The Boxcar Children

Catherine, Sarah, and I now refer to ourselves as the Boxcar Children. Why, you may ask? Well because today we built a boxcar--a freaking 8-foot-tall boxcar!!! :-) It was so funny. I don't know how we did it, but we got to the sculpture studio this morning at about 10:00, and when we left at 3:00 this afternoon, there was a boxcar painted to look like it was made of weathered wood. Some of our classmates had assembled the frame yesterday, and today the three of us, with Mr. Riccio surveying our work, attached a Masonite front to the frame and made a door for the boxcar out of two-by-fours. We then did this amazing paint job, and voila--we had a boxcar that looked like it was covered in old, wood panels. I must say it's cool-looking, even though I still think that the train car thing is a stupid idea :-) Our train car is actually going to consist of three parts: part one is the boxcar, part two will be an "economy class" setting, and part three will be "first class." I don't know how we're going to finish the other two cars, but hey, I didn't know how we were going to build a boxcar today. Then, this afternoon Catherine and I were sent to Dave's Decorating to buy some wallpaper and carpet for the "first class" section of the train car. We had no idea what we were looking for--except that whatever we got was supposed to be "1920s-ish." (Typical Mr. Riccio instructions.) We felt like a newly-married couple choosing wallpaper for our first home :-) We found some really cool wallpaper, but when we calculated how much we would need, we saw that it would cost about $70. We called the Tarble Arts Center to ask them how much we could spend on wallpaper for the train car, and they looked at the budget Mr. Riccio had given them. Mike, the Tarble guy said, "Ummm, Mr. Riccio has budgeted $5 for wallpaper." I started laughing so hard. That sounded about right for Mr. Riccio's planning techniques. The Dave's Decorating people were really nice, and they decided that they would just donate some other wallpaper and carpet to us that they had left over from some other projects. Hooray for Dave's Decorating! Now the trunk of my car is full of wallpaper and wallpaper paste.

I think that in the real museum world, I would not be actually assembling exhibit props like train cars and shopping for train car wallpaper. I think you'd have carpenters and other people to do that, but I am definitely not in the real museum world right now, so that would explain why I spent the day in front of a miter saw with a paintbrush in hand.

By the time Catherine and I finished shopping for wallpaper at 5:40 this evening, we were both pooped. We had worked all day, but not gotten anything done that we had planned on doing when we got up this morning--like homework. Oh well, I guess that's what tomorrow is for. I'm planning to have General Conference playing on the internet while I am working on things I needed to do today. Catherine and I are so pooped, in fact, that we think tonight we need to watch "Nacho Libre" and make chocolate chip cookies, so that's the plan.