April Fools

Today my classmates and I looked like a bunch of April fools, madly working on projects for our exhibit which opens in 18 days--projects that should have been done months ago! But it's not our fault that we are playing the part of the fools at this point--because Mr. Riccio didn't let us start assembling exhibit materials until now--grrrrrr!!! (I could rant and rave about this for quite a while because I am very agitated, but I will refrain.) Here is a picture of me pretending to be amused that I was spending the morning mounting images onto foam board at the library. Although, I am quite proud of the map I'm holding up. That's a picture of an old railroad switch tower map housed at the Douglas County Museum in Tuscola. The original map is really water-damaged and looks quite gross, but I spent some time with our photograph of it in Photoshop and voila--we now have the pretty map that you see here.

Bright and early today Laurie, Catherine, Kristen, and I went to the media services center at the library to cut out panel graphics and glue them to their foam mounts--which is quite an intricate process and involves baking the panels in a weird waffle-maker-looking thing for a few minutes. Then, we had to go to the sculpture studio to build our exhibit--literally, build it. Mr. Riccio put out his line drawing of the ridiculous train car and said, "Okay, build that." I wanted to have nothing to do with the train car, so I volunteered to go paint the temporary walls we'll be putting up in one of the galleries. That job, however, turned out to be quite ridiculous itself. Some of the walls we're going to use had a bunch of vinyl lettering on them that had to be scraped off with putty knives. Then we had to prime both sides of the walls before applying new paint, and we only had room to prime two wall panels at a time--which was a disaster with trying to get them dry and everything. That is a process we should have started long ago! The only high point of the sculpture studio experience today was when Mr. Riccio karate-kicked a cockroach that appeared on one of the wall panels. It was his one moment of seeming quite heroic. I don't know how we're ever going to get the walls painted. Then, the group that was building the train cars kept measuring and cutting things wrong; and it soon became apparent that we were going to be there for hours on end. I, however, had to write a paper and submit it to Dr. Barnhart before 6:30 this evening, so I bailed out--very frustrated that all of this work had been saved until two weeks before the exhibit opens.

So I went home and grumpily wrote my paper. I decided that part of the reason I was so grumpy was that I am once again finding myself without time to eat and/or sleep. It's like I always have only three choices--but can only choose one thing: eat something healthy, get some rest, or finish an assignment that has to be done right now. Necessity always requires me to choose the third option. So I might just have to be permanently grumpy until after the exhibit opening :-)

Something funny did happen though. My classmates got in trouble for getting drunk at the karaoke bar on Saturday night instead of getting drunk at Dr. Reid's house! :-) Ha ha. I did not get in trouble because I had a legitimate excuse to not be a part of Saturday night's escapades, but I guess that it's kind of an expected thing that at Dr. Reid's house after the symposium, the current students mingle (and drink beer) with the alumni (even though I don't see what the point of that is--since everyone is drunk, but whatever). Dr. Reid and the alumni at her house couldn't believe that the current students would go off to a karaoke bar with last year's students instead of coming to hang out with them. This has developed into quite an issue, which I find hilarious since by the time I left to go home that night, everybody--faculty, students, and alumni included--didn't know up from down. The whole concept of people getting in trouble for getting drunk in the wrong location amuses me to no end.

Well, I'm off to bed so that hopefully I will not be so grumpy and sarcastic tomorrow.