Crate & Barrel

Here are the infamous chairs! Now, remember that the space where the chair will be placed is a little 6 x 6 foot fake train car which will also contain a table and some luggage--not much room. And, said chair will only be part of the exhibit for three months--not very long. Soooo, which chair would you choose? The big honking wicker chair for $50? Or the nice little leather chair for $2? Any sane person would choose the $2 chair, but I have stopped worrying about it because it's not my problem. I just think it's funny. :-)

Then, here's today's project at the sculpture studio: a fake crate to go in the fake "boxcar." Aren't museum exhibits supposed to show people real things--not a bunch of fake things? But, anyway, since there was no stopping them from making a fake crate, I thought it might as well look good, so I volunteered to do the wood "graining." While I was painting the Masonite planks to look like wood, I was thinking about the pioneers who used to paint wood to look like marble. Their skill was much cooler than mine! While I was painting the crate, Dan, Aly, and Kristen were building a bench for the fake "economy car." It was really funny because Dan was trying to pretend like he knew how to use a drill and other power tools, but he's never used them before, so it wasn't working out so well. It took them a really long time to finish the bench, and it did look cool, but the problem was that when you sat down on it, it would tip forward--not good for museum visitors. Why did this happen? BECAUSE WE ARE HISTORY STUDENTS--NOT ARCHITECTS OR CARPENTERS OR FURNITURE MAKERS!!! We have not spent a semester studying bench configuration. But try telling Kristen that, and she bites your head off. I know this is bad, but as she was puzzling over how to make the bench stay up when someone sits on it, I was chuckling inside :-) I have to go to the studio again tomorrow morning to work on stuff, and hopefully we can get everything finished since we need to start putting it up at the Tarble Arts Center on Monday!!

Thankfully, once again, the weather did not turn out as bad as they had predicted. Originally, we were supposed to have super bad storms here all evening. We did get a lot of rain all day, and they're saying that there is flood danger again, but that's a lot better than hail and tornadoes! We really only had one nasty thunderstorm blow through at about 7:30 p.m. It was kind of funny because I was sitting on my bed, and I had been really tired all afternoon, so I was even kind of drifting off to sleep, when all of a sudden it sounded like a bomb went off outside. There was a HUGE flash of lightning and a monstrous boom of thunder. It's like the lightning bolt shocked the life back into me because when that happened, it jolted me awake, I jumped out of bed, and I have been busily getting stuff done ever since then--and I'm not even tired! :-)

I've been hearing on the news that in Mississippi they've had some pretty crazy flooding going on. In Vicksburg, some houses are under water! I was hearing that the river gauge reading was almost 50 feet there, so I went back and looked at some pictures I had taken along the riverfront in 2006. I was shocked when I realized that the Mississippi River would currently be up to the bottom of the river gauge shown in this photo!!! This river gauge is on the back of the wall containing the Vicksburg riverfront murals--so the water is basically up to the lower part of the downtown area! When I took this photo during the summer, I was standing at the top of the concrete boat ramp that, at the time, dropped down about 30 feet to the river--which is typically about 20 feet deep. But now people wouldn't even need to use the boat ramp--they could just go get in their boats in their backyards and float away. I read that in Natchez the river crested today at 54 feet and is expected to reach 56 feet after today's rain--yikes! Every morning on the radio during the summer, they would state the river gauge reading, and it was typically at about 15 feet--or 17 if we had a big rain storm. So I can't believe how much higher than usual the Mississippi River is right now! I hope that Natchez Under-the-Hill didn't get flooded. That's where Magnolia Grill is located--and they have the best bread pudding in the South, and the best chocolate pecan pie, and they have some pretty tasty sweet potato fries there too. So I hope they're okay. Well, I'm off to bed--maybe I'll dream about Magnolia Grill's bread pudding.