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!