Return to the Second City

Essays are finished, my sketchbook filled with drawings of questionable quality has been turned in, and I've worked very hard to stop thinking about the rococo armchair I misidentified on an exam. I woke up this morning in a tiny bedroom under a flight of stairs, looking out on a snow-covered street and thinking, "thank goodness I have my snowboots," and that can only mean one thing: I'm back in Chicago, baby!

My plans for the next few days are simple: visit friends at the Chicago History Museum, relish in the presence of public transportation, and eat everything, everywhere. And then I hop in the car with one of my oldest friends and we drive south for an epic roadtrip that will eventually take us home to California! All in all, I think this is shaping up to be a remarkable winter break.

Stupidity, atrocious calumny, infamous wickedness!

Google Translate is my new favorite toy.

As I type I am sitting in Winterthur's rare book room and (carefully) flipping my way through La Mode Nouvelle, a French fashion and political periodical printed in 1832. I'm looking for early 1830s fashion plates in order to compare the styles against French paper dolls from 1822 for a paper that I have due on Friday (oh, graduate school!), but I keep on coming up against very impassioned-looking sentences written in italics and with multiple exclamation points that just cry out for translating.

My current favorite? "Gens de la revolution, avez-vous prodique aux pretres assez de menaces et d'outrages?" Which, according to Google Translate comes out to something like: "People of the Revolution, do you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults?" Somehow I think something was lost in translation.

So, I ask you, people of the revolution: DO you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults? Inquiring minds want to know.

Boxes for everyone!

No, actually, I just made one. So a box for me, I guess.


His name is Walter. He is big enough to hold maybe five pens and a mini-stapler, but he's mine, all mine!

I ended up using linseed oil as a coating instead of shellac - it lets the grain of walnut shine through more. And if I keep using words like "grain," "dovetail," and "chisel," I might be able to fool you into believing that I know what I'm talking about. Which, clearly, I don't.

Still, I made a box! I guess if this museum curator thing fails, I can always fall back on a career in cabinetmaking. (The furniture conservators who supervised our box-making just got pounding headaches and they don't even know why.)

Wood as far as the eye can see

Grad school is hard. We've got tons of reading, papers due every week, and then, of course, there's shop class.

Yes, internet, I am building a wooden candle box in graduate school. Yesterday I used a handsaw and a chisel to make the dovetail joints and then I assembled it using hide glue (which smells, by the way, exactly how you'd expect: gross, and a little like warm melted cow.) Today we're going to be shellacking our boxes to bring out the "shine" of the walnut wood.

Apparently this craft project is supposed to help us understand the experience of the 18th century cabinetmaker and appreciate the material goods they produced in a more hands-on fashion. I'm so busy being inordinately proud of my kind of sloppy dovetails, though, that I don't think I'm going to be able to focus on anything else.

Shoshana, Master Cabinetmaker! Just rolls of the tongue, right?

P.S. I'm in graduate school. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this earlier, but if not - yeah. Graduate school! Can't believe they were crazy enough to let me in, but they can't take it back now.