Looking back on it, page the past couple weeks have been an utter blur.
After all this, viagra order and seeing all the tasks remaining (wiring, view lights, instruments, sunshades, roof deck) between now and Burning Man, I have to admit that having our DMV application denied was the very best thing that could have happened to us.
So much to do, so little time, as Dean Motter’s Mister X was wont to say.
So here’s all the crazy work we’ve been up to, compressed into one massively overdue blog post:
We started in on replacing the headliner …Kristina beautifully laminated all the old masonite headliner panels with pages from our well-thumbed Rand McNally atlas of the U.S., focusing on all the neat places we’ve visited (Nevada, Utah, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, etc.).
We then installed it, using hardware from last weekend’s junkyard crawl and quickly found that the panels, which I had pulled from several old Ford vans, didn’t precisely fit. For some reason they’re all falling about 1/8 of an inch short of fitting precisely into the metal ribs that are clipped to the van’s ceiling, but I’ll be finishing the jobs with screws and heavy-duty adhesive.
So that’s in progress.
I also got into getting the sound dialed in – Rob helped me zero in on the nasty line-buzz problem the amplification system was suffering: Inadequate grounding on the power inverter. I can mitigate it a bit with heavily-shielded speaker wire, which I spent last night installing in the speaker booms …
… but then there’s the matter of having to split the signal from a two-channel amp into four channels, which meant shelling out $43 to Radio Shack on a gadget I’ll have to install later.
So that’s in progress.
While Rob was over, his daughter and mine made some more mallets, this time with stout but whippy fiberglass rods and superballs, which they dipped into PlastiDip and left to dry.
I need to go back and give everything a final dip, as well as dipping the handles for better grip and no fiberglass splinters.
So that’s in progress.
I also started sorting out all the 100+ LEDs that were unceremoniously ripped from our last Burning Man project and stuffed into a bag so that I can segregate the ultraviolet …
…from the white …
… and begin designing the overall lighting scheme.
So that’s in progress.
Then there’s this entire snake’s nest to sort out – the speaker and lighting wires from the four speaker booms needed to be trimmed and cleaned up, but I still need to install more lights, which means more wiring and trimming and cleaning up.
So that’s in progress.
And all along, I’ve been machining little scraps of aluminum from the xylophones into pendants and keyfobs to give out as playa gifts. (seen here artfully stacked on the kitchen table by my daughter).
And that’s in progress.
But I feel that it must all be leading towards something, right?
Right???