I’m sick today, kids, but I figured I’d toss this up for you all since I’ve been away for a bit.

The blog is looking much spiffier thanks to my aforementioned awesome brother.  He did some updates on the ol’ WordPress stuff, adding the nifty new layout in the process.  I wouldn’t doubt that things may change around here in the coming months as I become more familiar with how the software works.  I didn’t have a lot to work with before, and as my brother said, “The back end on this is completely different,” meaning I can do more cool and fun stuff.  I told you he was great, right?

I don’t feel like I’ve been doing much lately, although I did set aside about three hours of time to work on the sculpture last week.  Three hours.  Sounds like a lot, right?  Sounds like I probably hung a bunch of stuff on my frame and now we’ve got some marbles rolling around, right?  Well…

Here’s what you get.  Three hours of work is apparently enough to make a six-inch long little ramp.  This stuff always seems like it should go so much faster, but doesn’t.  There are all these tiny details that come into play, at least when I do it.  I have to figure out what direction the ramp comes off at, check how it will line up with the rest of the sculpture lines, figure out how much of a rise I need to get the marbles rolling, figure out where to make the appropriate bends, get stuff bent, cut, and filed down appropriately, and then lots of times I just have to shrug my shoulders and say, “I have no friggin’ clue if this is right or not, but if I keep sitting here it will never get done.  If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, but I’ll figure out some way to fix it somewhere down the road.”

Some day, after I’ve been doing this for a while, I’ll pick up easy or at least standard ways on how to take care of some of these problems, but for now it’s a lot of guesswork.  It’s a learning process, this creative stuff.  For now I have a niggling three-hour problem wrapped up, and it’s on to the next challenge.