OK, so this blog update is obviously ridiculously overdue. I think I've set a new record for time intervals between posts. The good news, however, is that I have a lot of pictures and news and so this update will be followed quickly by at least one or two more.


On the very first day of assembling the shop frame (which was sometime back in June!!) one of my forklifts suffered catastrophic engine damage. Great beginning! So we ended up having to rent a scissor lift, which was actually a blessing as it made the job much easier. These two pictures were taken when the shop frame was nearing completion. With the use of the scissor lift and Otis, my trusty forklift (the one which didn't break) Christina and I assembled the whole frame in 5 days.



The next step was to put up the insulation and exterior wall panels. This is actually quite a pain in the ass, as the insulation has to be hung on the side of the building, and then the panel has to be quickly put up over it and screwed into the frame, sandwiching the insulation. Any significant wind or rain stops you dead in your tracks. Also, this job requires a minimum of three people, so our friend Cedar, among others, helped us out during this phase.

The Northern edge of our property is marked by an arroyo, or dry stream-bed. One day in July, an unusually heavy mid-afternoon rain turned that stream-bed into something more like a raging river. I think this is what "flash flood" means!

This was the scene on that day in the area between my storage containers. My storage containers are where I have stored pretty much everything I own. The water level rose to the point where I had 5 inches of standing water in each of my containers. I really haven't been able to get very far back into them yet, so I don't really know how much of my personal belongings were damaged, but I know it was a lot. Several of my machine tools have pretty aggressive rust on them. It wasn't much compared to New Orleans, but it was a bit of a personal disaster nonetheless.

At least Sprocket had a good time.

Here is the shop almost done, with the roof on and the windows framed out. You can see that our "commute" from the house definitely won't be causing any road rage!


We finished the shop in the last week of August, and here it is! The site of much future productivity and art creation! After getting the final inspection, we quickly moved Christina's tools in so that she could teach a Women's Welding Workshop in the first week of September. And pretty much as soon as that was done, I jumped on a plane bound for Amsterdam, where I spent three weeks building...... Ha!, you'll just have to wait for the next blog entry!

Stay Tuned!

OK, so this doesn't have much to do with building a house or a shop, but that's true of a lot of stuff I've written about on here, and this is too good to pass up!

I made a motorcycle "seat" for Sprocket so he can ride on my BMW K1100LT with me!

Holy shit, is that the cutest dog you've ever seen or what? His seat is made of leather and stainless steel, and is custom made for my bike.

His first time on the bike. For all you safety conscious types out there... don't freak out. I NEVER ride without a helmet, and the only reason I did on that day is that I didn't want Sprocket to freak out too much, not knowing it was me in front of him. Also, we only went on a very short ride.

OK, here's the payoff.... the video: (Check out those ears!)

OK, FINALLY the shop is about to get underway. A few days before the housewarming party the truck with my building arrived. Although you can't tell in the picture below, the day the truck arrived happened to be the windiest day in Taos that anyone can remember, even old-timers. So Christina and I spent most of that day unloading this semi-truck in winds that were a sustained 45 MPH with gusts up to 60 MPH. If we were more than 3 feet away from each other, we had to shout to be heard. It sucked.

There it is! That's the entire building laid out on the ground in front of the ready-to-be-poured foundation. It was dicey climbing up on top of the skid-loader in those 50-60 MPH winds to take this picture, so I hope you all appreciate it!

Wednesday June 13, exactly one year after I arrived in Taos from my LAST trip from LA, was the day of the concrete slab pour for the shop. A concrete pour is a big deal, and at 2100 square feet, this was a very big pour. You only get one chance to get this right... within a few hours you lay down what will be the floor and foundation for years and years to come. And concrete ain't cheap... within those few hours I spent about $9,000. Luckily I had an awesome and very competent crew.

Cedar and John Hunt screeding the fresh concrete. Screeding is the first step in the day-long effort to get the concrete super-flat.

My awesome slab crew. From left to right.... Cedar, Dillon, Elliot, Doyle, John Hunt, Marv, Peter (who expertly ran the crew) Russ, and Ben. Christina, Sprocket, and I are in the front. Several of these fellas, and the one lovely lady, commented that this was one of the nicest slabs they'd seen poured. Thanks, everyone.

Time to build a god-damned shop already, so we can get back to work!

Yes, yes, I know you've all been clamoring for pictures from the housewarming party... Well here they are!! (OK, maybe not clamoring....)
Our cute little gear house in the early afternoon of the party, set against Taos Mountain. You can see the kids already climbing all over Christina's outdoor aerobatic/trapeze rig...

Oh, there they are! Kids everywhere! People like to procreate here in Taos. Must be the thin mountain air.

I was lucky enough to have two very awesome out-of-town guests for the party. On the very left of the picture (not a great picture of him, to be sure) is my cousin Eduardo who, amazingly enough, is a robotics student and robot builder in Brazil! He totally surprised me with his visit (although he didn't come all the way from Brazil for the party, he was already in San Francisco for RoboGames.) And the fellow helping me fill the flamethrower tank on the Subjugator is my very good friend Doyle, who also came out for the party. Doyle earned the title of being my first non-family friend to come see the house, and the first person to stay as a guest in the K-Shack. He also helped fix a few robots (and break one!) and pour the concrete slab for the shop (see the next blog post)

Thanks a lot for coming, Eduardo and Doyle!

We shot the air cannon several times that night, and always let kids do it. Here's Corban, one of my favorite kids in Taos, firing it (while wearing the Brazil T-shirt we brought back for him)

And, here's a first for this blog.... A movie! Here's another lucky young fella, Luca, firing the cannon.

Gratuitous shot from inside the house. This gives a little feel of how the inside looks these days. We don't normally have that many flowers, believe me. People bring flowers to house-warming parties, apparently.

Look, people really came to our party, see!


One of the best things about the party (besides fire-breathing robots and drunk dudes falling over rocks) was the awesome live music we had. Jemma played the accordion inside and the El Rito Marching Band christened the house as the sun set.

Thanks for making it such a great time everyone, and helping Christina and I make the transition from "finished construction project" to "Home."

And for all you who couldn't make it, you were missed.

Howdy Folks!

Well, like I said last time, we moved in! No, really, we did!!

So now, it's time for the housewarming party! Come one, come all, to see the fruits of our labors. The party will be on Sunday, June 10th, from 4PM onwards. Here's the front and back of the invite:

Having finished the house, we're now moving in......


Havoc the cat asserting dominance over the bear rug, and.....

Unpacking my skull collection on the multi-purpose kitchen table. More pictures of our newly moved-into house to come soon.

There's other exciting news, though, too! The preparation for the concrete slab for the shop is coming along.... Here's what it looks like right about now: (The edge of the house is barely visible at the extreme right edge of the picture)


And, last but definitely not least.... I got a dog!! I don't necessarily expect the rest of you to share my excitement about this, but I am very excited! He's a 10 month old Weimaraner/Lab mix, very well-behaved, and super cute! His name is Sprocket.




So find your way to Taos, everyone, and share a beer with us on June 10th! And meet Sprocket!

Yes, right, it's been a long time since I blogged last.... I should really stop making any effort to apologize for the long gaps between posts, as it seems to be the norm for me.

And, as usual, a hell of a lot has happened since the last post.


This was the day we poured the concrete countertop which would come to serve as our kitchen table, dining table, reading table, project table, etc. etc. etc.. All the rebar and formwork is ready.....

Now skip forward a few weeks and......


We're IN!!! YES, it's true!!, we got our final inspection and we have moved in!! Christina took all these pictures during the few hours when the house was still empty, before we started filling it with all our crap from our previous lives. The two pictures above show the same countertop, the centerpiece of the kitchen and in some ways of the whole house.



Two views of the East wall. The first pic above shows the view that we wake up to every morning from the sleeping loft. The bottom pic shows the same wall seen from the ground.


My room. Now full of stuff. It will never look like that again.


Don't take the small things for granted, oh ye city dwellers!

As of this post, we have been living in the house for about two weeks. Showering! cooking! sleeping! using the internet! It's pretty amazing. The bad news is that moving in is quite a lot of work, too. Christina and I realized that by the time this whole escapade is over and things settle down, we will have been moving for about two years!!

All that time away from my shop is starting to take a toll on me. At some point in my life I realized that if I'm not making something, I get cranky. Well, I haven't really made anything for almost a year and a half, now, and I'm getting cranky. Luckily, we broke ground on the shop this week, and will hopefully pour the slab in about three weeks!

So start making your plans to come out and help build the shop, everyone! You know you want to! See you soon......

The guy who we hired to spray the urethane insulating foam onto the outside of the quonset was the single most frustrating person we had to deal with on this house. After the third or fourth time he didn't come on the day he said he would, Christina was just about ready to strangle him. Anyway, he did eventually come and finish the job. The overspray got everywhere... the uncovered parts of the forklift now sparkle in the sun with little micro-drops of urethane!

The house is finally holding heat the way it should.

(In this pic you can also see the burly new front tires on the forklift!)

Not long after the foam was done, we got the plaster team back to do the final coat on the exterior. We added quite a bit of Charcoal dye to the plaster, so the exterior is pretty dark. It's already been referred to as the Goth House.... Hmm...... I think Gear Box is better. With the exception of the front door, the exterior of the house is now totally done.

(Oh boy, look at those tires!)



The interior is getting closer and closer, too. In both of these pics you can see that the interior plaster is now done. More than anything else so far, this step really unified the interior into one finished visual space.

The floor of the loft above is also now done, thanks to Christina's hours of back-breaking sanding and sealing.

The room below the loft, where I'm standing, will be my room.... or perhaps more accurately, the repository for my tons of stuff!



Two views of the kitchen. The kitchen has no walls, it's just one part of the main room. The countertops will be poured concrete. In these two pictures they have been framed and the concrete formwork has been done. The piano-shaped counter has a square-shaped inset, which is where the stove will go. This counter will also serve as the dining table. Christina apparently just can't wait to start cooking!

Next up, bathroom!

The building permit and the loan money for the shop are now both in hand! Ground-breaking on the shop within weeks!

Wow, not a single blog update between February 7th and March 5th! When will I be demoted from blogger to miscreant?



For our 2-year anniversary, we decided to be bold and daring and not work on the house for a day. Instead we took a drive through some rural areas surrounding Taos, and came across some interesting stuff.

After one look at this crumbling adobe house, Christina decided that she had designed our house all wrong. And I sort of fell in love with this crumbling adobe hardware store. What were we thinking making out buildings out of such durable materials like metal?



Another thing one sees in rural New Mexico is lots of dead animals. There's something so beautiful about them, don't you think? For some reason that bobcat was strung up on a fence, like a warning...... To other bobcats? To trespassers? That didn't stop us from bringing it home and cutting off its head and putting it in a bucket of water. (No, we're not satanists, we just like skulls.)



We decided to hire professional plasterers to plaster the outside of the house. Foklifts, when fitted with scaffold planks, make really awesome mobile work platforms. The plastering team took entire wheel-barrow loads of plaster up with them on the lift, and they plastered the whole outside in one day. In fact, less than a whole day; the bottom picture was taken after they left on that same day. However, don't get too excited; that is just the first coat, and we're not even ready for the first coat of interior plaster yet.....




The interior is coming along, though. The first two pictures are of the same wall, before and after sheet-rocking. I discovered I'm really good at sheet-rock.... who knew? I'll really miss seeing all that plumbing all the time. This wall separates the kitchen from the bathroom, and so I suppose you're wondering why the hell there's a big hole in the wall, right? For a fish-tank, of course!

The bottom picture shows..... that the house is a mess.


Note to self: When moving scaffolding by yourself, remove large heavy objects from the planks above you. Because if you don't remove things like cordless drills, they can fall off the scaffolding and hit you in the head, which really hurts.


That is what the sky and the house looked like at sunset tonight. Really. It almost made me forget about the annoying electrical short in my truck. Actually it did make me forget, for about a minute.

Oh, and I turned in my building permit application for the shop today... a big feat considering how much paperwork was involved. Hopefully we'll be breaking ground on the shop within 4 to 6 weeks. Man will that be exciting. Start making your plans now to come out to Taos and help me build the shop, everyone! Seeya soon!

Yes, yes.... long time no blog. So what else is new!
Winter keeps slogging along here in the "desert".I've come to a conclusion about winter. Personally, it doesn't bother me. I like the snow, I like winter clothing, and I sort of like the cold. BUT, the havoc that it wreaks on equipment and systems is a big fat pain in the ass! In the picture above, I've set up a heater and "shed" to try to un-freeze our water spigot. It didn't work, and now we have no water. Two months ago, the cold caused our refrigerator to crap out. Our propane stove has crapped out, too. And the hydraulic fluid in the forklift and the robots gets so viscous that they don't run right. By next year, when we are in the house, hopefully winter won't be so difficult. But for now, we huddle together in the Kaczynski Shack (our current home's new name!).


Forklifts have so many uses, I can't understand why everyone doesn't have one or two!?!? Here we've converted the forklift into our mobile scaffolding for working on the outside of the house. Christina is putting up tarpaper. After that comes chicken-wire, then plaster, then paint, then the outside of the house is done!!! I'm ready to move in already, dammit.


Plumbing. I've done all the plumbing. It's more work than you might think. But yesterday we actually passed the plumbing inspection! Maybe I'll just give up on this whole robot thing and just become a plumber. I suppose it would justify my constant plumber's butt. But maybe that's not a good enough reason to become a plumber. Hmmm... I may have to reconsider.....


This, my friends, is a drawing that I worked up not too long ago of my future shop. Only today, however, do I feel justified in posting this drawing, because today....... I paid a deposit on it!!!

YAY, I'm gonna build a shop!!!!

As long as the snow is only on the ground, and not falling on our tender ear-lobes, we continue to work on the house.

Some recent beautiful days have allowed us to get the metal roofing onto the lower roof. This roof section, covered in "Berry" Pro-Panel, is now officially the first totally finished surface on the exterior of the house.

In this picture you can also see the beginnings of the polyurethane foam spray on the quonset. Eventually, when Christina can successfully convince the very lazy spray-foam contractor to come out to our place again, the whole quonset will be covered in that ugly yellow mush.

It'll keep us warm and dry, though.


Look, how pretty!!

(The house doesn't look half-bad, either....)

Oh boy, lots has happened since way back when I posted last.

First, I went to San Francisco to pick up all the robots on their return trip from Zagreb. We were supposed to do a show in SF, but that fell apart, and, unsurprisingly, I don't have any good pictures from that debacle!

When I picked up my little bro Cles in Albuquerque on my return trip, the winter holiday season began! My mom came a few days later. (I think the theme of this post might be... Winter)

Cles and I went snowboarding.... (I Photoshopped us together from two separate pix for this one...)

We also went shooting.... (I'm pretty sure my brother isn't a homicidal maniac, but looking at this picture I'm no longer certain)

Christina and I didn't let the cold weather stop us from working on the house. We installed the large south-facing windows. Even though he's not in the picture, Cles also helped. This was a big step, because it meant that the outer shell of the house is now done.... we are enclosed! No more wind blowing through the house!

We also had the septic system installed. That big concrete bunker being lowered into the ground is our own private sewer!

Here we are standing on the septic tank. Thank god we'll never have to see it again! And hopefully we won't smell it either! You can see that there's not too much snow on the ground.... yet.

We installed the 4 x 6 joists which will form the ceiling of my room and the floor of our bedroom above.

And then it snowed. A lot. If Christina had stood still for much longer I would have lost her under the snow.

After my brother and my mom left Christina and I had a whole second wave of visitors... friends of both of us from all over the country. To entertain them, and ourselves, we played with robots in the snow. That was fun.

One night six of us rented snowshoes and snowshoed up to Williams Lake in the nearby mountains in the middle of the night. It was a full moon and the combination of the moon and the snow on the ground was amazing. It was like daytime. This photo was taken with my camera-phone. We were at about 9500 feet above sea-level, and we were really cold, in case you can't tell.

A nice pic to end the post. That's the Rio Grande gorge behind us, and the bridge.

Happy winter!

A few weeks ago I said that we'd had the first snow of the year.... Well I guess that was technically true, but yesterday morning was MUCH cooler!

This pic was taken around 8 AM.

Twenty minutes later the sky cleared, and six hours later the snow had all melted; you couldn't even tell it had happened!

Work on the house continues apace. We're trying to get the space enclosed before the winter really sets in. That way we'll be able to do interior work, like framing, plumbing, and electric inside a warm space even when it's skin-cracking cold outside. This pic from inside the house shows the hybrid construction.



Christina the Superstar wielding her NailGun!! Having a roof feels like a big deal. It sure beats not having one.



Christina had the excellent idea of cutting the parapet profile into a modified gear pattern. Not an easy job, but pretty damn cool.



At 6:45 AM this morning, there was an awful ruckus under the bed. That usually means that one of the cats has brought in a half-dead mouse, but this was much more violent. Turns out that one of the cats managed to bring in an extremely alive rabbit! He was surprisingly easy to catch, and he was in good shape. I took him far from the cabin and let him go, and he ran like hell right back across the front of the cabin! I guess rabbits aren't know for their intellects....

Two more pictures, taken just this morning, of the house! Christina and I have done most of the framing of the front of the house by ourselves in the last week or so.Starting yesterday we've gotten some help from a very talented builder here in Taos, John Hunt. The wall initially was tending to bend inwards toward the interior of the house, so I parked the Scout outside and used a ratchet strap to pull the wall back to true! The large openings in the wall will ALL be windows! We'll have to come up with some kind of innovative privacy solution.



A few days ago we finally moved out of the dome over at Christina's shop. We lived there for months before our little Kaczynski shack was finished. Also, Christina had all her personal domestic stuff stored there since she sold her house over a year ago. We got it all into one truckload on Geronimo. It was a bit of a milestone in our long journey to really living on our own land!



I'm now working three days a week at a leather store called Letherwerks right in the heart of Taos. (The fellow I work with is named Kristian and moved here from LA a few years ago!) I'm actually having a blast learning how to make custom leather stuff in the old-fashioned way. Among the things I've made is this pair of "Banana Holsters" for a theater production. (You may have to click on the picture to really see the holsters!) This play will happen in the fall, and I'll be doing more stuff for it later, including some robotic modifications to an electric wheelchair, so stay tuned for more info on that.

And obviously, stay tuned for more progress on our house!

Oh, and I got a loan for my shop!!! Yay!!!

November 2nd of this year (and every year!) was Day of the Dead! This is the day specified in Mexican culture when the living honor and celebrate the dead. For several years now Taos has been the site of a Day of the Dead parade, originated and still organized by Christina and a few others. Christina, on stilts and in Victorian-era dead-person's garb, and me, in my newly completed steel and leather skull mask, accompanied a full marching band and 60 or 70 other celebrants and marched through the tiny town of Taos to celebrate our fallen fellows.


The container, which will be our winter kitchen and protected storage, now has a window and a door. Even though the kitchen will be protected from the elements, it's still damn cold in there.


It's amazing how fast stuff gets built when you actually have a paid crew working for you. The quonset is now fully erected, and the end-walls are mostly framed. Within a day or two, the crew will be gone, and the rest of the exterior wall framing and roofing responsibilities will fall on Christina and me. It will be fun, but probably a little slow.

In the last post I said I'd put up a pic of a very cool thing I got at the scrapyard in Albuquerque. Well, for all you gearhead dorks like me, here it is! It's an old piece of earth-moving equipment called a "clamshell." One of the guys at the scrapyard said he thought it probably came from one of the mines here in New Mexico. Maybe it's radioactive!


AAAAAAGHH!!!! TARANTULA!!!! Actually, they're really pretty harmless. And, starting a few weeks before Halloween every year, they come out in the thousands and make a mass pilgrimage to the Rio Grande to mate. If you're into bizarre and violent means for reproduction, google: "tarantula wasp."



With the Rastra walls in place and filled with concrete, it was time to put up the I-Beam. The forklift was surprisingly handy for this task! Eventually there will be quite a lot of weight on this beam, so the plans called for a support pillar somewhere near the middle of the beam's span. We found, again at Coronado, a really beautiful and very old steel beam for the job. Here, I'm welding it into place. In these pics you can tell it's starting to get cold....



The day after we put up the I-Beam we got.... the first snow of the year!!! It was beautiful! And the house looked pretty good in the early morning light, too.


This pic was taken at the end of a very long day. Christina and I and a crew of four other guys worked all day long to put up the first four ribs of the quonset hut. The learning curve was steep. But finally it's starting to seem like we might really have a home sometime soon.... an indoor kitchen and a shower sound pretty good right around now.

All right, here comes another marathon post.... After seemingly so long with no progress on the house, things are snapping into action!




As all you faithful blog readers out there know, the little tiny house we live in now is well built and insulated, perfect for winter living. But our damn kitchen is OUTSIDE!!! Lots of fun at 7:30 in the morning when all the water is frozen and you can't make your damn coffee! So, Christina joined the "Cool Kids with Containers Club" and bought herself a 20-footer which will become our winter kitchen and auxiliary storage area. Moving this thing around was a fun challenge... my forklift could barely do it. The bottom pic shows it's final resting place... We'll cut a door and windows into the side pretty soon here.




Finally some progress on the house! The house (as you will all see in the coming weeks) will be a hybrid construction consisting of a partial quonset hut and partial traditional frame structure, with Rastra block endwalls. Rastra block is a kind of rigid block made from concrete mixed with post-consumer recycled plastic; it is hollow and is later filled with liquid concrete in much the same way that regular cinder blocks are. In the first pic, Geronimo (my trusty diesel Dodge) delivers all the Rastra needed to build the end walls. In the next pic Christina and our friend Thomas do the "Holy Shit It's Cold Out Here, But The Walls Are Starting To Go Up" dance. It's really popular here.




Thanks to a good recommendation, Christina and I have discovered a fantastic salvage and wrecking yard in Albuquerque called Coronado Wrecking. They've got acres of stuff, mostly from dismantled commercial buildings. Our hybrid house design calls for one end of the quonset hut to sit, not on the ground, but high in the air on a supporting beam. We found an 18-inch I-Beam in perfect condition at Coronado which would work. However, it was 44 feet long, and they don't deliver. So, we went back with a trailer and a torch-cutting rig, Christina cut it down to 33 feet, and we trailered it and a few other nice heavy things back to Taos. (I'll post a pic soon of a really beautiful item I scored at Coronado) Well worth the trouble considering we saved $500 over buying it new.



Preparing the I-Beam for the attachment of the quonset as well as the roof joists which will come off the other side of it will require quite a bit of metalwork. Instead of trying to bring the beam to the metal shop, we brought the metal shop to the beam. I performed a feat of funky wiring to get 240 volts out on our land for the welder. Here, Christina is drilling holes in steel brackets which will later be welded onto the beam, which is sitting behind her. The nearly completed Rastra walls of the house are also in the background.

In related news, my second loan attempt for financing the shop is looking more promising than my first. I'll find out in a few weeks if I get to build a shop or not. Also, my laptop broke, so I have to use Christina's for stuff like this very posting... great! Funny how that happened at the exact same time I had to throw $1000 at my truck! And, I'm totally obsessed with getting a dog. Unfortunately I can't really get one until the house is built; our current cabin is a little too small. All the more reason to finish building!!

Wow, it’s been about five weeks since I blogged! That’s got to be a new record for laziness.

After we returned to Taos from Burning Man we only stayed put for about two-and-a-half weeks before heading off to Europe. During that time Christina held her national Women's Welding Workshop, during which she taught seven women from all over the country how to weld and blacksmith. I was a guest speaker and presented a lecture on Kinetic Sculpture in general and on my own work in particular. Other than that, I applied for a loan to finance the building of the shop, which was rejected, and got generally depressed and aimless.

But luckily, Europe beckoned. We first spent two days in Amsterdam; one day to bicycle around the city and another to check out the well-known robotics festival Robo-Dock. Friends of ours have participated in this event in the past and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about. We will probably put together a proposal for next year with our friend Doyle. The first picture up there is of the Dead Chickens' installation, which was probably my favorite piece there. This sculpture plays music, albeit a rather noisy, percussive type of music.




After a flight on a Croatian Airlines turboprop we arrived in Zagreb. The event we were to participate in was called Device Art, organized by an incredibly motivated group of four young entrepreneurs calling themselves Kontejner. Almost immediately we set to work unloading the container, which miraculously DID NOT fall off the ship and land on the bottom of the ocean! Four artists, including Christina and me, brought art over in the container. The other two, Kal Spelletich and Ryan Doyle, and their crews, arrived later than we, so I got the honor of directing an all-Croatian crew of guys to help unload the container!




Next up on our first full day in Zagreb was to bring all the gallery-scale art we'd shipped over to a gallery space for an opening the following evening. After much difficulty finding a transformer suitable to operate our 110 volt art, the installation was complete! The third picture shows Christina posing in front of her "Nine Beating Hearts" piece, with my "Our Little Family" and "Impatience" to the right. The remainder of the gallery art was supplied by mostly Croatian, Slovenian, and Serbian artists. By and large, it was very impressive, and, in contrast to most American artists I've come across, the European artists present at the opening were eager to talk about the conceptual and intellectual underpinnings of their work at length.




The other venue, where we would execute most of the fire and robotic performances, was an old factory called Močvara, which means "swamp". Between performing there was a lot of drinking and posing for pictures; in the sixth picture Christina can be seen posing with (from L to R) Jay Broemmel, Kal's right-hand-man, Douglas Repetto, the illustrious inventor of Dorkbot, Ryan Doyle, and his gal Heather. (Kal was probably off somewhere chatting up a Croatian lovely!) Christina also finally got to experience Kal's FireShower, something she'd wanted to do for a long time!



Christina and I chose Device Art as the place to premiere our new performance Amortec, in which she (on stilts) and the HD6LAW (or Highly Dangerous 6-Legged Aluminum Walker) do a choreographed dance together. Even though the piece is only six minutes long, and our performance was a bit improvisational, this was a highlight for many people, including me.



The Robochrist Industries performance, comprising the Subjugator, the Necropod, the Drunken Master, and eight pig heads, most of which were shot from the air cannon, took place on the last night of the festival. It was well-photographed, but so far the pig portrait is the only photo I've received! The theme of the show was U.S. imperialism, and several props were built to portray this theme, including various scenes from Abu Ghraib. To me, quite possibly the most interesting aspect of the perfomance was the Croatian audience's reaction to the theme, which was something like: "Why would you want to do a show about that?" Our feeling, as Americans, that this was really the only thing we could do a show about, somehow did not translate. This was the topic of 90% of the six or so interviews that I did after the show.



Finally, once it was all over, Christina and I had a chance to see Zagreb.

As you may have surmised by now, there has not been a lot of progress on our land. But that is about to change. Stay tuned.... I promise another post within a few days.

Hey, I thought this blog was supposed to be about building the house and shop, right? What's with all the pictures from all these trips? Isn't that a picture from Burning Man?

Yes, well, we do get a bit distracted from time to time. Burning Man was a good break after pouring the slab, and we got to ride our tall-bikes together.

Next up... Getting a loan for the shop!! Paperwork!!! FUN!!!!

As usual, a lot has happened since last post.

It's been a tiring week, and today was a particularly dense day. Today, with a lot of help from friends, we poured the concrete foundation of the house!

The first pic shows the pre-slab plumbing, which got the thumbs-up from the inspector. Hey, does that mean I'm a plumber now?

The second pic is, I think, one of the nicer stitched panoramas I've put on here. These pics were taken from the top of the forklift, about 30 feet up. This shows the spread of the land and the foundation about two days before the concrete pour. The orange tubing in the foundation is radiant-floor heating (hot water goes through these tubes buried in the concrete and heats the house). I think this pic is worth clicking on for a better view.

In the third pic, Christina shows off her trowel!

And lastly, Christ and Christ posing happily in front of the new slab. That was snapped only hours ago.

Tomorrow, off to Burning Man!

Oh yeah, who said blog entries have to be frequent? I never read that anywhere! (But then I've never read anything about blog theory and practice, or whatever....)

So as usual, a lot has happened since the last entry. First, we went to Seattle to take part in the "Funeral" for the Infernal Noise Brigade, a politically motivated marching band that Christina was a part of when she lived in Seattle and which decided to call it quits by throwing itself a weekend-long party. The night we arrived Christina and I got into a canoe with her best friend Becky Quick and INB founder Gray (AKA Filastine) and rowed down the Duwamish river. This river is where all the industrial container loading happens, and in addition to narrowly evading the Coast Guard, we also rowed under the beautiful cranes in the first pic. The rest of the weekend was one march and party after another, for which Christina and I got suitably attired (second pic).

While in Seattle I got the cell-phone call which sealed the deal on a long-simmering proposal to do a robot performance in Zagreb, Croatia in late September. This will be part of an art and technology festival called Device Art which is organized by the group Kontejner (after navigating to their home page you can find the Device Art link near the bottom). So, after returning from Seattle I spent four days fixing robots before overloading yet another Penske truck and driving it up to San Francisco so that the robots could be transferred into a shipping container bound for Croatia. In the third picture I am maneuvering the Subjugator across the loading dock between the Penske and the container truck.

While in SF I was lucky enough to catch an SRL show. Click the link for their home page and lots of pix of the show.

After a sort of hellish, hung-over day of air-travel to get back to Taos (with no liquids, mind you!) it was time to get to the plumbing of the house!

Drain lines for houses on slab foundations have to go into ditches, and ditches have to be dug, one way or another. Don't let anyone ever try to convince you that digging ditches by hand in areas overrun by subterranean lava flows is easy, cuz it ain't!!! I came across this fucker of a rock, and it took me an hour just to figure out how big it was. I finally was able to dig a tunnel underneath it and pull it out with the forklift. So much for the four-inch-wide ditch! Stay tuned for more pictures of the plumbing coming very soon! (I know you can't wait!)

And finally, on a sad note, my cat Cuca disappeared about four days ago. That pic above is the last one taken of her. Unfortunately, it seems she probably didn't come to understand the dangers of coyotes soon enough. Well, she led a happy life.... wish her well on her journey to kitty heaven.

I had some requests for a picture of the inside of the cabin... so here it is! This is a rather hastily assembled montage of four pictures taken through the south facing window... the doorway is on the right.

Another request was for a map showing the layout of the land and the spatial relationships of everything. I just love fulfilling requests! (This map was made in a drafting program, so the distances and sizes of everything are actually very accurate.)

And although no one requested it, here is a pic of the newly refurbished Husqvarna. Actually, since this picture was taken, I've had to do more work on it, and it's not really running yet, but boy does it look good!

We're off to Seattle for a few days now... seeya soon!

Today was a big day of work and play. A few days ago we had a backhoe come out and dig the trenches for the footers of the foundation, so today Christina and our friend Cedar spent most of the day working on the forms for the upcoming concrete slab pour. (Cedar is the upside-down guy in the top pic.) I spent the day studying plumbing code and preparing the application for the plumbing permit. Who knew there was so much to know about plumbing! A fair amount of it goes in before the concrete pour, so we need to get the permit ASAP.

After a day of work, Christina and Cedar relaxed on her old Ford pickup, known as "Standard Issue." The light and the sky were really beautiful when I snapped this pic.

Just before that picture was taken, I went dirt-biking with our friend Thomas, which was tons of fun!! Then Thomas and his wife Siri came over to our new homestead and we all drank Caipirinhas (the national drink of Brazil) and played Ping Pong and pool (on the newly set-up pool table) until it just got too dark.

You just don't get such a good combination of work and play all that often!

Well, faithful readers, I promised you pictures of our new little cabin, and here they are. In fact, lots of them!

The first pic shows the house on day one, when it was little more than four railroad ties set in the earth and a floor made from plywood and pressure-treated two-by-six. The well-drilling rig is in the background.

The second pic shows the cabin with all the framing and the roof and some of the plywood wall sheathing done. You can see the framed openings for the two windows and the door.

In the third pic the outside surface of the walls has been done. For this we did what's called "board and batton," or alternating wide and narrow vertical rough-sawn planks of wood.

The fourth pic shows the house nearing completion. The windows are in, and the interior walls have all been finished. Christina and Tatou strike fantastic poses!

And finally, the fifth pic shows our new home in pretty much finished condition; in fact this pic was taken this morning. Off in the distance are my containers, and off to the right is Mr. Wexler, the moped.

A few days after finishing the house, we tackled the water situation. The well has in fact been drilled, but there is probably another month of trench-digging, electrical wiring, and plumbing to be done before we have any running water, so in the meantime we set up the water tower system seen in pic six. The water in the blue barrel feeds both the shower behind the tower as well as the kitchen seen to the right. For a better picture of the shower, click here.

And last but not least, the final picture shows the venue for the endlessly recurring West Mesa Ping Pong World Championships, to be played from now until eternity between Christina Sporrong of Sweden and Christian Ristow of Brazil! May the best ping ponger win!

Yes, yes, I know, it's been FOREVER since I updated this thing. There have been people who have claimed that I update this thing too infrequently for it to be really called a blog, and although I have vehemently disagreed in the past, this time they may be right.

But hey, I have a really good excuse! There has been SO MUCH happening that I really haven't had time!

Let's see, shortly after my last entry Christina and I went to San Francisco for our art opening, which was tons of fun. We showed our art together for the first time, hung out with good friends, met the amazing V. Vale of REsearch Books, went to the beach, and had great food. I didn't really end up with any great pix from the event, but there's a pretty good little movie here.

When we returned, we immediately got to work building "the mineshack". There is an informal arrangement here in Taos whereby, although it's not technically legal, you can usually get away with building something that is 100 square feet or less without a permit. So, in order to stop staying at Christina's shop, we decided to build a little 8-foot by 12-foot cabin - just big enough for a bed and desk and a bunch of shelves. We've been working on that for about two weeks now, and we just finished it today! In fact, I'm writing this blog entry from inside the mineshack right now (Yes, we have high-speed internet in the mineshack!) I will post a picture in the next day or two.

All the while that we've been building our little home, we've also been having a well drilled on our land. The picture above shows our well-driller, Wes, standing next to his rig about ten minutes after he hit water, which was about three days ago. He reached the aquifer at approximately 640 feet, which was quite a bit shallower than predicted. If you look closely, you can see my containers in the background. Pretty soon we'll have water plumbed all over our land!

Sunday, July 2nd, was my birthday, and so we had a party. I ran some robots, which was the first time I've run them since moving here. Christina masterminded the party, which was fantastic, and included the delicious cake which I seem to be quite angry at in the lower picture!

In all my spare (!) time, I've also been obsessively rebuilding the Husqvarna dirt bike that I got for free in LA a few months ago. Stay tuned for pix of that.

But most of all, stay tuned for pix of this awesome little house. What a great feeling to build a house that you can live in! I think I'll crawl into bed now.

Oh my god, it's finally over. I am out of LA. This is it. I never have to go back!!

My plan to use my Dodge truck to carry the few items remaining in LA as well as tow my Scout to Taos unravelled when I had my little forklift accident.

So instead I embarked on a highly uncertain adventure.... using my 1979 Scout to tow approximately 4500 pounds of robots, shelving, motorcycle and trailer from LA to Taos. And you know what... it made it! Barely.

There was something much more visceral and more adventurous about this trip than any of the others. Maybe it was the constant threat of a breakdown, or the lack of air-conditioning in the 100-degree desert heat, or the encounters with the nice folks at NAPA Auto Parts in both Kingman and Winslow, AZ where I performed repairs, or the 50 MPH average speed, or the actual breakdown in Flagstaff, or the super-cramped sleeping quarters in the back of the Scout, or the fact that I only slept for two of the first 38 hours of the trip... It was sort of like a dream and a hallucination and a tour of the auto supply stores of the Southwest all in one.

Before leaving LA I determined that the trailer hitch on the Scout was not sufficiently stiff to support the tongue weight of the trailer, so I devised the auxiliary support scenario seen in the bottom picture. I wrapped chain around the hitch and passed it over the tailgate door before fastening it to the roll bar. Worked great.

So now, finally, I can devote myself fully to being in Taos. Oh, except that Christina and I are going to San Francisco for our first joint art gallery opening on the 14th. This is the opening I mentioned way back at the beginning of the blog. We'll be back in Taos by the following weekend.....

LET THE BUILDING BEGIN!

The loading of the truck did not go as planned.

I am now without a solid plan for how to get the remaining items to Taos.

My god this move has been difficult.

Every other stage of this move has been a colossal fucking pain in the ass, so I'm not really sure why I imagined this last phase would be any different.

However, I have at least learned a few things about the trucking industry.

First off, freight brokers for the commercial trucking industry are liars.

Secondly, to quote Christina (who had the unenviable job of trying to help me), trying to get a truck to go to New Mexico with non-containerized cargo is like trying to catch a cab in New York on Friday night in the rain while waving a gun around.

We spent most of the week in LA on the phone with the aforementioned freight brokers, several of whom promised us trucks by Friday. The routine was that they'd say they would call back with details, then they wouldn't call back. When we tried to reach them on the phone, they were usually at lunch. Whenever we were finally able to get them on the phone, they'd tell us that no truckers were wanting this load. (You see, the only thing the broker does is post on some web-based message board something like : "flatbed needed for machinery from Los Angeles to Taos, NM." Then it is up to the truckers to check in on this message board, and if they feel like taking the load, they call the broker.) We were strung along like this until Friday afternoon around 2PM, when all of a sudden we learned that the brokers had all gone home for the weekend!

So, I decided to rent a 24 foot flatbed and drive it myself. On the plus side, I now didn't have to depend on these lying freight pimps, and I could get going immediately. On the minus side, however, were the following factors: Christina and I would not be able to drive in the same vehicle; She would have to tow a trailer all the way back, which was something she had little experience with; the 24 foot truck would not carry everything.... hence my "last" trip would not be my last; and worst of all, for some reason one cannot rent a flatbed truck one way, only local.... so I would have to return the truck to LA. What a pain in the ass!

So off we went. Everything was fine until Sunday morning when the rental truck wouldn't start. Absolutely nothing happened when turning the key. So I crawled under the damn rental truck and started it by jumping the starter solenoid with my Leatherman. I've been starting it that way ever since.

The current plan is to load my Dodge truck onto the flatbed for the drive back to LA. I'm not really sure how to do that. Presuming I am able to get it on there, I'll unload it in LA and drive it back here to Taos with the last few things (which includes my International Scout, which I'll have to tow.)

Maybe that will be the last trip!

And, like I said.... what a pain in the ass.

It had to come some time.....

The last trip.

I contemplated the idea of doing several more trips in my own truck to get all the robots and the art car and the metal and and and.....

And that idea sucked. When I realized that the cost of having a trucking company get it all in one load was comparable to the cost of just three trips in my own truck, the decision was easy. And as a bonus, this way there's much less of my time taken and much less wear and tear on my Dodge.

So a few days ago, Christina and I drove to LA to supervise this last load. (Finally the robots are coming!)

A traffic jam outside Ludlow, California diverted us through some really desolate areas, including the deserted towns of Essex and Amboy and the vast salt fields pictured above. It really was a lot more interesting than the interstate.

Stay tuned for pix of the most interesting truck load yet!

So the roof is really finished now. As soon as it was done and I'd moved the forklifts in, I had the weirdest sensation of being in some kooky old desert dweller's machinery shed. I guess that's me! It was kind of cool.

Of course as soon as it was done I had to try to figure out how to photograph it. I sat down on the dirt. I ended up having to sit very close to the whole structure so that the late afternoon sun was blocked. I had to take all these close-range pictures, not really sure if I'd get around to stitching them all together. So I guess I'm sort of going crazy lately with the stitched-together panoramas... It's the roof's fault.

Framing of the roof is done.

My three containers are arranged in a "U" shape, with the opening facing south - for maximum passive solar gain, or sun exposure. It's already a great candidate for an enclosed workspace. So, I've decided to put a roof over it to protect the space and everything in it from the weather.

In the picture above, I'm welding support legs directly onto the containers to support the beams that will span the space and support the roof.

Later on, I will probably pour a concrete floor slab in the space, and maybe even build a wall with a large lockable door to safely enclose the work area.

The mountains in the background are the Sangre de Cristos, and the largest peak to the right is Taos mountain, which is sacred to the Taos Pueblo Indians and totally off-limits to everyone but them.

Obviously there are places all over the world with interesting histories, but what I am learning is that Taos really stands out, at least for a small town in America, for having an unusually dense and varied and violent history.

One of the more interesting episodes is the combined Spanish and Native American revolt of 1847. In a nutshell, what happened was that these two groups of people, who had managed to live in some semblance of peace for almost 200 years, found common cause in their distrust of the newly arrived anglos. In January of that year, a mob rose up and killed many whites in and around Taos, including the newly appointed first governor of the state, who had been in office only five months. After rampaging through town, they went 12 miles north to Simeon Turley's whiskey mill.

Turley had been making whiskey in Taos for a long time. In fact, his whiskey, referred to as Taos Lightning, was the town's main export for years. When the mob arrived at his mill, Turley made the mistake of trying to talk things over with them. A two-day siege ensued, in which all but two of Turley's men were killed and his mill destroyed. Turley himself was decapitated.

Needless to say, the American Army soon arrived from Santa Fe and proceeded to kill 300 to 400 Spanish and Natives in retaliation for the 25 or so whites killed by the mob.

Not long after reading this story for the first time, I accidentally stumbled upon the unmarked, overgrown ruins of Turley's mill. The ruins sit by a river, the same river that ran the water-wheel which powered the mill. I was walking a friend's dogs, including the three-legged Jack (look closely... he's missing his front left leg), when all of a sudden I was standing in what was left of the mill.

This is only one episode in a pretty rich history. If you want to read more, there's a good synopsis here.

Look!! Christina bought me the Play-Skool "My First Fence" kit!!

No, but really.... this is the first fence I've ever built!

Well, anyway, I think it's cool. The posts are un-peeled cedar. Cedar is, I think, the only wood that you can put straight into the ground untreated. All others will rot eventually. I believe this is because of the oils in cedar.

I think a high percentage of the low number of people reading this here blog don't really have a sense of where my new home is... or even where Taos is! (For a better idea of where Taos is, you're on your own.... it's not that hard to figure out) The land that Christina and I are slowly turning into our home and headquarters is approximately ten miles west of the town of Taos, just over the Rio Grande Gorge bridge. (The bridge, by the way, is the second tallest in the U.S., at 650 feet from roadway to water... That's more than twice the height of the Golden Gate.)

Check out the custom maps above for a better idea. Didn't I promise to post maps like these a long time ago???

A few things are actually starting to happen now on our land.

My old "Angel of Death" sculpture stands guard day and night, discouraging unwanted visitors. A few of the times I've been out there working, I've actually done a double-take - wondering who that creepy guy was over there.....

The second picture actually shows some pretty monumental developments. Those boxes sticking up out of the mesa are power! Electrical power on the land!!! We're planning on moving out there pretty soon, to stay in the borrowed Airstream trailer, and that power is going to make it oh so much nicer! And the arranged white rocks, which came up out of the ditch that was dug to run the power line, represent our first real landscaping. If you go left at the fork in the road you go to my 3 acres and our future shop, and if you go right you head to Christina's 3 acres and our future home.

Exciting!

Is it possible that you faithful readers are tired of pictures of forklifts? Well, if you're anything like me, you can't get enough of pictures of forklifts! So, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I'll just assume you love them as much as I do!

I can say that the learning curve out here, where pavement is scarce, can be high. Sometimes it takes two or three times longer to do simple things. And sometimes the things that worked great back in LA don't work here at all. That was the case with the forklift I brought out here. I thought it would work great.... after all it worked great in LA, even in a mud puddle. But it was no match for the dirt and dust, so I had to go to Phoenix and get the beauty pictured here.

It's a 1969 Otis-Baker-York, gasoline engine, 5000 lb capacity. Manufactured by the Otis Elevator Company! It fits in perfectly with my stable of funky, old, high-maintenance equipment.

The skid-loader in the background is not mine, but I wish it were. Those things are really fun. I'm thinking about some kind of wacky quick-attachmnet scenario for this lift whereby I can put on a loader bucket or a post-hole digger and sort of convert it into a skid-loader. We'll see about that.

Well, after many trips to LA and back, a trip to London (for my mom's birthday), and a trip to Phoenix, I'm finally here!!

This is the stop sign closest to our land. Actually, it's the only one within a ten-mile radius.

Some more things I love about Taos...

Sunsets like that one are just not that unusual. Really.

Christina's dog Tatou.... in my hat. She's a sweetie, and a real mama's girl.

And most of all, Christina. And how about that machine she's standing in front of? That's at a very strange junkyard in Manassa, Colorado, not far from Taos. We could never find the proprietor, so we just walked around his yards. I think I'll be going back there soon.

So after dropping the containers onto the land and then spending a day or two working on the land (starting to put up a fence) I took the train back to LA. Meanwhile, Christina got the process of getting the electricity run out to our land started. I loaded the new forklift onto the new trailer and put a few other things that I had to unload from the containers onto my truck and headed back to Taos. I spent two days in Taos helping Christina pick up her new Power Hammer, then took the (damn) train back to LA again. I picked up a 22ft rental truck and loaded it pretty damn full of more stuff that had to come out of the containers. In fact, I went to a truck scale before leaving LA and learned that my gross vehicle weight was 30,780 pounds, putting me 4,780 pounds past the rated load capacity of the truck and the legal limit for driving without a Commercial Driver's License. Needless to say, I observed the speed limit and avoided all weigh stations. I unloaded the truck in the wind and dust and then returned it. Sounds like fun, huh?

But the good news is that I've actually moved enough stuff to Taos now that I'm actually under no time pressure to go back to LA. I've still got probably two more trips (at least) to go, but all that stuff is in low-cost storage, so the pressure is off.

For the first time, I actually feel like I live in Taos. Wow. I moved.

OK, yes, right. It's been forever since I blogged last. Certainly forever in blog time, anyway. Sorry.

A lot has happened since then. And, in a way, not much has happened. Basically, I've travelled a lot and I've moved a lot of shit to Taos.

While the containers were being trucked to Taos, I took a train to Albuquerque. I did this instead of driving because I didn't want my truck to break down on the way and leave me stranded and unable to supervise the off-load. Unfortunately Christina was in southern New Mexico working on a movie, so I'd have to get up to Taos and handle things by myself. But.... when I walked out of the train station... guess who was waiting for me? That was an amazing surprise.

So Christina and I went up to Taos and handled the off-load the next day. This went a hell of a lot smoother than the on-load. I have to say it was pretty damn cool to see the containers sitting on my land. And actually it's pretty damn cool just to say "my land." I say it a lot.

Monday, April 3rd, the day I had the containers loaded onto trucks, was the worst single day of this whole move so far.

All three shipping containers were too heavily loaded. The legal load limit for what the big-rig trucks could carry was approximately 48,000 lbs. The first container to be loaded, the forty-footer, which I had estimated to weigh between 30 and 35 thousand pounds, actually weighed in at over 50,000. So, in the rain, while the $170/hr crane guy and the two truckers waited, I unloaded 2500 lbs. It only got worse from there…..

The second container, a twenty-footer, which I estimated at 25,000 lbs, actually weighed 36,000. I removed 9,000 pounds from this one. And the last one, which needed to come in at no more than 20,000 or so, weighed in at 32,000. When John, the crane guy, told me this, I almost broke. I had to remove 12,000 lbs, while they all waited and it rained on me and my stuff.

All told, I removed over 23,000 lbs from three containers. That’s 11.5 tons of stuff that didn’t make it to New Mexico and is still sitting in LA. The crane rental cost twice what I’d estimated it would because it took twice as long as I’d thought. And crane rental isn’t cheap.

I just barely made it onto the train which would take me on an overnight trip to Albuquerque, and when I did finally settle in to my seat, I realized I’d lost my cell phone. To put it euphemistically, I sort of lost it.

Me with my six robots. There's almost nothing left in the shop. I found a tenant for my apartment and move out of that tomorrow. The containers will be picked up by crane on Monday for the trip to New Mexico.

I'm almost completely out of LA!!!!!

(Oh, right, except for the two or three round-trips I'll have to make in April for all the big stuff that didn't fit into the containers. Damn.)

Well, the 40 mile drive back to LA with the new forklift was pretty damn sketchy. This was mostly due to my wimpy trailer, which in addition to having crappy tires also has no brakes. So I managed to find an incredible deal on a much beefier trailer with good tires and four-wheel brakes. The guy who I bought it from was named Tim, and was really pretty hilarious. That's him unloading some big asphalt tar tank off the trailer, and my good friend John Besse in the foreground. And that's a stupidly large boat made of concrete (!) in the background.... Somehow I can't imagene that thing ever really making it back to the water.

But the coolest thing that happened that day was that Tim gave me, for free, the awesome 500 cc two-stroke Husqvarna in the bottom picture! OK, it does have a blown tranny, but that's nothing. What an awsesome project that will be! According to him, this particular bike has a storied racing history and was originally built specifically for some motocross superstar in the early eighties. But the best part is that it was made in Sweden, just like my sweetheart!

Here is my very sexy new forklift! At least I think it's sexy. I already spray-painted on my robot-head-and-crossed-wrenches logo. This thing is really nice.... lots of power and speed, and it has headlights for night work!

Two more amusing pictures:

• Loading this forklift onto my trailer with another forklift. The Taos crowd will recognize the freak over on the right!
• My current fleet of forklifts. I'm bringing the two on the right to Taos, and selling the little guy on the left.
  

The same container pictured near the beginning of the blog, now almost full. All the big machinery is in this one.... very heavy.

In the last few days I have

• moved almost completely out of the apartment Christ and I were living in
• held two open houses trying to find a tenant for the apartment
  
• gotten my truck painted (I think it looks great, see it here)
• moved thousands more pounds of stuff into the containers
• fixed the broken forklift (thank god)
• sold and delivered my hot tub
  
• purchased an awesome off-road capable forklift (will post pictures soon)

I get closer every day, but it seems endless.

Injury Gallery

1. A phillips screwdriver bit pierced my finger. You can see the "cross" shape.
2. My big numb thumb after being smashed with a hammer.
3. Cut my finger. Don't know how.
4. Christina's finger smashed between an anvil and a wooden pallet.
   

Now that I'm back in LA I'm tying up all kinds of loose ends. Trying to find a tenant for the apartment I've been in, continuing the move out of the shop, moving out of the apartment, fixing the damn broken forklift, and trying to find a new forklift that will work out there in the Taos dirt. I drove down to the rural hills outside of San Diego the other day to look at an all-terrian forklift, which turned out to be a piece of crap, but while I was there I briefly flirted with the idea of just getting the beautiful Case tractor pictured above. Thankfully I came to my senses shortly thereafter.

My first view of the LA basin, 1:00 pm, coming down the 15 freeway. And they say the air quality is poor here! Ha! (That's thick smog, for those of you lucky enough to not know what you're looking at.)

My return trip was uneventful, at least compared to the trip out to Taos. My only misfortunes were a completely shredded trailer tire and an electrical fire under the truck (!), which I frantically blew out after crawling under the truck! I installed a fire extinguisher in the cab upon my return to LA.

Ahhh, Taos.


(Picture taken from our land with Christina's Fin sculpture in the foreground)

All right... back to the blog.

So, Flagstaff got completely snowed in on Saturday night. It's been years since this California boy saw so much snow, and I've never tried to drive in anything like this (never mind while towing a heavy trailer.

However, not too far east of Flagstaff the weather got clear and beautiful and for most of the day things were going great. We stopped in Gallup to have a late lunch at the El Rancho Hotel, a historic landmark building which is actually worth the stop. After lunch we fueled up with diesel, and as I was pulling out of the gas station, I heard..... a very loud noise.

Yes, a trailer tire had popped. But closer inspection revealed that it had popped because it had been rubbing the fender (which it's not supposed to do) because it was in totally the wrong place in relation to the trailer because..... the leaf spring hangers had completely broken off the trailer!!! Yes, that's right, the axles were no longer attached to the trailer!!

So, at 6 PM on a Sunday in Gallup in 10 degree weather, I set about getting the damn trailer jacked up and put back together (as much as I could) while Christina worked her phone magic and actually found a guy named Steve who would come out at 6 PM on a Sunday in Gallup in 10 degree weather with a generator/welder and weld the damn thing back together (at a gas station!!!!!)

Three hours later we were on the road again and we finally got to Taos at 4 in the morning.

We slept well.

The southwest didn't have any rain for a record-setting 143 days... before Saturday, that is. Great timing.

We woke up in Needles to have rain coming down onto our un-protected load. (At least I didn't have to worry about my welder getting wet!)

We started driving into higher elevations and before long rain turned to snow. Relatively uneventful but very slow-going. We were driving slow, that is, until we weren't driving at all. About 60 miles before Flagstaff traffic stopped completely, and we sat there for three hours. I got out and took pictures.

When we finally got to Flagstaff we found a bar, played pool, and got drunk!

This is what I could see from my rear-view mirror. Not much. And a lot less at night.

So....... After driving two hours to escape LA and another hour and a half or so at more reasonable speeds, we finally stopped at around 9 PM to rest and re-fuel in Barstow. While I waited for my chance at the diesel pump I walked around the rig to check the load. A frayed strap was the first clue.... suddenly I realized that my MIG welder was gone.

Wow.

I never heard (and certainly never saw) a thing. Considering that the only direction the welder could have gone off was to the right (the passenger side) and that I was driving almost exclusively in the slow lane, I believe the chances that it caused anybody else any problems are thankfully slim. But Jesus, what a drag all around.

We pushed on and slept in lovely Needles, CA.

It all started with such great promise.....

After loading the trucks and trailers for most of Thursday evening and all of Friday, we finally left LA Friday evening. Just in time for rush hour! It took two hours just to get out of LA. A harbinger of bad-timing related problems to come....

Creative lathe rigging with a borrowed forklift.

It looks like Christina and I will be heading off to Taos on Friday. It will be good to take a little break from the brutality of this schedule. She'll stay in Taos (can you blame her?) while I will return to LA next week to move more heavy shit. And fix the dead forklift. And try to buy a new off-road capable foklift for Taos. And move more heavy shit.

Loading my CNC mill into the last empty container. I didn't even bother trying with my forklifts. This lift belongs to the Brewery, the place I've lived for eight years and am now leaving.

The guy who helped me was really good. When he was done, I asked him if he drank beer, thinking I'd get him a six-pack as a tip, but he said no. Then I tried to offer him a cash tip, saying: "go buy yourself something." He replied: "That's cool, man. Why don't you go buy yourself some beers."

Oh well, I tried.

We actually got one of the 20-foot containers completely filled the other day.
When the black cabinet behind me collapsed earlier in the day, falling over and getting smashed and spilling it's contents all over, I pretty much lost it. It's a good thing Christina is around to think clearly and maintain some realistic perspective, because on most days I seem totally unable to manage those things. (We picked up the cabinet, emptied it, banged it back into shape, reinforced it, re-filled it, and put it into the container. I managed to smash my thumb really badly with a hammer in the process.)

It takes a village to raise an idiot.

Wait, may be that's only in Texas.

I guess what I meant to say is that it takes a forklift to fix a forklift. (Fixing forklifts is really what you want to have to do in the middle of moving) The battery in front of me goes to the forklift behind me and weighs around 2700 pounds. Click here for another pic of this battery removal.

Using old Robochrist show props to wrap up shelving full of metal. This shelf was too heavy for my forklift... probably 3500 lbs.

Yes it's been a while since I uploaded anything here, but.... Jesus Christ this is exhausting work. Here's a double-stack pallet... Metal bits on the bottom, and lathe chucks, vices, etc on the top. This pallet was probably 1500 lbs.

The other day I posted on here saying that moving all this stuff sux. Maybe this picture (which I took today) better captures the feeling....

If I had all the time and money I needed I would build my shop like a traditional industrial revolution brick factory (with an enormous bridge crane!) These are some gorgeous buildings we saw in San Francisco. I'd very happily transplant that bottom building directly onto my land if I could.

But alas, I am working with el budget-o pequeno (that's spanish), and as such I will almost certainly erect a prefabricated steel building, which might look something like this. It won't make it into Architectural Digest, but I actually like the way they look.

We took a little break from packing to go up to San Francisco this weekend. Part of the reason for the trip was to deliver this sculpture for a show in San Fran which will open June 8th. The show will be an overview of mechanical and robotic art from all over, curated by the inimitable Kal Spelletich. Christina will have a piece in there too. This show should be pretty kick-ass, don't miss it if you're anywhere nearby! Watch this blog in about 4 months for more details!

Someone (Leda) requested that I post a few more pictures of the land out in Taos. Well, here they are. These are some of the last pix I took last time I was there. In the top one you can see the Sangre De Cristo mountains at sunset. That pic was taken from the new land (which means that's what we'll see every goddamn evening!) Second pic is of the flat pad I cleared out of the sagebrush with the skid-steer for my containers. This is (hopefully) where the crane will be offloading them sometime in the next few weeks (if I didn't overload the containers and break the trucks and destroy the cranes and get sued and...)

Well, hopefully that won't happen.

And here is a panoramic pic I took from the land a few months or so ago. It sure will look different out there with a bunch of robots and broken trucks out there!

Sometime soon I'll post a pic of a satellite image of Taos to point out where the land is.

Oh, and I'm gonna get a dog when I get out there. I think I already know what kind. I'll let you know soon.

Over and out.

Christina is just about done building a new flatbed for her '93 Dodge Ram Cummins Turbo Diesel. (Oh, and we have matching trucks - how's that for sickening.... click here if you wanna see a picture taken in Taos of our twin trucks) Here she is working on hers while I drain diesel out of my old jet engine fuel tank into a drum full of biodiesel. We run our trucks on it when we can.

Moving this much stuff SUX.

This afternoon my two brand new containers (well, actually they're kind of beat up, but they're allegedly wind and water tight) arrived!

It was cool to watch them being unloaded. When the first one dropped the last four inches to the ground, the earth shook. My neighbor across the street on the second floor said it shook his whole place.

The bottom pic shows one of the 20-footers empty. I think it's the last time I'll see these empty for a long time. Within a week or so, I'm guessing, I think each of these will weigh around 20,000 pounds! Yikes!

Continuing to load the 40 foot container..... For some reason I thought I'd be selling my (many) mannequins before leaving LA, but they just seemed to want to go with me, so what the hell. Here a few of them are travelling from my shop to the container.

I'm moving to Taos, Dammit!

And I'm taking my robots with me!

For those of you who don't already know, here's the short story: I met a girl (Christina Sporrong). We fell in love. She lives in Taos. We bought land there. I decided I was done with LA. I decided to move. I'll build a big shop there where we both can work and make stuff. She will build a house where we can sleep and curl up by the fire with the dogs.

(That picture above is of me doing the first real work on my land - clearing a flat pad of dirt [MY DIRT!!] for my soon-to-arrive containers)

I'm currently in the process of loading every damn thing I own into 3 shipping containers! Right now I'm focusing on loading a single 40-foot container with a combination of hydraulics, motors, tools, books, records, and all kinds of other crap. Jesus, what a lot of work.

When this 40-footer is full I'll start filling two 20-footers with the big machine tools, shop tables, welders, tool cabinets, robots, sculptures, and other assorted remaining stuff. I hope it all fits.

Once these containers are full I'll be contracting the services of a crane company to come and lift them onto the beds of big-rig trucks which will drive them to Taos. At that point I'll have to hire another crane to off-load them into place on my land. This should probably be both fun and nerve-wracking to watch, as these containers will probably weigh up to 20 tons each. I hope the cranes don't break.

I'll post pictures of all the crazy stages of this move, as well as of the (arguably more exciting) building of the new shop and home that will happen in the spring. So stay tuned!