Other Criteria

Art work coming in for the local show and we wrap paintings all day, asses dragging by the end. Handling paintings worth a quarter million marvelously focuses the mind, but maintaining that level of attention is a drain on mind and body. We get almost as much done today, with the museum open and being interrupted, as we did yesterday. Finish packing tomorrow and then serious gallery repair, paint the signage and entry walls, get started on cleaning our mess, which is considerable, we've trashed the place in just two days. No one at the lake so I stop for a smoke and watch the spillway, they stocked dumb hatchery trout a few weeks ago and I watch a couple get sucked into the flow and wash over. A lesson there. Got home and the fucking table with radio and CD player, speakers, CD's, cassettes, books on tape, has toppled into a large and unsightly pile, takes an hour to clean up and then right the table. I enact a repair that is a marvel of jury-rig, I only need the table for a few more weeks as D has promised to build a smaller sturdier model (this one is a damned ugly Victorian end table) so I cob it back together, then anchor it to the wall with flexible metal plumber's strap, a nail, and a small clamp. An excellent repair, reminiscent of a mountain cabin or the Alaskan out-back. I couldn't find my baling wire. Interesting session with the dictionary. Baling wire as in what is sometimes (synthetic twine mostly now) used to bale hay, which after use, on a working ranch, is ricked on a post for emergency repair of almost anything, but the 6th definition of bail, is " to assist in escaping a predicament" which would mean if you'd never been a rancher, it might be bailing wire. Make a note to check what it's sold as. I don't know what bling is, heard the word in several different contexts recently, and I'm usually good at parsing things out, is it "something you don't need that you treat yourself to" or "illicit sex", oh, wait a minute, those might be similar. I've used that word a few times, probably (twice), over the years, as "a thought occurring" or "the sound a wine glass might make when thumped with a fingernail" but clearly it means something different now. Like how BOINK went from being a cartoon term to meaning fucking at a MLA convention, language at it's fluid best. It's all inflexion. Stand back and listen, it doesn't even matter if you understand the language, you understand enough, if you pay attention, to not put your foot in it. Everyone leaves us alone, as they always do during the turn-around, they know no one else could do this, and D comments, we'd taken an elevator load up to the vault, that what we did was holy, I'm absorbing this, from my position as janitor.