Let the Games Begin

Exhibit construction week has officially begun. It was kicked off today by a seven-hour work session at the studio. Fortunately I was able to go to church with Greg first! But the remainder of the day was spent painting walls, sanding wood, grinding the rough edges off of hinges, sanding more wood, painting, wallpapering, and painting some more. :-) It was a long day, but we got a lot done. Unfortunately, even though construction week doesn't technically start until tomorrow, we had to work today because we still had a lot of unfinished work. I would have preferred to not have worked today, but my classmates quite possibly would have banished me from the program had I not shown up. Now, tomorrow we have to undertake the foreboding task of moving everything we have built from the Art Park West studio to the Tarble Arts Center on campus--a distance of approximately 4 miles. The problem will be dealing with the size of the things we have built. Remember how the train car parts are 8-feet tall? Hmmmm, we'll see how that goes.

We've been encountering the usual "last minute" mishaps. Mr. Riccio was building Plexiglas cases today, but the special glue he had was eating away at and cracking the Plexiglas, which is not good, so we're not sure what to do about that. Also, the material we were supposed to get to build the temporary wall for one of the exhibit galleries got stuck on a train just outside of Chicago. The train people said they could deliver it to us by Wednesday, but that would be too late (because we would still have had to paint it). We thought of finding some horses and staging a train robbery like Jesse James, but we realized that might not be too effective. It actually wouldn't be a robbery though, since we already paid for the material. But anyway, Mr. Riccio ended up getting some plywood for a us to use instead. The problem is that even after a few coats of paint, the plywood still looks like plywood--not very museum-ish, but we'll work with it. I think if we strategically place the exhibit panels and paintings, we'll be able to cover up the most noticeable spots.

This week will be pretty crazy. We all have to have a turn being the "project manager" for a day and making sure all of the required tasks get done. Our teachers have scheduled no class sessions for this week, but in addition to installing the exhibit, there's a bunch of extra school stuff we have to attend, which will make scheduling kind of hard. Tomorrow we have to attend the "i-Life Movie Awards" to see our Tilford Dudley film's campus debut. Then on Wednesday, as part of the Graduate School Expo, we have to host a reception at the Tarble Arts Center so that people can watch us installing the exhibit and we can tell them what we're doing. It will probably be kind of like watching monkeys at the zoo! Then on Thursday afternoon we have to attend the Graduate School Awards Ceremony to accept the award we were given for our Tilford Dudley project. Whew! It's going to be crazy.

It snowed today. What happened to spring? Supposedly spring will be returning this week. Tonight Aly and I watched part 6 of 7 of "John Adams" on HBO. It was so good! The relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson has been getting pretty tense. They used to be great buddies, but then they started viewing things very differently, and they slowly grew apart. John Adams won't die until next week's part 7, but I was thinking tonight about the story of John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's deaths--it is SO WEIRD!! Talk about a coincidence to the tenth degree. They both died on July 4, 1826--the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence!!! Is that crazy or what? John Adams' last words were supposedly "Thomas Jefferson survives." But, Jefferson had actually died a few hours before. Maybe John Adams saw his old buddy in the spirit world right before he died? Hmmmm, very interesting.

I am very, very, very, very glad that Greg and I got to have such a fun weekend together! Hopefully I'll get to see him this week again. His mom is flying into town to start moving things out of the house in Sullivan, so we're hoping that we can all meet up for lunch and/or dinner this week. Everything seems better when Greg is around, and he keeps me sane even though I'm surrounded by crazy classmates :-) I love him very much!!! Well, I'm off to bed to get some rest before this crazy week begins.