchased several of the cosmotology heads that were left over when the students left. With the aid of some of my sons, I have 'modified' them for the occasion.

Head #1: I just happened to have a plastic jaw from a different project and some large, plastic, doll eyes from China. I cut the skin off the face around one eye, cut out the other eye and replaced both of them with the doll eyes. Then I cut a portion of the skin away from the jaw area and cut up the plastic jaw into manageable pieces and went to work. I inserted the jaw in the proper place, cut the base off and bloodied the whole thing up. Turned out okay.

Head #1

Head #2: Last year at the after Halloween sale at Wal-Mart, I found a prosthetic popped out eyeball that was kind of cheesy, but it was only twenty-five cents so what the heck. Garrett helped me with this one. We cut the skin around the eye just smaller than the prosthetic eye, pulled the rubber up and inserted the prosthetic in place. We glued it, cut off the base and bloodied the thing up. This is the one I'll probably carry in the Zombie Walk.

Head #2

Head #3: My son-in-law, Nick decided he wanted a head for the Zombie Walk as well. He made a request for an exposed brain. This one, I cut off the neck base, added a foam piece that looked like a vertabrae and a tube for an esophagus. Then I cut a flap of scalp back and carved the foam inside with my Dremel tool. I had to put a foam coating on it to harden, then I painted it. Turned out pretty sick. When I showed Nick, he was duly impressed.

Head #3 first view

Head #3 second view

Head #4: Then I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I hit one with a heat gun?"

Head #4

Head #5: My son Rhys didn't want to be left out of the club, so he and I crafted a head together. We decided we wanted it to have half the skin ripped off and the skull exposed. We just happened to have a foam Halloween skull left over from last year. I painted the teeth with white nail polish last year. First we cut off the skin and scalp where we wanted the skull exposed, then we hollowed out the head a bit to make the skull fit. Then it was just a matter of cutting the skull down, and fitting it. It's always better to start with it too big and cut it back than it is to start too small and have to scrap it. Once we had a fit we liked, we glued it into place.

This isn't quite finished, we still have to cut off the base and give it a paint job. I'll probably post a picture of it when the thing is all done.

Head #5

Heads #6,7,8: I have three heads that I cut the eyes out of and replaced them with glow in the dark bouncy balls. I think I'm going to make some cemetery sculptures out of them.

Did I mention I like Halloween, alot?

Random Act of Nature

2011-09-03T22:09:00.001-06:00

This is going to be a short entry tonight, but earlier today my three younger sons and I were working out in the yard. There were a couple of fence boards laying under a tree and I had one of my boys pick it up to put it on the pile of old fence boards that we have and when he picked it up it was covered with Ladybugs. I like ladybugs. They don't cause any harm, they look pretty and they eat aphids.

Ladybug beetles on a fence board

Halloween Coffin

2011-09-02T15:46:00.000-06:00

When we moved into the house we are living in now, there was a cedar fence in disrepair along the back of our property. The fence was meant to divide the property from a ditch that serviced a farm to the west of us. When the farm became houses, the ditch stopped holding water and the city attorney let the homeowners know that the easement for the ditch had lapsed and we were free to fill in the ditch and expand our yards.

I talked to our backfence neighbors, and they had a really nice fence with landscaping that went right up to it. They didn't want to expand their yard and told me I could have it. I watched the sun every day in the summer and found it arcs across the ditch every day. Looks like a good place for a berry patch to me.

The fence fell down of it's own accord and I dismantled it and saved the wood, knowing I would have a use someday for the old, worm-eaten, rotted cedar, I just didn't know what. Over the next few seasons, I filled in the ditch with what I had but it wasn't enough. This year a friend of mine found some topsoil and had it delivered to our driveway. I had my fifteen year old son shovel the dirt into a wheelbarrow and wheel it back to the ditch to fill it in. I had him do it because I wanted him to understand what kind of work he'd be doing for the rest of his life if he didn't pull good grades at school.

As I was poking around on some of the Halloween sites that I haunt, I came across plans for a coffin made of fence planking. Immediately I remembered that I happened to have alot of fence planking and went to work. The site where I found the plans was, http://www.scarefx.com/project_coffin.html.

To do this build I selected the planks for the bottom and sides that would be durable first and rotted second. For the top I selected planks that were rotted, worm-eaten, broken and knotted, even a little warped. Just the way I like them. Before I display it, I'll age the fresh cut edges of the boards with a little Raw Umber wash. That should do the trick.

I think it turned out fairly well, and when I display it for Halloween, I'll find something to do with it, like putting one of my skeletons in it or cobwebbing it a bit. Maybe I'll have fog and lights come out of it, who knows.

Here's some pics.

Coffin top

Knothole on the side

Rotted boards at the end

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part VIII

2011-09-01T11:01:00.000-06:00

Trip #8--Jenny Lake
When Nick's friend, John was here, he showed me pictures of the sun setting behind Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. I was stunned. Growing up, spending my summers in West Yellowstone, I spent alot of time in Yellowstone but hardly ever ventured into Grand Teton. I never had time. When I'd go to the park I'd usually have to be back by six o'clock to get ready for the show. Grand Teton was just too far. I had always viewed Grand Teton as the awkward kid brother to Yellowstone anyway. I was wrong.

Yellowstone has many things that make it unique, and there is alot to see there, but the views in Grand Teton are magnificent. I will be spending more time in that park in the coming years.

We planned to caravan to the park with our friends, the Airths and then hook up with some other friends, the Whitings for a picnic in the park. The Whitings had camped there the night before. After the picnic we planned to hike to Hidden Falls on the west side of Jenny Lake.

Jenny Lake is a glacial lake that was formed about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last great glaciation. The receding glacier left a terminal moraine which defined the banks of Jenny Lake. The lake is considered by many to be one of the most picturesque lakes in all of North America. I would tend to agree. From the east bank of the lake, the view of the Tetons is spectacular. There is a viewpoint on the east bank that centers the lake between Mount Teewinot and Mount Owens. Great photo op.

We left between ten and eleven o'clock in the morning and drove along the Moody Highway, then through Driggs and Victor before heading over the pass into Jackson Hole. While in Driggs, we stopped at a grocery store for some supplies and there was a bear exhibit with a bunch of taxidermied bears and a ranger talking about what to do in case you run across a bear in the wild.

The Tetons from the Idaho side

Random taxidermied bear

When we arrived in Grand Teton National Park, we used a minor entrance near Teton Village to enter the park. We drove through about ten miles of a beautiful mixed forest of Aspen, Douglas Fir, Lodgepole Pine and White Pine. Wildflowers were abundant even at this late date in the summer. As we drove past the three Tetons, the sun struck them in a spectacular way and I regret we didn't stop for photos, but we were on a schedule and had to make the picnic area because our friends had been waiting there for a few hours.

The view from the picnic area

Friends sharing a meal

We picnicked at the north end of Jenny Lake next to the south shore of String Lake. Jenny Lake and Leigh Lake are connected by a long skinny body of water called String Lake. String Lake is very shallow and is used for swimming, poling, canoeing and boating. It was fairly busy when we first arrived.

Back in the 1800's at the end of the fur trade, there was a colorful trapper beloved around here named Richard Leigh. He went by the nickname, Beaver Dick and there is a park near here named for him. He was from England and according to accounts had bright red hair. He was second only to Jim Bridger as far as fame and knowledge of the surrounding territory goes. He married a Shoshone woman and by all accounts was very much in love with her. Leigh Lake is named for him while Jenny Lake is named for her. All through Wyoming and Idaho, mainly the Teton range and basin there are features named for Richard Leigh. He must have been quite the character.

Recreation at String Lake

The hike from String Lake around the northwest side of Jenny Lake was spectacular. Everything was green. There had been a fire in the last ten or fifteen years and there were standing blackened tree trunks around but the new growth of both trees and underbrush were beautiful. As we started across the trail, it threatened to rain and a few drops fell. All the revellers at String Lake packed up and left. It was an exodus.

Fire and rebirth

The hot chick

Friends on the trail

The trail was beautiful from start to finish. Often when I hike, the trail is okay with moments of WOW but this one was fantastic the whole way. There was something to see every foot of the trail. From mountain vistas to wildflowers to mini waterfalls to sweeping views of the lake, this trail had it all. I will hike this trail again.

About a mile and a quarter along the trail the heavens opened up and we were hit by a torrential rainstorm. Huge raindrops were coming down. We stood in the shelter of some large trees for fifteen or twenty minutes waiting to see if the rain would stop, and just when we were about to decide to abandon the trail, we saw the sun peek out from behind some clouds and the rain stopped. We continued down the path.

Random mini waterfall along the trail

Caught in the rain

Spectacular view

We made our way to Hidden Falls and climbed up the trail a quarter mile or so to see the waterfall. This particular waterfall is a series of steep cascades that go on for about 80 feet. This is one of the most popular hikes in Grand Teton National Park. There weren't many people on the trail today because of the rain. The storm had hidden advantages. First it drove all but the most adventurous people away, and it cooled us down on an otherwise hot day.

Hidden Falls

The trail back was slow going because we had a few little children that were tired. I took up the rear and stopped often to take alot of photos. When we got back to String Lake, the kids decided it would be the thing to do to wade in the lake. It's a very shallow lake, so the sun warms it pretty well during the day. It was pleasant. Next time I'll bring my water shoes and trunks.

Mount Teewinot, my new favorite mountain

I loved the line and texture here. I'm a designer, what can I say?

Kids in String Lake

The Whitings headed for home after the picnic and before the rain. The Airths decided to go home via the pass, and we decided to head home through Yellowstone. In retrospect I wouldn't do it that way again, it was alot of nighttime driving behind bad drivers pulling trailers, and it added about three hours to the trip. On the bright side, though we did get to see the sun setting on the Tetons and we added another waterfall to our list. Just inside the southern border of Yellowstone is a beautiful waterfall called, Moose Falls. It drops off a cliff for about 35 feet. Another great day.

Jenny Lake from the east shore flanked by Mount Teewinot and Mount Owen

Sunset in the Tetons

Moose Falls, Yellowstone

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part VII

2011-08-31T13:25:00.000-06:00

Trip #7--Lewis & Clark Caverns and Crystal Park
A couple of weeks ago, I found a notebook that I had used a long time ago and on the first page there was a note that said, "Crystal Park, 2011". I took that as a sign. I've been a rockhound since I was eight years old. There is a place in Montana, near Dillon, called Crystal Park. It's a 220 acre deposit of quartz crystals that is held under claim by the Butte Gem and Mineral Society but the Forest Service manages it. For five dollars you can park your car and dig all day long if you like. All these years of being a rockhound and I had never done this trip. High time I did it. I've taken the kids on digs before and they seem to enjoy it. Garrett has told me that he wants to collect rocks as well.

As I was looking at the map I realized that Lewis & Clark Caverns is about an hour and a half away from Crystal Park. We hadn't been to Lewis & Clark Caverns since our daughter Cynthia was a baby. I looked up on their website and found that the price of admission is a mere $10 for adults and $5 for kids under 12. Ten bucks a head is dirt cheap. Garrett is our only discount kid now. We had to do this.

Last Wednesday was the first day of school, so the kids were free on Monday and Tuesday. We planned to drive up to Lewis & Clark Caverns on Monday, drive down to Dillon after the tour and camp in the Grasshopper Creek Campground near Crystal Park. On Tuesday we would dig until we got tired of digging and head home. Pretty good itinerary and with little deviation we stuck to it. Of course we had Chimene's fried chicken. We can't camp out without that.

We headed north towards West Yellowstone, but turned on the Henry's Lake Flats toward Ennis. When we got to Ennis, I took a wrong turn and headed over to Virginia City. Luckily it was only fifteen miles out of the way. We drove up to Boot Hill and talked about the bad guys buried there and headed back to the road and made our way to Lewis & Clark Caverns. Because of the mixed up detour, we got to the caverns at about ten minutes to four and got in on the four o'clock tour.

There is a mile long trail from the visitor's center to the caverns that rises about 300 feet in elevation. It's paved all the way so it's not a bad walk. All along that trail there are interpretive signs and benches. If I had it to do over again, I'd have stopped at the signs a little more because the tourguide was the last person up the trail and we waited at the cavern entrance for at least fifteen minutes before she got there. The views of the valley, from the trail were incredible.

The entrance trail and the exit trail from the cavern entrance

The valley as viewed from the cavern entrance

Rhys and Garrett at the cavern entrance

The cavern entrance

There were thirty or so people on the tour. The tourguide was a young girl (high school age) who had been a tourguide there for three years. She was a little annoying. She had done the tour for so long that she had everything memorized and didn't need to think about what she was saying. Her voice was fairly high pitched and had almost no inflection. Plus, the script hadn't changed appreciably since I took the tour in the 70's and 80's. The jokes are just as bad now as they were back then. She took a few minutes at the beginning of the tour to tell us the history of the caverns and outline the rules, then we took the tour.

The caverns were discovered by deer hunters back in the late 1800's. The reason they are named for Lewis & Clark is that the expedition passed nearby. At the time of the naming, almost nothing had been named for Lewis & Clark, now you can't turn around in western Montana without bumping into something named for them or the expedition. The original guy who claimed ownership of the caverns used to take tours through them and would allow guests to break off stalachtites in one room as souvenirs. That went on for about thirty years, from the turn of the century to the great depression. The railroad claimed they owned the land, and the government agreed. Then the railroad gave it to the federal government who used the Civil Conservation Corps to make some improvements to the caverns. Improvements such as concrete steps and handrails instead of the rickety wooden stairs that the original guy had put in. Finally, the federal government turned it over to the Great State of Montana and Lewis & Clark State Park was born.

The caverns are an active drip cave, meaning the host rock is limestone and water dripping through the millenia has hollowed out the caves, dissolved the limestone and redeposited it in a form called calcium carbonate. That's the same thing pearls are made of, by the way. The calcium carbonate is redeposited in wierd, otherworldly forms called stalachtites, stalagmites, columns, flowstone, helictites and soda straws. Flowstone is the most common formation in solution caves and is formed by more "rapidly" flowing water. It's not rapid at all, just more than the others. Stalachtites grow from the ceiling down, while stalgmites grow from the floor up. When a stalachtite and a stalagmite meet it's called a column. Soda straws are tiny hollow stalachtites. Helictites are very rare, and very fragile and don't survive long in tourist caves. They grow in all directions an look as if gravity didn't have anything to do with their formation. There are very few helicities in Lewis & Clark Caverns. I told you I was a geology nut. I've told my geology professor friends that I'm a geology groupie.

Stalachtites and stalagmites

Flowstone on the cavern wall

More flowstone

Column surrounded by stalagmites

Soda straws

The last room of the caverns is the most active of all the rooms. It was discovered after the original guy died, so it hasn't had to withstand the vandalism. It's also the largest room in the caverns. Very beautiful. We posed for a group photo there. At the end of the tour, the tourguide asked if there were any questions and I asked, "What is Beethoven's birthday?" She was unprepared for a smart alek on the tour and to my credit, I got a bigger laugh with that than she did on any of her stale, tired jokes.

The Civil Conservation Corps blasted an exit tunnel through 500 feet of solid limestone. They blasted from two directions in the days before GPS and laser sights and were only off by a few inches. Pretty good work by those guys with old school surveying tools.

Formation in the last room

Group shot

Exit tunnel

After the tour, we drove back to Dillon and then another hour to the campsite which was along the Pioneer Mountains Scenic Byway. When we got there, we had the second hitch in our plans. The Grasshopper Creek Campground was closed for remodelling. It was dusk and I was close to being in trouble with Chimene. Luckily, we had a map in the car and she said it looked like there was another campground a little further north. As it turns out, there are many campgrounds along that scenic byway. We stayed at the Price Creek Campground for $8.00. It was a beautiful, private, quiet campground. We pitched our tent, ate a meal, enjoyed the fire for awhile and went to bed. I will stay there again. It was idyllic.

Price Creek Campground

At the campsite

The boys around the fire

After breakfast, we broke camp and headed over to Crystal Park. The Price Creek Campground was actually much closer to Crystal Park than the Grasshopper Creek Campground, so that was a bonus.

Crystal Park is 220 acres of quartz crystal goodness. It has been core drilled up to 180 feet and they were still finding crystals at that depth. Only hand tools are allowed at Crystal Park so this deposit will never run out. It is immense. It has been heavily dug, though so there are a few strategies for finding crystals. The easiest way is to walk the park and look for shiny things on tailings piles. Chimene found alot of crystals that way. Another strategy is to find areas that have not been dug. That's the hardest way because the whole of the mountain has been dug on. It looks like it was carpet bombed. The other strategy is to find a likely looking hole that has been worked and expand it. That's probably the easiest way to get to virgin ground. That's the way I chose to work and I found some stuff. Next time I go, though I will take a pick and some five gallon buckets to better work the diggings. It was a fun day. We stopped digging at about three o'clock and headed home. We were home several hours before dark.

The diggings

Tyler and Haydn screening for crystals

Tyler and Haydn watching the rest of us work

Gasoline...$100
Lewis & Clark Caverns....$55
Food....$50
Campsite....$8
Parking at Crystal Park....$5
Beautiful Memories....Priceless

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part VI

2011-08-30T08:56:00.000-06:00

Trip #6--R Mountain
Out west of Rexburg, Idaho there is a pair of volcanoes that dominate the skyline. They are called the "Menan Buttes". The north butte is the tallest and most of it sits on BLM land. The south butte is privately owned and a family farms in the crater. The north butte is referred to as "R Mountain" because of a big white R that is painted on it. Here in the west, it used to be traditional to paint a big letter on the side of a mountain to indicate something about the area. The R was either for Rexburg or Ricks College, I was never sure which. I believe it was for Ricks College because students from there are the ones who always painted the R. When I was a kid, every year at Ricks College homecoming, students would hike up to the R, cover it with kerosene soaked burlap bags and light it at nightfall. It would burn for an hour or so and was always a cool thing. Since Ricks College changed to BYU-Idaho the R has fallen into disrepair and is no longer being maintained.

The north butte, or R Mountain. The R is barely visible now

These two volcanoes are unique and are studied by vulcanologists from all over the world. First, they are among the largest tuff cones in the world, and second they erupted through the Snake River and the river gravels. These are the only tuff cones to do so in North America, so combining that with their size, these are very special cones. A xenolith is a rock with a different origin than the volcanic material embedded in the tuff. These volcanoes have xenoliths that are both lava rocks from previous flows and river rocks from the river gravel.

When I was in the eighth grade, our geology class climbed the north butte for a field trip. I may have climbed it one other time but I don't remember. I decided to take my sons up the R this summer and I'm glad I did. It was a fun hike and we had a great time doing it. When I climbed it before, I went up the east face trail. That trail has been closed and now there are two remaining trails on the south side and the west side. We chose to climb the west face.

My sons at the trailhead on the west face of R Mountain

The trail is well maintained and the first two or three hundred yards is sand and gravel. As the trail rises, it alternates between dirt, sand, and rock. The landscape is dominated by large sagebrush and juniper trees and the further up the mountain you go, bizarre rocky outcroppings that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie. The view out over the valley is breathtaking as well. To the northwest you can see the remnants of multiple lava flowsand evidence of collapsed lava tubes.

Sagebrush and Junipers

Lava flows and collapsed lava tubes

Rocky outcropping

Toward the summit there were many small caves and overhangs. In one we found evidence of animals using it for shelter, as there were twigs and bark and leaves gathered together in what looked like a den.

Random cave near the summit

The R Mountain is climbed daily and frequently and is well maintained. The BLM wishes people to stay on the trail up the face because native plants have been trampled and erosion has ensued, so in places they have built rail fences along the trail to keep people from sensitive areas. At the summit, the climb becomes steeper and they have placed a chain railing there to assist climbers. Once on the rim, the view is really incredible. To the East is the city of Rexburg, to the south is the second butte, to the west is the desert and farmland and to the north is the Island Park Caldera. At any point on the rim, the crater is also visible. There are a few trails up on the rim. One trail follows the rim all the way around and another cuts through the crater. We only had time to do about half the rim trail and then cut through the crater as we had a Boy Scout court of honor to attend that night. We chose to do the south rim.

The crater from the west rim

Veiw to the west from the rim

The south rim has many strange rock formations and appears very alien and rugged. Xenoliths are abundant. There are interpretive signs in several places on the rim that talk about the geology, biology, ecology, and botany of the buttes. It all makes for an interesting hike. We wildcatted around the rocks of the south rim for awhile and explored some of the formations before we found the crater trail and headed for home. We found a basin or depression that appeared to have water in it in the spring and after rainclouds. We imagined that this would be a place where some of the lizards, birds and other animals that populate the buttes would come to drink. This was another great day.

Basin

Rock formations on south rim

Strange rock formation

A xenolith

Alien landscape

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part V

2011-08-29T23:58:00.001-06:00

Trip #5--Sentinel Meadows

Chimene and I decided we needed to get away, just the two of us, so we scheduled a day trip into Yellowstone to do a little hiking. This was one of those days that we wanted to see things you don't normally see in the park. We opted for a short hike just before Madison Junction called Harlequin Lake. I hadn't been on this particular hike since I was a teenager, so I thought it was time for us to see it. Harlequin Lake Trail is a short hike, only about a half mile long to a cute little lake covered in lilypads. It was nice, but not a trail I would wish to hike again. It was short and once you are at the lake there is nothing to do because the tree line is right up to the shore. I wanted to see it after the fires of 1988 came through. It had been a much sparser forest back then, but after it burned, the new growth is so heavy that it is almost impassable. It's a trail worth doing once every twenty-five years or so, I guess.

Harlequin Lake

We decided to take the Firehole Loop Road, which is something we almost always do when visiting Yellowstone. There are several sets of falls along this stretch of the Firehole River. There is a small falls furthest downstream, then the larger more picturesque falls that everyone stops to photograph, then the swimming area, and finally above the swimming area is another falls that we had never explored before. We hiked down to the water's edge to view this section of the falls up close. We were glad we did. It was quite stunning.

Chimene and I at Firehole Falls

The upper section of the falls

We stopped at our second favorite pinicking area at Fountain Flats Drive, photographed some random elk and paid our respects to Mattie S. Culver. She was the wife of the innkeeper at Fountain Flats in the 1800's. She died of consumption in March and the ground was too frozen to bury her so her husband, E. C. Culver froze her body in two whiskey barrels laid end to end and waited for spring to bury her. To this day, you can wade out in Nez Perce Creek and pick up white "rocks" and find parts of broken plates and bowls. When the Culvers would break a piece of china at their inn, they would toss it in the creek. That "trash" is now an historical park relic and is illegal to remove from the park.

A random elk at Nez Perce Creek/Fountain Flats Drive

Mattie's grave

We picked up the trailhead to Sentinel Meadows at the end of Fountain Flats Drive and Ojo Caliente spring. Ojo Caliente is a very hot pool that boils down into the creek. In fact it's the hottest water in the park at 211 degrees. When I was a teenager, we used to come into the park at night and swim in the river just below Ojo Caliente. It was some of the nicest water in the park and would alternate between very warm water and cool water depending upon where you swam.

The old swimming hole at Ojo Caliente

In the 1870's, the army was garrisoned in these meadows and named them "Sentinel Meadows" for the three large thermal mounds that dominate the valley. Superintendent Norris, the second superintendent of the park discovered a hot spring that was just the right temperature for a nice leisurely soak. The soldiers would do their laundry in the spring and bathe in it as well. Norris built a small log building at or over the spring and called it "Queen's Laundry Spring" and the structure was called the "Soldier's Bathhouse". I had hiked to Soldier's Bathhouse when I was a teenager but hadn't been back since. We decided to find the bathhouse but didn't have any luck and ended up having to blaze our own trail back to the car. After we returned, I looked at a map and researched where we had gone wrong and next time I'm sure we will find the structure. When I was a kid, we used to go hot-potting all the time, but now it's very illegal and the punishments are prohibitive so it's no longer worth it. I do miss that though.

The Sentinels

When we were blazing our own trail back to the car, we stumbled upon a random bison. He was too tired to gore us so we escaped unharmed. On the way back to the car, Chimene noticed a really cool rock outcrop and decided that we needed to climb it. On one side there was a cute little geyser, but on top the view was spectacular. We will definitely do this hike again.

Random bison

Really cool tree roots

Random rocky outcropping

Random thermal feature

The view from the random rocky outcropping

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part IV

2011-08-29T17:58:00.001-06:00

Trip #4--Lava Tubes

My son-in-law, Nick enjoys exploring and caving. No matter where he goes, he always finds cool stuff to do. Then he shares it with the rest of us. When his friend, John came to visit last month, Nick took John and I and my older sons, Tyler and Haydn out in the Idaho desert to go exploring.

The Idaho desert north of our town was created by lava flows on top of lava flows. In some canyons, there are up to seven separate lava flows visible. When lava flows, sometimes it flows into a channel and when it does, the sides and the top of the flow cool faster than the middle, so a hard shell is created. That shell can be thirty or forty feet thick, or more. Eventually, the molten lava flows out and all that is left is a hollow tube. Thousands of years later, sometimes a side will collapse and expose the tube. Sometimes conditions are just right and ice will form in the tube and there will be ice year round. They call them, Ice Caves.

Sometimes animals used them for their dens, early Americans used them for shelter and there is evidence that some native peoples have used the ice caves for preservation of food. During the Cold War, part of the defensive strategy of the United States was to use some of these natural caves to shelter local populations in the event of a nuclear strike. We have one such cave in the desert here. They were called the Civil Defense Caves and during the Cold War they were stocked with food and water and supplies. They were supposed to shelter 8000 people.

While we were in the desert, we spelunked three caves. The first was the ice cave, the second was a lava tube with no ice and the third was the Civil Defense Caves.

Cave #1-The Ice Cave
This cave has Ice year round. To get back into it there is a slide worn into the ice from so many people climbing in it year after year. There are a couple of large chambers and areas where the roof has collapsed so the tunnel is narrow. At the end of the main tube there is a frozen waterfall. Above the main tube is another tube that also has ice in it. We spelunked in both of them.

Rock formations such as this indicate the presence of a collapsed lava tube

Nick, Tyler, Haydn and John getting to the Ice Cave

The Ice cave lava tube has several areas where the ceiling caved in. To get to the cave you have to climb through several of these areas.

The entrance to the Ice Cave

The ice begins within the first fifteen feet underground in the ice cave. The main tube has a rope embedded in the ice that you can use to aid yourself down into the main chamber. After that you have to navigate around a huge ice dam to get into the rest of the cave. This involves laying on your back and kicking off the ceiling to propel yourselve through the tube.

John at the ice slide

To get to the upper chamber you have to do a little rock climbing with toe holds and finger holds. It isn't too tough, but one false move and it could be catastrophic. When you get into the tube, however, the ice crystals on the ceiling are very beautiful.

Ice crystals on the ceiling

Haydn, Tyler and me at the end of the upper cave

The view, emerging from the Ice Cave

Cave #2--The Lava Tube
Nick has lava tube radar, so he set out across the desert for a hundred yards or so and found another lava tube. This one was much more pristine than the Ice Cave. This lava tube wasn't collapsed as much as the Ice Cave, so it was long and round. Almost perfectly so. We were able to cave in this one for about a quarter mile before it became impassible. It was very cool inside.

Nick at the entrance of the second cave.

Inside the second cave.

Haydn, Nick and Tyler inside the perfectly round tube.

Cave #3--The Civil Defense Caves
The Civil Defense Caves are about fourteen miles outside of Rexburg, Idaho on the desert. Nowadays they aren't full of supplies or water, but they are a destination for history buffs, geologists and spelunkers. I had been here once before, when I was a teenager, but I didn't have a flashlight and stayed in the opening, didn't venture any deeper than the existing light would allow. I also think I was on a field trip and the teacher wouldn't let us go very far into the caves.

Dirt road from here

Entrance to the Civil Defense Cave

Inside, looking out.

Haydn and John inside cave to show scale

The Civil Defense Caves are two ends of a massive lava tube. The ceiling in most places was forty to fifty feet high. The only places it wasn't were the areas where the ceiling had collapsed and there was rubble on the floor. The main cave is 3000 feet long and about twenty yards wide. This is a large lava tube and it was the government's idea for surviving a nuclear attack. Gives new meaning to the term, "Bomb them back to the stone age."

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part III

2011-08-29T12:51:00.000-06:00

Trip #3--Union Falls

My son Haydn went on a trip with the Varsity Scouts this summer, called High Adventure. They camped near the Bechler area of Yellowstone, just outside the park and made day hikes into the park. Since we have been obsessed with Yellowstone's waterfalls for the last three or four years I thought it would be fun to take the hike with him to Union Falls.

Union Falls is the second highest waterfall in Yellowstone National Park, and is so named because two rivers meet at the falls and their waters mingle on the way down. It is very spectacular and only a small percentage of park visitors ever see it. The trail takes hikers deep into the backcountry of Yellowstone and many people camp along the trail. It is possible to do the hike as a day trip though, but it is a long one. The hike is 7 miles one way, but at the end there is a side hike of another half mile to a swimming hole that is a must if you make the hike to Union Falls. With the side hike, it became a sixteen miler.

We drove from Ashton, Idaho along the Grassy Lake Road and parked on the far end of the dam. Grassy Lake sits just outside of Yellowstone. The trail we took is called, Mountain Ash Trail. There is only about a 300 foot elevation shift, but you lose it and gain it several times during the hike. The trail is through a beautiful forest of white pine, lodgepole pine and douglas fir. The undergrowth is lush and green. It was a very pleasant hike. Most of it was shaded. We had one major river crossing where we had to get wet, but the rest of them had fallen logs that we could cross.

Haydn at the river crossing

Leaders and a scout crossing a stream

A view from the trail

The last half mile was the toughest because it's all uphill and sandy so it's quite a slog to get there. After hiking the face of Table Rock, though I wasn't complaining. Once we got to the falls, though the view was breathtaking. The vantage point the next photo was taken from was about 150 yards away and still the mist from the falls was everywhere. That was very refreshing after hiking through the hot sun the last mile or so.

Union Falls

Haydn and I in front of Union Falls

After that, we ate lunch and then made the pilgrimage to the swimming hole. The neat thing about the swimming hole is there was another waterfall.

At Scout Pool

This was a great day.

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part II

2011-08-29T11:27:00.001-06:00

Trip #2--Table Rock

My son turned 12 in the middle of scout camp this year. On his twelfth birthday the scouts were scheduled to climb Table Rock. I decided to climb it with him.

Table Rock is a very popular hike in the Teton Range. It doesn't require any technical climbing, just hiking. There are two major trails to the summit of Table Rock, the Huckleberry Trail and the Face Trail. The Huckleberry Trail is a switchback trail, about 7 miles from the trailhead to the summit and the face trail is about 4 miles without many switchbacks. The elevation gain on both hikes is 4000 feet. That makes the Face Trail brutal.

Table Rock is a large sedimentary rock about 10 yards wide by about a hundred yards long. It's elevation is 11,106 feet above sea level. Approximately the elevation of base camp on Everest. From Table Rock you get the best view of the west face of the Grand Teton. Once you summit and see that mountain, all thoughts of, "was this really worth it?" melt away.

I climbed Table Rock twice when I was a scout and attended Treasure Mountain Boy Scout Camp. Both times I climbed it, though we took the Huckleberry Trail. This year, however there was more snow than usual in the Tetons and the spring runoff had washed out four bridges and the streams were impassable on Huckleberry. In addition, the switchbacks for the last two miles were covered with ice. The part of the trail that was iced over has sheer cliffs dropping off over 3000 feet. Huckleberry wasn't an option this year. We climbed the face.

I was a little concerned for my twelve year old, wondering if he could make this climb. That was one of the reasons I decided to go. I also wanted to celebrate his birthday with him on Table Rock. I thought that would be cool.

We started out on the trail at about 7 AM and it didn't take very long for me to realize that my son did not need my help. Within the first mile the faster hikers outpaced us and I didn't see any of them again until we reached the summit. Rhys, my son was in that first group. Out of 17 people that climbed, my son was the fifth person to summit. I was the last.

About a mile up the trail, two of the scouts told the scoutmaster that it was too hard and they didn't want to do it. They tried to convince us to go back down the trail. He and I had to pep talk those two boys to get them to finish the hike. We took as long as we needed to and rested alot, but they finally decided that this mountain was not going to beat them. I was proud of them. The last mile and a half, they pushed ahead and summitted well ahead of the scoutmaster and me.

The Face Trail is very steep, and there is a sign at the trailhead that says it is not recommended. I have bad knees from an injuy I sustained in grad school, so the going was a little rougher for me than some of the others. The scenery was magnificent though. We set goals for how far we would go before we rested and made it up the mountain that way. Most of the elevation gain was in the first two and a half miles. The last mile and a half, the elevation gain was steady but very manageable. The problem with climbing a mountain, though is that every time you cross a ridge, it seems there's another ridge in front of you that needs to be crested.

Just before the summit, there is a field of fractured boulders that was very interesting to me. It was all sedimentary rock and fossil bearing. The neatest fossils were the worm burrows. I don't know the age of the fossils, but there are worm tracks all through some of the boulders. Among the other fossils I saw were rain impressions. Those were very cool as well.

After the boulder field were large patches of snow and at this point of the climb I knelt down several times for several minutes at a time to ice my knees. I don't know if I'd have made it up the summit if it hadn't been for the snow. When I finally got to the summit, Rhys came down to guide me up to the top. That was very cool. No one told him to do it, he came down for me. I appreciated that. When I got to the summit, all 16 of us sang "Happy Birthday" to my son on Table Rock. It was a great day.

Rhys and I on Table Rock

How I Spent My Summer--Travelogue: Part I

2011-08-29T09:38:00.004-06:00

Because I teach three semesters, my summer doesn't start until the middle of July. Usually I have a little time during June and July to kick back and enjoy some family time in Yellowstone, but this year I had a very large production of Oedipus going up onstage and I didn't have time to do anything else. My garden suffered, my leisure time with the family was non-existent. All I could do was work.

We made up for lost time in the last several weeks, though and have done a great deal since. I will break this up over several blog posts. You can click on the photos to view them larger.

Trip #1--Yellowstone
This was a whole family trip. Nick and Cynthia and their kids, Ashley, Chimene and I and the boys. It was the Fourth of July and we decided to spend it in Yellowstone instead of going to Idaho Falls to brave the crowd of 100,000 people or so gathered to watch Frank VanDerSloot blow a million dollars. After the parade, we headed North to Yellowstone and met up with our good friends, the Airths at Sheepeater Cliffs for a picnic.

Sheepeater Cliffs is my very favorite place to picnic in Yellowstone. Its an exposed cliff of columnar jointed basalt next to the Gardiner River. After the picnic, we climbed the cliff.

Climbing Sheepeater Cliffs

After the climb, we hiked for a half mile or so along the bank of the Gardiner River to a beautiful cascading waterfall that isn't marked, I'm not even sure it's named. This waterfall is mainly seen by fishermen because almost no one else ever takes this trail. That's a pity because it's magnificent. Three or four years ago, we went on a trip to Yellowstone and decided, "You know how we drive past things and say, 'one of these days we should stop and see that?' well, today is 'one of those days'." We hit all the side attractions instead of the big touristy places and rediscovered how exciting Yellowstone can really be. That was how we discovered this particular waterfall. We have been back every year ever since. We have also gone on a pilgrimage to see as many of the park's 300 waterfalls as we can. We love the hidden Yellowstone.

Cascades on the Gardiner River

Kids, grandkids and friend on the trail

After the hike to the falls, we drove up to Mammoth Hot Springs because our friends had never seen it. Mammoth Hot Springs is a shadow of it's former glory, unfortunately because of some earthquakes and tremors the plumbing under the feature has changed. It's still spectacular but not anything like it once was.

One of the better views of Mammoth Hot Springs

After walking the boardwalks, we went to the lodge at Mammoth and had ice cream. No summer is complete without eating the ice cream in Yellowstone. It just tastes better than anywhere else.

We made it home before dark and had our obligatory fireworks display with our friends. All in all, a great day.

Back on the blog

2011-08-29T08:47:00.000-06:00

I took a very long hiatus from blogging, but now I think I'm ready to get back on the horse. Just to update.

Concerts I have been to...

2010-06-28T01:05:00.000-06:00

Rock Music has been important to me for as long as I can remember. I used to listen to my brothers' LP's and 45's when I was a little boy. They were both more than ten years older than me.

The first LP I ever bought was Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". Great album. Still a great album. I am sad that albums are going away and I-Tunes is taking over. We are becoming a "greatest hits" people. When the album goes all the way away, we will lose what was great about them, the deep cuts. Almost all the albums I have, I start spinning the hits first, and then find my way deeper in the collection. That's where I find some of the richest music, some of the most meaningful. The deep cuts become more important to me than the hits.

I also remember saving money as a boy because every now and then I'd have enough to go to a record store. I loved going to the record stores. They always smelled like patchouli. Seemingly endless racks of vinyl records in wooden crates, arranged alphabetically by artist. The stores were dimly lit and there was always good music playing. Only cool people worked at record stores. There were always "cut-out" bins in the record stores as well. Cut-outs were surplus albums that the labels weren't pushing anymore, didn't sell very well the first time around, so they would put a saw cut through about an eighth of an inch of the cover to mar it and sell it at a deep discount. You couldn't go wrong with a cut-out because they were so cheap, and often you'd find a real good album. I bought Heart's album "Magazine" in a cut-out bin. I've always loved that album. I recently re-bought it as a cut-out CD.

When I was in the sixth grade, The Carpenters were a very big deal. They had a song called, "Sing" that had a children's chorus. Their production manager contacted the local music teachers in every town they were to play in and arranged the best sixth grade class to sing onstage with them. My sixth grade class was picked so I got to sing with Karen and Richard Carptenter. I was the shortest kid in the class, so I was at the end and Karen put her arm around me and sang to me, looked in my eyes and smiled. She had big teeth. Steve Martin openened for them before he was big.

When I was in high school, Pocatello, Idaho was a stop along the concert way. I never went to shows there for some reason or another. A couple of the shows I missed and lived to regret missing were Fleetwood Mac and Van Halen in the late 1970's.

When I was in college, my favorite band was The Cars. They had scheduled a North American tour and were scheduled to play at the University I was attending. On the day the tickets went on sale, my friend and I were on our way to purchase ours and the announcement on the radio said that The Cars had disbanded. Arrgh!

Then life happened. I finished college, went to grad school and in my last year there, Sir Paul McCartney did a North American tour and played Ames Iowa which was just a few hours south of Mankato, Minnesota where I was living. I bought tickets for my wife and I and we went to see him.

Paul McCartney
July 18, 1990-Ames Iowa
This was the tour when Paul finally acknowledged that yes, indeed he was a Beatle. From the time The Beatles broke up until the 1989 tour, McCartney had avoided playing The Beatles catalog in his concerts, instead playing solo material and Wings material. This concert blew my mind. It was incredible. I was really into The Beatles during graduate school, so this concert was very timely. The concert consisted of about half old Beatles songs, and the other half was solo material and Wings. He also covered John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." The concert ended with an eleven minute version of "Hey Jude" and we all sang along from the beginning. Then the band left the stage and the lights came on. We screamed for another ten minutes demanding an encore, and finally the lights went down and a pin spot picked up McCartney as he rose up on an elevator in the middle of the stage. Just him and an acoustic guitar, and he played "Yesterday". When he was done, he bowed and left the stage. We all left because we knew that if he played anything else it would ruin the feeling we had right then. It was almost sacred.

The Rolling Stones
February 1st, 2003-Denver, Colorado
My best friend is the world's greatest Rolling Stones fan. For twenty years he had been trying to get me to see a show with him. I had put him off because of money or location, or any other reason I could think of. Finally, in July of 2002, I got a fairly terse phone call from him that went like this, "Gary, The Stones are going to be in Denver on February 1st. I just bought you a ticket. You owe me a hundred dollars!" So I went. And I had a great time. The show was fantastic. I told him after that he'd never have to sell me on a Stones show again. During the "Forty Licks" tour, they featured a classic Stones album each night. The night we saw them they hit "Let it Bleed" which at the time was my favorite Stones album. Highlights of that show were, Can't You Hear Me Knockin', Gimme Shelter, Monkey Man, and Street Fighting Man. The whole show was tight though. It was awesome. After the first couple of songs, though, a guy who looked surprisingly like Charles Manson was dragged kicking and squirming from the concert. I asked the guy next to me what happened. He said the dude was smoking pot. That was interesting to me, because a girl on the other side of me was smoking it all night and the guards didn't kick her out. She was pretty and blonde, and had her shirt tied up in a knot just below her perfect ladieberries so her belly was bare. I wonder if that had anything to do with it?

The Rolling Stones
November 22nd, 2005-Salt Lake City, Utah
Okay, first of all, the concert was pretty decent, although it was right after Keith had fallen from a Coconut tree in the Carribean and had sustained some brain damage. I think the brain damage was buffered by the copius amounts of drugs he had taken over the years. The high points of this show were You Got Me Rockin' and Sympathy For the Devil. I have to say that the Salt Lake crowd is terrible. They were lethargic for almost all of the show. It was as if they wanted to be seen seeing The Stones rather than just seeing The Stones. When they finally did Satisfaction toward the end, the crowd finally got into it, demanded encores and didn't realize they'd already had two. Were I Mick Jagger, I'd not play Salt Lake again.

The Best Two Days Ever
The Who and The Rolling Stones
November 13th and 14th, 2006-Salt Lake City, Utah and Nampa, Idaho
I've covered this in great detail in another post called "The Best Two Days Ever..." Suffice it to say, The Who were inspired, and the Stones were incredible also. Highlights of The Who show were all the hits, of course, but Eminence Front was astonishing, and the encore was a mini version of Tommy. Then Roger and Pete came out with an accoustic guitar and played "Tea and Theatre" from the new album. That's another of those deep cuts I was talking about earlier. The Stones were in great form as well, and the highlight of that show was Keith singing, "You Got the Silver" with Ronnie playing slide guitar.

Eric Clapton
March 8th, 2007-Salt Lake City, Utah
Eric Clapton was incredible. The show was my birthday present to me. First he had Robert Cray as the opening act, and as soon as the concert was over I went out and bought Robert Cray's "Live From Across the Pond" CD. I've never done that before with an opening act. He had two young turks with him, Derek Trucks from the Allman Brother's Band, and Doyle Bramhall III from his own band. The way the three of them would solo was a clinic in great guitar playing. Clapton always batted clean-up and blew the other two out of the water. In the end, Clapton invited Robert Cray on the stage and they did an epic version of "Crossroads". Unreal.

3 Dog Night
Idaho Falls, Idaho (don't remember the date)
This highlight of this show was the fact that I was able to go with my two daughters. We had a "Daddy/Daughter's" date. The three of us have always like 3 Dog Night, and we had a great time together. The band really looked as if they should be playing Branson, Missouri, though. I think they were all playing to a click track. The vocals may have been live, but comparing them to The Stones, The Who, McCartney or Eric Clapton, it seems that time has passed them by. The music was good, the set list was good, but the band really consisted of a bunch of old men. The big highlight of the show musically was an inspired version of "You Can Leave Your Hat On."

Alice Cooper
Idaho Falls, Idaho (don't remember the date)
One of my buddies from church called me up and said he had a ticket to see Alice Cooper in Idaho Falls that night, and he couldn't make it. He'd been called into work at the last minute and did I want his ticket. Of course I said "Yes!" I got out of the tub, got dressed and drove down to Idaho Falls and saw Alice. Okay, it was the darkest concert I've ever seen. In fact it's the darkest anything I've ever seen. I want to see it again! At no point did Alice ever call good evil or evil good, however. The end of the show saw Alice hanging from a gallows. Great shock rock. I don't know why he's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a travesty.

Up and Coming
I have a ticket to see Roger Waters perform "The Wall" in November
I hope to see Al Green open for Buddy Guy who will then open for BB King at Red Rocks.
The next night, Heart is playing the Paramount in Denver. We hope to see these back to back.
Kiss is playing Salt Lake City, I hope to see them
Bob Dylan is playing Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I hope to see him as well.

I don't know how many of these shows I really will see, but I already have the ticket for Roger Waters.

A Few Country Shows
I've been to a few country shows because I love my wife and she loves country. I don't.

I took her to see Reba Macintyre in Buffalo, New York. Reba had a bunch of line dancers in front of her stage and I realized that country line dancing is just disco dancing with tight jeans and cowboy boots.

I have taken her to see Keith Urban twice in Salt Lake City, Utah. What I've found about Keith Urban is that 75% of the audience is female. The other 25% is male who are there because their wives are there. He is a very good guitar player though.

I took her also to see Montgomery Gentry in Salt Lake City. The audience there is so hit and miss. For some shows they are loud and wonderful, but others they are lethargic and dead. Montgomery Gentry was one of those. The dude in the big hat couldn't work the audience up for anything. Jeff Foxworthy opened for them.

Life ain't fair!

2010-06-23T01:39:00.000-06:00

When I was in college, I had a terrible bout of illness that literally had me bedridden. I don't remember if I ate anything, there was no-one to fix me meals. I was so weak that one day I actually soiled myself and lay in the filth for several hours before I could move enough to clean myself up.

I was diagnosed with Giardia Lamblia which is a Rocky Mountain parasite. I always thought you got parasites in South America or Africa or exotic places like that. The doctor tested me for Giardia, by the way but never found any traces of them in my specimen. For twenty-five years I dealt with the aftermath of Giardia Lamblia and everything that went along with it. For twenty-five years I never went very far away from Pepto-Bismol or Immodium AD.

When I was a teenager, I was eating a celery stick and noticed that my mouth went numb. No big loss, I could live without celery. My sister Jolene also had a bad reaction to celery. In total I have two siblings and my mother all allergic to celery. Bizarre, I know.

I love shrimp, but about ten or fifteen years ago I noticed that every time I ate shrimp I got a headache. I wasn't about to stop eating shrimp, so I combatted the problem by ingesting some Ibuprofen about twenty minutes before I'd eat, so no problem, right? Well, about five years ago I performed my usual strategy, took the pills and then ate the shrimp. They were butterflied and breaded prawns. Delicious. But then my throat constricted and I could no longer swallow. Life just ain't fair.

I'm getting older, and more concerned about my health now, so I've been to the doctor and had tests done. Turns out I have high cholesterol and am insulin resistant. I also have sleep apnea, so now I sleep with a C-Pap machine. Life just ain't fair.

Last July I went to the doctor to find out why I didn't feel good most of the time. This doctor is unlike other doctors I have been to. They are all interested in treating symptoms, but he goes for the source of the problem. I like that. He thought there might be a Cortisol problem, so we ran some tests to find out. My Cortisol was just fine, but I found out that I am allergic to Soy, to Milk, and especially to Gluten. That was one of the most discouraging days of my life. Life ain't fair.

Turns out, I most likely never had Giardia Lamblia. The doctor who treated me all those years ago didn't know anything about gluten intolerance, so he looked up my symptoms and came up with what he thought was most likely. The cure was worse than the illness. The horse pills I took for Giardia were horrible and did lasting damage to my guts. That was another thing the doctor found out when he diagnosed me with the gluten allergy.

So in a nutshell:
High cholesterol-most meat is out
Insulin resistante-sugars and carbs are out
Milk allergy-even as an ingredient it hurts me (I knew about the milk allergy for a long time, by the way)
Soy allergy-it's getting increasingly difficult to find anything that doesn't have soy in it.
Gluten allergy-almost everything is made with some type of wheat product.

So what can I eat? Not very much.

The good news is I'm losing weight and I don't have the digestive problems like I used to. Soy is a natural source of Estrogen, which would explain why so many men have man-boobs.

What my year is like

2010-06-22T00:31:00.000-06:00

I'm 48 years old now, and my life has kind of settled in. I used to feel like a fly, buzzing around waiting for a piece of rotten meat to land on, but now, we've lived in the same house for ten years. This is the first time I have lived in a single dwelling that long in my whole life. When I went to graduate school in Minnesota, after we had lived in our apartment for 8 months, I told my wife that that was the longest I had ever lived in one home, continuously in my life. And it was true.

Now, however, I've settled into a pattern. Besides work, I have several mania that occupy my mind and my time. Most can be broken down by season, so I'll list them that way.

Winter
Of course Christmas and New Years are important holidays for us, and we celebrate them in style. Usually we invite several friends over for both holiday eve's and eat alot of finger foods, visit, play games and enjoy ourselves. On Christmas Eve, we put out Luminaries on our driveway to show that the Christ Child is welcome here.

Winter is also College Football Bowl Season which I am compelled to watch. I like any team that can come from a mid-major conference, bust into the BCS and win. I keep hoping BYU will be that school someday soon.

In Winter I also plant my garden (inside). I will plant somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 heirloom tomato plants. I love them, and enjoy watching them grow. It's the only thing I do that is slow, so it gives me solace.

Spring
Spring is when I really get the garden going. I have a PVC greenhouse that allows me to plant a little earlier and keep things growing a little later. I usually put the tomatoes and peppers in there. I also grow peas, carrots, beans, radishes, beets, onions, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers and broccoli. I love the garden. I try to be as organic as possible. I compost and don't use poisons on my garden.

I also start thinking about rocks and gemstones in the spring. I'll usually make at least one pilgrimage to the Teton Dam to collect Jade each year. There are also some cinder cones here that bear a plagioclase, sunstone material that is really pretty when cut. Sometimes I'll plan a Montana trip to go digging for Sapphires. Those are my favorites, and I like the Montana ones the best.

Summer
Of course the garden is still in full swing at this point, and we'll have the backyard looking really good because we like to entertain friends in our yard. We have one of the largest yards in the town in which we live. It wasn't intended to be that way, it's just the home we bought. Both my wife and I love the big back yard. When we drive up on the hill, we see the huge mansions set on very small pieces of property. My wife can't stand that. I agree. I'd hate to have a house that big and have neighbors that close.

Summer is a time for rockhounding. It's been a hobby of mine for forty years. I still can't get enough of it.

Fall
I'm a sucker for Halloween, and am determined to have a yard haunt this year. I'm usually too busy to do that at Halloween time so this year I'm starting early. I'm crafting a graveyard out front, and a witches lair for just inside the house. I'm pretty excited for that.

By late fall, the garden has given me everything it can and it's time to can the food. I do most if not all of the canning, jam making, dehydrating and food storing in our home. I don't mind, I really kind of like doing it. Both my brothers do the canning in their homes and I don't mind emulating them. I hope I have a large harvest this year because I bought a whole lot of extra bottles.

The other thing that occupies my mind in the fall is college football. I follow most of Division IA, but especially the teams that aren't from the privileged conferences. I like whichever teams play against the power conferences, and it's made sweeter every time they win.

So there you have it. My year in a nutshell

It's that time of year again...

2010-06-16T23:55:00.002-06:00

My Garden

Heirloom tomatoes

Yesterday I put 26 Tomato plants in the ground. This is a time of year that I love. Gardening season.

It wasn't always this way. I used to till the garden for my wife, but beyond that I didn't want to be involved. That all changed about nine years ago when she was pregnant and couldn't get around to do the garden. She said, "If we're going to have a garden, you will have to do it." So I did, grudgingly at first, but then it became a refuge, a place of solace, a place where time slowed down.

Her brother was living with us at the time, and he was, well, he was a piece of work. Still is. Don't get me started there. All he wanted to do was play video games and talk about him playing video games. When I'd come home from work, he'd start talking about the things he'd done in the video game that day and I'd walk out to the garden. I'd start pulling weeds and he'd keep talking. I would tell him that if he wanted to talk, he'd have to pull weeds. He'd pull a few and excuse himself to get a "drink of water" and would be missing in action for the remainder of the time I was in the garden. That was revelatory.

The next year, I took over the vegetable garden for good, and my wife has concentrated on the flower gardening. I happened to notice an advertisement about heirloom tomatoes the second year I had the garden, and I studied up on them to see what they were. The picture was really neat, it showed a tomato salad with a vinaigrette. Nothing but odd shaped and colored tomatoes. I had never seen anything like it, but because I'm a designer, I had to try them. The next season I purchased a kit with five different kinds of heirloom tomato seeds and became an heirloom gardener.

The first heirlooms I tried were: Caspian Pink, Big Rainbow, Green Zebra, Tigerella and Brandywine. They were very good, and different than any tomato we had ever grown before. I really loved them. The next year, though, I thought I was too busy to go to the effort of growing them from seed and purchased hybrid plants from the local nursery. The tomatoes I harvested that year were perfect in almost every way. Uniform size, smooth skin, perfect color, they all ripened at about the same time. What more could you ask? The problem was none of them tasted like anything. They were so bland I could almost not eat them. I vowed then that I'd be an heirloom gardener and have been ever since.

The picture above is a sampling of some of the heirlooms I planted a couple of years ago. Every tomato in the picture is ripe, including the green ones.

Following is a brief description of some of my favorite heirloom tomatoes that I have grown:

Besser-Cherry-Red: This is the best and sweetest cherry tomato I have ever grown. They are like candy and are extremely prolific producers. I have six children but only one boy that likes tomatoes. He and I will go into the garden together and eat the Besser's right off the vine. This is a grand tomato.
Big Red-Beefsteak-Red: This is a very good tomato for canning. I like to can stewed tomatoes and the large fruits from this tomato are easy to process and tasty too.
Brandywine-Beefsteak-Pink or Red: This is the king of heirloom tomatoes, but I admit not my favorite. Don't get me wrong, it is a very good tomato and I grow them every year, but there are others I like better. The flavor is great and they put up very well.
Caspian Pink-Beefsteak-Pink: This is a fairly large tomato with fruits averaging around 12 oz. It's big and meaty and a very tasty tomato. Great for hamburger slicing.
Mortgage Lifter-Huge Beefsteak-Pink to Red: This is the largest tomato I have grown. Fruits up to 24 oz. Big tasty beefsteak. Great for processing. I'm growing two of them this year. Story goes the man who developed this strain sold the plants and then the fruits at the side of the road and paid off his mortgage in four years.
Tlacalula-Pleated-Red: This is the oddest tomato I have grown. It's ribbed all the way around and has little channels inside where the seeds go. When you slice it horizontally, it looks like lace. It's also a very tasty tomato.
Costoluto Genovese-Pleated-Red: Another of the ribbed tomatoes. Very tasty and very pretty when sliced horizontally.
Opalka-Paste-Red: This is a Roma or Sausage style tomato. I use them for drying. I blanche, peel, srpinkle with Itallian seasoning and dry them in my dehydrator. The plants are very prolific.
Banana Legs-Paste-Yellow: This tomato is almost exactly like the Opalka, but is yellow instead of red. Also good for drying.
Yellow Pear-Pear-Yellow: This is another of the small tomatoes I grow each year. These are also like candy. My son and I will munch these off the vine as well. They produce like Zuchini, so don't plant more than one of them.
Black Krim-Beefsteak-Purple to Black: By far the ugliest tomato I have grown, but it is also my very favorite. It has an earthy, dusky taste that is rich and full, powerful. When you slice it, it looks positively rotten, but the flavor overrides any ugliness. This is my number one heirloom.
Cherokee Purple-Beefsteak-Purple: Whereas the Black Krim originated in Russia, the Cherokee Purple originated in North America. These are very much like the Black Krim in taste and texture, but are slightly prettier. Another of my favorites.
Paul Robeson-Beefsteak-Purple to Black: I had to grow this one merely because it was named after the great actor/singer, Paul Robeson. I worked in "The Paul Robeson Theatre" in Buffalo, New York. Had to grow it out of principle. This is a large tomato and very tasty.
Green Zebra-Plum-Green on Green Striped: This is a created heirloom, so it doesn't follow all the rules, but it is open pollinated. The taste is tangy and it's cool looking besides. This is my wife's favorite.
White Wonder-Beefsteak-Ivory: This is another of the weirder tomatoes I have grown. It's ivory colored when ripe and is positively the best hamburger slicer I've ever had.

I have grown forty or fifty varieties over the last ten years and these are my favorites. This year I planted twenty varieties, many of which I've never grown before, many I have. Throughout the season I'll keep this blog posted on the progress of the tomatoes. I'm sure I'll love some of the new varieties and they'll become part of the usual rotation.

Robin Hood Begins...

2010-06-12T03:16:00.001-06:00

First of all, Let me say I really wanted to like Ridley Scott's Robin Hood. There is so much to like about the character of Robin Hood from the original literature, of which almost nothing was gleaned by Scott or Russell Crowe to make this particular incarnation of the outlaw remotely likeable. From the revisionist history, through the wooden acting of Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett (could they make her more manlike?) to the anachronistic props, awkward cinematography, cheesy soundtrack and words thinly disguised as a script, this film was a misuse of millions of studio dollars and a colossal waste of two hours and twenty minutes of my precious time.

Of course I shouldn't expect an accurate portrayal of history from a Ridley Scott film. One needs only to look at Gladiator and his liberal use of revisionism to know that he is rarely impeded by the truth in storytelling. It's as if he believes his audience will be so enthralled with the story he is telling that they will forget to look up the facts. Or maybe he thinks he is telling the truth in some alternate Blade Runner universe. The closest encounter with historical fact in this film was that Richard the Lionheart was killed by a crossbow bolt to the neck. The events preceding the fatal injury and the events following bear no resemblence to the incident portayed in the film I saw tonight.

There was the intimation of the rebellious barons of England forcing John to sign the Magna Carta but alas, John evaded that in the movie while his alter ego in history did not. In this version, John Lackland seemed to have the upper hand in everything, while being a snivelling, pompous, arrogant, conceited, buffoonish two dimensional stock character. That could have been the fault of the actor, but this reviewer believes it is more likely caused by poor script writing. These are just a sampling of the liberties Ridley Scott has taken and continues to take with history when he is making films. Heaven forbid he should be shackled with the truth.
This being said, it is almost certain that the character of Robin Hood is a literary figure, not an historical one.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers couldn't capture the literary essence of Robin Hood either. The beginning placards talked about how Robin Hood became an outlaw by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and yet there was almost no other reference to it in the entire film. He wasn't even labled an outlaw until the last few lines King John spoke at the end of the film. The Sheriff of Nottingham who is a pivotal character in the story of Robin Hood was barely seen as a minor character with no real bearing on the action. Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Robin Hood's arch nemesis wasn't even mentioned, instead he was replaced by the antagonist Godfrey who is historically out of phase with the mythos by about a hundred years, give or take a decade or two.

The Merry Men were sidenotes in this version rather than being integrel to the plot. None of them were compelling enough in this film to convince me they belong in a (heaven forbid) sequel. This film seemed to be more like "Robin Hood Begins" than it did Robin Hood. Perhaps the sequel should be called, "The Green Knight."

Sometimes a poor script can be rescued with great acting performances. This was unfortunately not the case in Robin Hood. After Russell Crowe dogged Kevin Costner's portrayal of Robin Hood I expected so much more from him. Frankly, Crowe's version made me almost forgive Costner of his equally bad version and I found myself wishing for the good old days of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Crowe's portrayal of Robin Hood was equally as wooden in his portrayal of Maximus in another Ridley Scott film, Gladiator. There were times tonight I couldn't tell if I was watching Maximus, Captain Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander, or Robin Hood. The strong silent tough guy routine is getting old. Please, Russell, let us see the same passion in your acting that you exhibited when you were assaulting paparazzi.

Cate Blanchett, whom I almost always like by default whenever I see her in a film, could not overcome the frumpy costume, bad wig and bad writing to become a likeable ingenue. The costume was unflattering even though Scott tried to show how appealing she was by focusing shots through Robin's eyes at her buttocks and down her blouse as if he could in someway see something that was hidden from the rest of us. Between the two of them there was almost no chemistry, with the small exceptions when Robin told Marian to ask him nicely. Those two small moments were not enough to rescue this very long, very tedious film.

The one bright spot in the acting performances was an aged Max Von Sydow, whom I almost always like, and someone who has been acting for so long it should be automatic. Max did not dissappoint.

For the most part, the design of the film appeared to be accurate and well done. I especially liked the heavy chain mail that most of the characters wore during battle scenes. Some of the ruins appeared to be modern interpretations of what a ruin ought to be, and for a set designer like me that was distracting. I'm speaking specifically of the broken arch in Nottingham that people on horseback were shown riding through repeatedly as if they spent alot of cash building it and wanted to get their money's worth from it.

The design of the film seemed very credible until near the end when re-tooled WWII Normandy Invasion landing craft were employed to storm the beach at Dover. Never mind the fact that Phillip II of France never got past the planning phase of invading England, by the way. Peter Jackson got away with the WWII landing craft in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers because it was a different world and a different time they were portraying, so perhaps Scott decided he could too. Anachronism only works, though if you employ it throughout the film or you happen to be Monty Python.

As the film climaxed, I began to see out of place helicopter shots coupled with underscoring that sounded like it was trying to be heroic but somehow missed the mark. Some of the countryside they showed was stunning and magnificent but the movie had to be put on hold while the director decided to get the most out of the helicopter crew and show us some really pretty scenery. The shots reminded me of similar shots in The Lord of the Rings movies, but in those, the helicopter shots with the triumphant, heroic underscoring worked. The out of place shots in Robin Hood tended to take the momentum out of the film which was already tedious enough.

Speaking of tedium, the script writing was obvious and at times preachy. Sometimes it was downright ludicrous. For example, at the end of the film when the English are meeting the French at the White Cliffs of Dover and Maid Marian shows up in full, too small, battle armor with a host of either hobbits or lost boys, I couldn't tell which. It was as if the filmmakers were trying to have a Robin Hood meets Peter Pan, meets Lord Of the Rings moment. In LOTR though, Eowyn only had one hobbit, in Robin Hood, Marian had about twenty.

There were several moments in the film that hinted at a LOTR or Saving Private Ryan influence. The lighting of the beacons on the beach were reminiscent of the beacon lighting scene in The Return of the King. The beacon lighting in Robin Hood fell far short of it's counterpart, however. The arrows flying overhead at the battle on the beach were like many such scenes in the LOTR trilogy and also like similar scenes in Hero and yet in scope they were somehow lacking that kind of power in Robin Hood. It was like comparing a pea shooter to a bazooka. In the beach storming scene, there were several underwater shots reminiscent of the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan but with arrows shooting through the water instead of bullets. In short, most of the really interesting moments from the film seem to have been lifted from other films. This was so rampant through this film that I hardly think it was any kind of homage.

All in all I've seen at least six incarnations of Robin Hood, including my personal favorite, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn and the 1922 silent Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks. Of all the Robin Hoods, I would rank this one at or near the bottom battling with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for last place. I tried to like it and I wanted to like it, but alas the filmmakers did not fulfil their part of the contract. I'm fortunate that we waited to see it in the cheap theatre.

Recommendation: See this one only if you are an insomniac.

*Note* This review is solely the opinion of the writer. *Note*

Deluxe Witches Broom

2010-06-11T02:39:00.000-06:00

Deluxe Witches Broom

This is a variation of a broom prop I have made many times for different productions. I will post pics of some of the others that I have done so readers can see the difference between the standard version and the deluxe version. The goal with the deluxe version was to get a broom to look more like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. I'll discuss both versions, and show where I diverged from the standard version.

1. Materials:

Straw Broom (I bought a nice one for $13, but next time I do it, I'll buy a cheap one for about $7)

Oil Funnel (about $3)
Grass Skirt or Raffia (I found a bag of grass skirts at the local thrift store
Hot Glue (lots of it)
Fabric (ultra suede works well)
Trim
Spray Glue
Spray Paint

Tools

Bolt Cutters
Utility Knife
Pliers
Scissors
Glue Gun
Band Saw (can use Jig Saw or Hand Saw)

Step 1-Demolition:

First you need to remove the metal band. Bolt cutters work really well for this. On a cheap broom, there's often not a band at all. Second you need to remove the plastic twine that holds the bristles in place. This is done by cutting the twine with a utility knife and then pulling it out with the pliers.

Cutting the twine.

Pulling the twine.

Demolition complete

Architecture of the broom. If you pull back the outer layer of bristles, you will find a bundle of bristles inside that give the broom volume. Cheap brooms will have a much smaller bundle or none at all.

(At this point, by the way, you can choose to make a peasant broom by pulling all the outer bristles up and tying them to the handle with jute twine. That leaves the juncture between the top of the broom and the bottom very ugly, so wrapping that with alot of jute will mask it.)

Or you can continue on and make a witches broom...

Cutting the ferrule

Step 2-The Ferrule:

The Ferrule is made from an automotive oil funnel. The end is cut off to allow it to sleeve down the length of the handle. It's best to cut a little at a time so as not to cut the hole too big. This should be a snug fit, and almost be difficult to slide down the broom.

At this point you could choose to make a standard broom or go on to make the deluxe version. To make the standard witches broom, you need only decorate the handle, the ferrule and distress the bristles.

Decorating the handle can be whatever you like. I've done it with wrapping leather and tying beads and finger bones into tassles. You might pound brass furniture tacks into it. The sky's the limit.

To decorate the ferrule, I usually use spray adhesive and fabric to cover it, and then add some kind of trim.

To distress the bristles, you can cut them jagged on a band saw (be aware of where your fingers are at all times when using saws) or by hand with scissors. Then paint them unevenly with brush or spray paint.

Or you could go on to the deluxe version...

Fitting the ferrule.

Step 3-Securing the bristles.

When you remove the steel band and the plastic twine, you interrupt the integrity of the broom and you need to strengthen it. This is done by packing alot of hot glue into the bristle array.

Step 4-Attaching the grass skirt.

This grass skirt was designed for a table, I suppose for a luau decoration. I started by hot gluing two or three rows around the inner bundle. The next time I do this project, I will omit this step, because it was a big hassle and I believe it was unnecessary.

Step 5-Attaching the grass skirt part 2.

The grass skirt needs to be attached to the top of the bristle array. This is done by hot gluing several rows around the top of the bristles where they attach to the broom.

This is where I got frustrated with this project. I finally cut most of the outer array of bristles off and just dealt with the grass skirt. This is why next time I do this project I'll use a cheaper, thinner broom and not worry about the inner/outer bundles.

If you look at the Wicked Witch of the West's broom, you see that it's made of raffia, but has a rigid core which allows it to stand out for a ways before it droops. This is the reason I didn't just glue the grass skirt to a stick. I needed the rigid core to accomplish that.

Step 6-Decorating the ferrule.

The ferrule is decorated by applying spray adhesive to both the fabric and the funnel. It's important to glue both surfaces for a permanent bond, and it's also important after you have sprayed to allow a minute or two of open time to allow the glue to begin to cure. Don't give too much time, though because that is just as bad as not giving it as much. Either way you compromise your bond.

Once the fabric is applied to the ferrule, then it's time to decorate the ferrule with fabric trim applied with hotglue.

Fabric attached to ferrule with spray adhesive.

Trim being applied with hotglue

Step 7-Ferrule attached.

The ferrule can be attached with either glue or a mechanical fastener. I used a pneumatic stapler with 3/4" narrow crown staples

Step 8-Painting

First of all, this is not a good picture of the paint job. I'll swap this pic for a good one when I get it.

The painting was accomplished by spraypainting the bristles with Design Master Glossy Wood Tone, Design Master October Brown and Krylon Ultra Flat Black.

Things I'd do Different

I'd use a cheaper broom with less bristle
I'd not worry about gluing the grass skirt to the inside bristle array
I'd spray the bristles of the broom with spray adhesive to get the grass skirt to lay flat on it.
I'd decorate the handle somehow (I still might)

This is my first attempt at making a broom this elaborate. I learned many things as I built it tonight. The next time I build a broom like this I will update this tutorial.

My love affair with Halloween

2010-06-09T22:35:00.000-06:00

I think my first recollection of Halloween came at about age 5. My sisters were busy at the elementary school with their Halloween preparations. They could talk about nothing else. I knew that there would be trick or treating and spook alleys and the annual Halloween Carnival. And then the unthinkable happened. I got sick on Halloween. I couldn't go to the Carnival, couldn't do anything. I was heartbroken.

So I did the only thing I could think of and made my own haunted house. It wasn't much, but it did have a tunnel with cobwebs which I made from a child's table with string taped down on one end, and an electric chair. My Dad came home from work and I had him go through my haunt. He was a theatre teacher at the local college, so everything was a production with him. He made a big deal about the tunnel and acted scared, then I asked him to sit on my electric chair. He did and then he stood up really fast, because my electric chair consisted of a child's chair, a washcloth, and a straight pin stuck up through the washcloth. When he stood up, the washcloth was attached to his bottom.

The next year, Mom and Dad dressed me up like a hobo and I went to the Halloween Carnival. Dad, being a theatre teacher, applied a beard and mustache to my face with spirit gum. It looked very real and a kid came up to me and yanked on the beard. When it didn't come off, he was dumbfounded.

When I was in college, I was a Psychology major for awhile, and one of the cool things about the area I lived was that the State Hospital was in our town and every year they had a Haunted Mansion. This hospital was in an old Gothic Victorian building, so it was already scary, then add to that the fact that all the ghouls were mental patients. I was okay until the very end when a very big ghoul wearing a hockey mask and a trenchcoat came at me with a chainsaw, and it was going. When he brushed it across my legs I thought I'd wet myself (for the record, I didn't) Obviously, the chain had been removed, but the blade was still there.
Exhilirating!

My wife has been very good over the years to make really cool costumes for the kids and we've always liked Halloween together.

In recent years I've gotten into extreme pumpkin carving. Sometimes I carve portraits, sometimes I carve a pumpkin in a pumpkin. Usually we have between 8 and 10 carved pumpkins on our porch.

In the last couple of years, I have been designing the Halloween Concert for the Music Department at the University I teach at. They have offered to pay me, but I only take a portion of what they offer and take some of the props I built in lieu of full payment. That's how I ended up with two corpsed skeletons and 4 of my skulls.

It's June 9th and I'm already starting getting my haunt done for next Halloween.

Necronomicon Tutorial

2010-06-08T21:18:00.001-06:00

The Necronomicon Tutorial

This is a tutorial for changing the cover of a book, using found objects. Because most of the items were found kind of happenstance at a thrift store, I don't expect anyone to actually replicate this, rather to use the steps to create your own appliqued books

Many of the steps are covered in more detail on The Dragon Book Tutorial on this blog.

(Click on any of the pictures for a larger image)

1. Ingredients: This project came to be because of a fortuitous trip to the local thrift shop. I found a large book for $4.00, a rubber eye necklace for $.50 and an old "Hippy" belt for $1.00

2.Applique: For this step, I hot glued a portion of the Hippy belt to the spine, leaving the danglies in case I wanted to tie human finger bones or beads or stones into them later.

I also filled the medallion with hot glue to give it body as it was rather flimsy.

Then I applied the medallion to the book, also with hot glue. Because the medallion was made of rubber, it didn't take the hot glue very well, so I also nailed it to the book with four brass furniture brads. They look okay because I worked them into the design.

Step 3. Substrate: This step is covered in detail The Dragon Book tutorial. Do Not Skip This Step. I use either Jaxsan 600 or ViCryl, but I think Monster Mud would probably work if it were applied very thinly. Basically the substrat is used to give things a common texture so it will look uniform when painted.

Step 4. Layout: I picked an Art Nouveau font for this book because it seemed appropriate. I laid it out by counting the letters in the word, dividing by two, finding center on the book, starting in the middle of the word laying it out in both directions. That way the word is centered. I laid it out in pencil first then inked it with a sharpie.

Finished inking, now onto the next step.

Step 5. Raised Lettering: On the dragon book my daughter said I should do raised lettering, I didn't want to do it, but in between that book and this one, I decided I should try. After it was laid out and inked, I went over the inking with hot glue, trying very carefully to fill in all the black lines.

Done with the raised letters.

Step 6. Painting: This step is also covered in more detail in The Dragon Book Tutorial. I am fortunate to have a spray booth where I work, so I do my spray painting there and avoid toxic fumes. The first step is to base coat, and I did this with a red and a magenta spray paint. (note, I also taped out the eye medallion before I started to keep the paint from it.)

Then I did the spray and daub technique described in The Dragon Book Tutorial. The paint color I use for this is Design Master Glossy Wood Tone. It is sprayed on the book and immediately daubed off with a paper towel, leaving a very convincing faux leather look.

Step 7: Nailheads: The book didn't look finished to me, so I added some nailheads (brass studs that can be found in the craft area of most fabric stores) The nailheads look a bit bright here, but not to worry, they'll be knocked down in a later step.

Step 7: Metal Leafing: This step is also covered in greater detail in The Dragon Book Tutorial.

Applying the adhesive

Applying the metal leaf

Burinshing the leaf with a clean, dry brush

Leafing and burnishing done

Step 8: Schmutzing: Actually, I really only posted this tutorial because I didn't have my cameral available when I did this step on The Dragon Book Tutorial.

If you have applied metal leaf and nailheads, now is the time to dim them with a light dusting of Glossy Wood Tone.

Schmutzing is one of the details that give the book an old look, a used look, a dusty look. It makes the book look credible. It's acheived by taking some dark brown junk paint and laying it out randomly on the book, and then immediately dipping your brush in water and watering down the paint you have just applied.

Oh Oh, this looks bad, doesn't it?

You can also use the paper towel to remove the wet paint from areas you don't wish it to be. This will also take the glossy appearance away from the Glossy Wood Tone. I think that is essential for a credible project. I also gilded the edges of the pages with gold spray paint, also in the technique described in The Dragon Book Tutorial.

After the Schmutzing is dry (and I always use a hair dryer to help me get it that way because I'm impatient), I like to add a bit of flat sealer because I don't like the way the Schmutz paint feels when I hold it.

Voila, the finished book!

Gallery of oddball props

2010-06-06T16:41:00.002-06:00

I have been a professional properties master at the regional theatre level, I put myself through college as a properties master, and now that I'm a college professor, I teach a properties class. Here are some examples of prop work I have done. Some of it is for the class, some of it is for plays, some of it is for Halloween, and some of it is just for fun.

You can click on the images for bigger pictures.

Sven Forkbeard-Prop head I made for demonstration in my props class last semester.

I used a modified "skullandbone" technique. The tutorial for this can be found online at http://www.skullandbone.com/tutorial_02.htm

Sven-Showing cause of death

The Book of Count-This is a joint project. We built this book for the play, "Everyman". Jules Isaacs built the insides and I did the cover detail, build up, leafing, nailheads, painting etc... The book was built on the "Magic Coloring Book" premise. When Everyman looked through the book at the beginning, it was blank, but after he had scourged himself and repented of his sins, he opened it and all the pages were full. It caused some ooh's and aah's from the audience, because he did it in full view and the book never left the stage. pretty cool effect.

A full sized Bucky corpse that I did for the pirate themed Halloween concert at the University I teach at. They offered me cash, I took the skeletons!

The other full sized Bucky skeleton for the Halloween concert. This one lives in my office and mysteriously finds himself in my office chair, or hanging in the elevator from time to time. I don't know how that happens, but every now and then I get a note from the custodial crew...

A grail I made with a student for the play, "Everyman". We used a technique that I came up with. Basically you frankenstein a brass bowl and a brass candlestick together. This one we silver leafed.

A few more grails, some more elaborate than others. It's my goal to have as many grails as the knight in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" by the time I retire.

How my Dad died

2010-06-05T01:41:00.000-06:00

My Dad was larger than life. Everybody who knew him knew that. It was funny too, that at his funeral several people almost argued over which one of them was my Dad's favorite. The truth was that they all were. Dad had the singular ability to make anyone he met feel special and important.

He was an actor and a director of plays. He was quite the showman. Whenever he entered the room, it always seemed a little brighter around him.

Several years ago, Dad survived Leukemia. It took alot out of him and he confided that he never wanted to go through chemo again. He never seemed to have as much energy after that experience. Nevertheless, he tended his orchard, cared for a prodigious vegetable garden and made countless doll cradles for his granddaughters. Sometimes he found time to golf a few holes.

About a month and a half before he passed away, I had borrowed his pickup and was intent on returning it. I called him up with the intent to return it and he began melodramatically describing his horrible golf day and claimed it was over, he could die now. He went on and on, as he was wont to do. So I asked rather innocently, "Does that mean I don't have to return your truck?" He sputtered a bit and said I needed to return it. It was all in good fun, but as I look back there was a bit of self fulfilling prophecy at work. A month an a half later he was dead and I ended up with the truck.

Dad didn't feel well that day, but he and Mom decided to go on an Alaskan cruise anyway. Dad looked really unwell in the cruise pictures. When they got back, Dad went to the doctor and found out that he had Melanoma, and it was all through him. It was terminal. All of us had always considered Dad to be an immortal, so it came as quite a shock to us when we found out he wasn't going to beat this one.

Dad was a quick study, though. Once he found out he was terminal, he was ready to get on with it. He went downhill really fast, and then he kind of leveled off for a few days as if he didn't know what to do. He hadn't ever died before so he needed some direction. They went to the oncologist again and the good doctor told them what to expect. He also said it could take weeks or months to go through the next steps. When he got home from the doctor's office, it was as if he said, "alright, now I have a script, I can get to work."

What the doctor said would take weeks or months for him to do took days and weeks. At the very end, he leveled off again, and the hospice nurse came in and told us what to expect, and she said it could take days or weeks. Once she gave him his next "script", it took him hours to finish the job.

I got a call on November 10th that the end was nigh and we needed to come and see him. Halfway there, I told my wife, "Dad won't die today, he'll wait until tomorrow." She thought I was ridiculous for saying that, but I explained that Dad's favorite play was "Seventh Heaven". In a nutshell, it's about Chico and Diane, two lovers during WWI. Chico goes to war and is presumed dead. Diane tries to make do as best she can, but her evil sister tracks her down and starts to beat her and is going to sell her into prostitution, but then miraculously, on Armistice Day, November 11th, Chico returns, blinded but saves the day and casts the evil sister out. I told her that Dad would wait until Armistice Day to die. As a kid, I remember Dad pointing out every 11th of November that "on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the armistice was signed". It was an important day to him.

Dad stabilized, and we went home. The next day, Armistice Day, my wife and I drove to Rigby to see him. My family all gathered and at 11 O'clock we had a family prayer and my brother, Lloyd gave him permission to die. After that I read him one of his favorite poems that he had read at countless funerals, Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." When I read the line, "I hope I meet my maker to his face when I have crossed the bar.", Dad squeezed my hand. He still had a strong grip to the end.

He lingered throughout the day, and we took turns sitting with him. Mostly he slept. One time when I was in with him, he awoke and said he had had a dream. I quizzed him about it and he indicated that someone in his dream was asking him to come with him. He wasn't sure who it was. About four O'clock in the afternoon, my sister Paula ushered us all into the room and Dad was thrashing around on the bed. He was saying over and over again, "I'm cold! I'm so cold!" My sister-in-law, Renee ran to the laundry room and got hot towels from the dryer and draped them on him which calmed him down almost immediately. Then he got a surprised look on his face and proclaimed, "I'm dying. I'm dying! I have to go. Let me go!" Then he threw the covers off and started to crawl out of bed, reaching towards someone we couldn't see. Mom and my brother Bruce both grabbed his hands and stroked them and told him it was okay, he could go. We'd all miss him desperately, but he needed to go and they gave him permission to do so. Dad settled back onto the pillow, took some deep breaths, sunk into the "death rattles" and passed from this life.

I told the oncologist this story and he told me that it was remarkable because people with cancer that far advanced usually can't feel temperature and at the end are usually unable to speak. Of course it wasn't remarkable to me, because it was my Dad. He lived extraordinarily and he died extraordinarily. That was to be expected of him. He died well. Anyway, the oncologist said, "Gary, you don't understand. Your Dad made and exit!" And that was a great way to characterize that great actor's demise from this world.

When we organized the funeral, we decided to honor Dad by making the funeral one hour. He always liked promptness when he directed a show. My oldest sister, and my two brothers each gave speeches, my other sisters, the granddaughters and one of Mom and Dad's friends who is a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir all sang songs in between the speeches, and I also read four poems from Dad's favorite book of poetry in between the speeches. The program looked like it would be a very lengthy funeral, but we honored him and kept it right to an hour. Prior to the funeral, we told the bishop of their church, who was to preside over the funeral that if he wanted to say anything he could do it at the beginning of the service, but that we didn't want him to do so at the end. We had it planned out to the last detail and didn't want him to ruin the climax (the Mormon Tabernacle Choir lady's solo) with some homespun platitudes. He honored our wishes and it was a glorious funeral. Since he was a WWII veteran, an honor guard from the Idaho National Guard gave him a 21 gun salute, and my nephew, Brett who was in the Marine Corps assisted in folding the flag and presented it to my mother.

I miss him.

The Best Two Days Ever!

2010-06-04T01:20:00.001-06:00

Music has been very important to me for most of my life. I'm a big fan of blues based rock. I believe that for every emotion I have, I can find a rock song to express it. While I was mid-life crisising, the song that was the most meaningful to me was "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who. For some reason it resonated with me on many levels. The obvious connection to the song is that I happen to have blue eyes, but that is really tertiary in the scheme of things.

"No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man,
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

No one knows what it's like
To feel these feelings
Like I do
And I blame you

No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

When my fist clenches, crack it open
Before I use it and lose my cool
When I smile, tell me some bad news
Before I laugh and act like a fool

If I swallow anything evil
Put your finger down my throat
If I shiver, please give me a blanket
Keep me warm, let me wear your coat

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes"

(Pete Townshend)

For some reason that song was very meaningful to me in a dark time of my life. I don't feel the need to analyze it here, I don't really wish to revisit it in that kind of detail. Suffice it to say that it has personal meaning to me and I felt at the time that this song saved my life, or at least my soul.

My best friend is the world's greatest Rolling Stones fan. He and I have been the best of friends since 1983. I'll call him "Oss". You know you have a best friend when you can go your seperate ways for six years and then reconnect and it feels as though no time has passed. That's the kind of friend Oss is.

He and I both went to grad school, him in Denver, me in Minnesota. After working in professional theatre back east for a number of years, I decided to move back west. On the way back, I called Oss and told him we would be passing through Denver and wondered if we could crash at his place for the night, and spend the next day visiting before we left for our eventual home. We ended up staying for a week. We consider ourselves to be "twin brothers with different mothers". It was a great time. One of the strongest threads that bind the two of us together is our love of music.

For twenty years Oss had been trying to convince, cajole or demand that I went to a Rolling Stones concert with him. I always had an excuse. I didn't have the cash, I lived too far away, etc... Anyway, in July of 2002, Oss called me up and said quite tersely, "Gary, the Stones are going to be in Denver on February 2nd. I just bought you a ticket. You owe me a hundred dollars!"

So I went to a Stones show. It was incredible. They featured my favorite Stones album, "Let It Bleed". My favorite Stones song is "Gimme Shelter" and they played that as well. It was amazing. After the show I told him, "You'll never have to convince me to see them again." We've seen them twice since then.

The Who has been my favorite band since high school. My first recollection of them was seeing concert footage of them on TV when Pete was bouncing all over the place and Roger, in his fringed vest was swinging the microphone around his body, tossing it in the air and catching it just in time to sing. The show was great, but the music was solid as well.

Anyway, Oss and I saw The Stones in Salt Lake City on November 22nd, 2005 and then at the end of that tour they decided to add a half dozen dates in venues they had never played before. One of those venues was Boise Idaho. Oss found out about that and called me and we agreed it was historical and we had to do it. We ponied up the cash and got our tickets. About a week after we got the tickets, Oss called me up again and said, "I don't know what to tell you, Gary, The Who have just announced Salt Lake City the night before The Stones in Boise."

We agreed that we didn't think we could do both shows and left it at that. A week later, Oss called me up again and said, "You don't understand, Gary, God will never give you The Stones and The Who on back to back nights again! We have to do this."

About twenty years ago, I had purchased a bunch of silver bullion when the price of silver was around five dollars an ounce. I figured it would be a good investment. I checked into the metals market and found that the price of silver was up around fourteen dollars an ounce and decided to sell it so I could go to The Who as well as The Stones. The lady at the coin store had a glut of silver because everyone wanted to sell right then, so she didn't want to buy mine. I swung a deal with her that I'd take $1.50 below spot if she'd buy it. She agreed. I made a profit, she made a profit, I got to see The Who. We could only afford the cheap seats, but at least we were going to be there. Money well spent.

I picked Oss up at the airport and we went to The Delta Center. The ticket troll looked at our tickets and said, "You'll have to go to portal UU." I asked, "Is there anything wrong with my ticket?" The troll said, "No, we're just going to upgrade your seat, that's all."

We went from nosebleed seats to some of the best seats in the house. I was about thirty to forty feet away from the stage, at eye level. In my opinion, the seats there were better than any of the floor seats except the front row. I didn't have to look through anyone to see the band.

The Pretenders opened for The Who that night and when they played the song, "My City Was Gone" I felt like my eardrums were blistered from the guitar solo. It was fantastic. At the end of The Pretenders' set, I told Oss, "I don't care if The Who suck tonight, my money was well spent." The Pretenders were so good, I didn't know how The Who would ever top them, but they did.

The Who played an incredible show, all their major hits from the beginning through "Who's Next" and then a few others. They didn't hit anything from Quadrophenia, however which disappointed me. They also didn't hit anything from Tommy during the show. Then they left the stage and we expected them to come back on and do a couple of songs for an encore. They came back and did a thirty minute mini version of Tommy! WOW!

Finally they ended up with an acoustic song from their last album, the song was "Tea and Theatre". It was just Roger and Pete and an acoustic guitar. It was an incredible way to end the show. No way to chase that with something else. After that we knew the show was over and it was time to go.

We drove all night and saw The Stones the next night in Boise. The highlights of that show were an eleven minute version of "Midnight Rambler", and Keith sang, "You Got the Silver". That one was very meaningful to me since I cashed in my silver to make the whole thing work. Another "highlight" of that evening was when I was trying to use the Men's room and a bunch of women hijacked it.

That was a great two days.

Musings of a Madman

2010-06-03T00:22:00.000-06:00

This is my first attempt at a blog. I haven't spent alot of time on other peoples' blogs, so I don't really know what the protocols are, so basically I'm going to make it up as I go.

I have many interests, many hobbies and many things that occupy my mind. I don't know how to be bored. What all this means is I might talk about Halloween on one post and my visit to see The Rolling Stones in Denver on the next. Perhaps as I get more material I will find a way to organize it, but for right now, what you get is what you get. I'm not sure I'm interesting enough for a blog, but I do know that I am geeky enough for one.

I have an M.F.A. in Scene Design for Theatre from Mankato State University (which has been changed to The State University of Minnesota at Mankato), a B.A. in Theatre with a dual major in Psychology From Brigham Young University, and an A.A.S in General Studies from Ricks College. I currently teach Theatre at a private university somewhere in Idaho.

I have been married happily since 1984 and have sired six immediate offspring and am the proud grandpa of three little grandsons (as of 2009).

My father, along with three other men, started The Playmill Theatre in West Yellowstone, Montana in 1964 so I grew up for four months of the year in Montana and eight months of the year in Idaho. In the spring and fall, for two weeks each, we had to travel back and forth from Idaho to Montana because of school and work up in the theatre. I remember knowing as a small boy that I was actually magic because I could go to sleep in my bed in Montana and wake up in my bed in Idaho.

In 1983 I was diagnosed with Giardia Lamblia even though the doctor who diagnosed me never found any of the flagellated protozoans in the uh, uhm, uh specimens I gave him. I spent 26 years dealing with the after effects of that, until last summer I went to another doctor for a different thing and mentioned to him the plight of my guts and he ran some tests. He found that rather than having a malevolent parasite lodged irrevocably in my bowels, I happen to be allergic to Milk, Soy, and Gluten. I spent 26 years dealing with a stomach ache and all that goes with it (no need to be overly graphic here, you can imagine). I have been gluten free since last July (2009) and have been mostly milk free since then (I will cheat on cheese, it seems the further processed it is the easier it is for my body to deal with it) and mostly soy free (I will cheat on chocolate a little, because I'm an addict, but not like it was before). In addition to Milk, Soy, and Gluten, I am also allergic to Shellfish and Celery. Celery of all things. I am also Insulin Resistant, and I have High Cholesterol. I ask you, what can I eat? Everyone I talk to about my plight says I should eat vegetables. I tell them that my food eats vegetables and I don't eat what my food eats. I told the doctor I wasn't coming back because every time I saw him he took something else away from me.

I'll talk about me some more later. I believe I'm tired enough to go to bed.