Lazy Sunday afternoon

Ah yes, nothing like a lazy Sunday afternoon. Two middle-aged women with hatchets and crow bars, an abandoned piano, high-humidity 90 degree weather, a pick up truck and a plan. What could be any more entertaining than that? It look us under an hour to dismantle the whole thing and get the pieces parts hauled out to the street. I now have a relatively unlimited supply of piano guts to do with as I please. An interesting note (at least to me) is that the hammers of pianos have different colored felt. The one I already had has red, the one I got yesterday has green, and Dorinda's has grey. I have a whole bunch of keys and the whole strip of the part where the hammers and other stuff connect. If I can talk the boys into doing it, I may try to send them back out there to get the big metal piece the piano wires connect to. I would make a VERY cool rust dying form. That part of it (I think she called it the sound board) was too heavy for us to lift into the back of the truck, but maybe if the boys unscrew it from the wood part the 2 of them can get it home.

We also did some gelatin plate printing yesterday and that was pretty cool. We were just playing, so I don't really have anything that I'm willing to show, but at least I got some ideas for the situations where it might be the appropriate technique for a particular effect. It did strike me as very project-specific though. One more weapon in my war chest to be used as needed. I also got the deck cleaned off and replaced the weird shaped piece of tarp covered plywood with a great solid wood exterior door to use as a work surface. If the rain holds off today (that's a joke, y'all....we're crying for rain) I'm going to try to get a couple of coats of polyurethane on it "just in case" the thick painted surface needs some extra help. I can already tell it's going to be a huge improvement. I can actually get to the cabinets it sits on, it's perfectly flat and level, the top is white so I can see what I'm doing, and it doesn't have an irregular shape. I also raised it about 3" higher than it was and my back didn't bother me at all, even after an hour or so of standing there working. My daughter came out on the deck and asked why I had plastic lizards and snakes and spare body parts lying around. After I told her what we'd used them for her comment was "Oh, so it was arts and crafts day at the B house this morning. You should run your own summer camp." I think I'm going to invite Mike Rowe to come paint and dye and discharge with me for his Dirty Jobs show. Or maybe I'll invite him over to just stand there and let me look at him.