A Queer Mobile

Visiting my father

I took another trip last week back to North Carolina to visit my father and my sister's family. My posting last November told of Dad making it home from a rehab facility after recovering from a broken knee.

Unfortunately that's not all the story. In early November Dad was hospitalized with a bowel obstruction. Surgery to correct the problem (scar tissue) was successful, but he's just not thrived after the second surgery in four months. My sister and I were hoping that he might make it home, but he is still very frail. I thought I'd pay him a quick visit. Along the way my sister and I managed to work through some tax and estate issues - I'm doing a bit of homework with one of my CPA friends on questions that arose.

I suspect I'll head back to see him around his birthday in mid-March: he'll be 90.

Another new sculpture

This beauty is another new work coming out of the temporary shop space. The black material is a man-made composite called PaperStone: it's formed from recycled newspaper and natural resins. It's so waterproof that it survived being submerged in flood waters for days with no effect at all. John shaped these sensuous forms from slabs of the material, and then mounted a polished wooden ball. It looks unstable and completely improbable, but it's actually rock-solid.

John's new show

John has a new show at Legion Arts here in Cedar Rapids that opens next week. Legion Arts was severely damaged by the floods last year, but they're now running full-steam.

John created this new eight foot standing sculpture entirely from materials recovered from the summer floods. 

John's thank-you gifts...

So many people helped us in the flood recovery effort. The first project John took on after getting his new temporary shop running was to take selected materials that we recovered from the flood waters and to create sculptures for our helpers. Here you can see an array of the sculptures before he played Santa in January last week. Each work is unique, but all have similar designs.

John's new (temporary) shop is in full swing

With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.

The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.

John's new (temporary) shop is in full swing

With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.

The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.