Hammering and Animal Heads

Another day, another dahlia. I hope I haven't used this picture (or that joke) already. I'm starting to lose track!

We have had very warm weather the last week or so. One day we got up to 88º F (or 31º C) and that was no fun. Fortunately at school they're finishing up a replacement of the air conditioning equipment, so yesterday I had nice, cool air conditioning at work. The downside is that they're doing power-drilling on the roof, so the construction noise never stops. And you know how I love that.

Then I came home and found that Mrs. Kravitz had hired people to build some sort of structure in her back garden. They were out there hammering and sawing and from the looks of things it's still not done. I have no idea what it is. She already has a summer house and shed in the back, so it's a bit of a mystery. More construction noise!

In the library, my boss is on a campaign to remove a collection of animal-head artworks that students made many years ago from the glass display cases facing my desk. (I blogged one of these animals once but I don't think I've ever shown the whole collection. I'll photograph them all next week so you can see them.) They're very creative sculptures, all made of clay, and they've been there longer than I have -- at least a dozen years. I really like them and I've argued for them to stay, as did the art department head yesterday, but my boss is having none of it. She insists that the students all think they're creepy (in other words one person may have said that), and she's been asked by administrators to change them (I'm skeptical). I actually said out loud, in resignation, "Well, that's fine. I'll only be here another year anyway."

I have a feeling I'll be saying that a lot this year. Assuming my buyout package is approved, which I still haven't heard.

After work I picked up my new glasses, with my "varifocal" lenses. So far, I am not a fan. It's very hard for me to wear them to work on the computer, for example, because the mid-range focal area is so small. If I focus on one word on the screen, everything within about an inch of that word is in focus, but beyond that it gets progressively blurry. In other words, I can't see my whole screen clearly, and forget looking at something like a photo or a painting in its entirety. Not to mention a spreadsheet. Shouldn't I be able to clearly see more than that?

Also, when I turn my head, everything sort of tilts and slants. My screen goes from a rectangle to a parallelogram. That doesn't happen with my regular reading glasses. It's like being underwater.

So, I dunno. The jury is still out. I'm wearing my old reading glasses at the moment.

The other day I happened to look at my secondary e-mail account at Gmail. I almost never use it, and I found an e-mail from April, from a guy trying to gin up publicity for a book release about some New York graffiti artists. I had allowed the artists to use some of my photos in their book, and he sent me photos of the printed pages so I could see how they turned out. That's one of my photos above on the left, superimposed over a negative image of the artists. (Here's the original shot, from April 2010.)

And here's the second one -- this picture, from April 2011. I must say, that looks quite good on the page.

I allowed these pictures to be used for free. After all, I took them mainly to make a record of graffiti and street art in New York at that time, and I'm glad they've served that purpose for the artists. (I did get credit, which is all I usually ask.) The book is a 468-page behemoth selling for $150 so I may have to be satisfied with these images of my images -- not sure I want to shell out that much myself!