Another Origami USA annual convention has come on gone. This year was an especially productive weekend and fun time for me. I meant to write a post last week when I was preparing for the convention, but I was too busy and ran out of time. So I’ll rewind a bit.
I’ve been busy folding new models and diagramming the past few weeks. A week ago Friday I had planned to take the day off from work and finish folding a whole bunch of works-in-progress. But I had to go in to the office to manage a group of contractors who are taking over the codebase of a project from another group, a project which I will be overseeing going forward. And as it turns out the codebase is sort of a fixer-upper. So it goes.
I had some good origami time on Sunday, but I had to choose between finishing models and finishing diagrams. I already had completed several new models for my exhibit this year and went back and wet-folded a few others, so I decided to concentrate on the diagrams. (More on the uncompleted models soon, as the they will be completed.) I went thru all the diagrams I had made in the last year -– fourteen in all — and proofread them. A few were mistake-free, several had one or two minor mistakes, several more had a sequence of steps that needed to be redrawn for clarity and/or accuracy. And then the last few — the Moose, Adirondack Chair, and U.F.O. needed to be finished. The ending steps of each of these models are fully three-dimensional so every step requires a new, highly detailed drawing. So that took up all of my free time and late into the night the rest of the week.
Last Thursday there was a happy hour event after work for the people in my group. I was vacillating on whether to go, being tempted to skip it to go home and fold. But there has been alot of turmoil lately in my group, and people will speak the kind of truth after work with a beer in their hand that the won’t in the office in the daytime, so I went along to hang out and encourage my colleagues to have another drink and see if there was anything to learn. The place was way downtown in SoHo, a neighborhood that I haven’t been to in years.
The bar was right across the street from where I used to live way back in 1993-94 with my friend Levitt when the area was pretty sketchy. I was in a third story walk-up loft that have a living space in one half and a studio full of stage lighting equipment in the other, and we were (among other things) working on software to automate the control of the lights thru MIDI. The stairway always smelled like machine oil and your were always light headed when you reached the flat. We suspected poor ventilation and carbon monoxide. The neighborhood changed a lot in the time I was there. There used to be some crack bum sleeping up the block, in a doorway that became an Armani store. Guess he had to find another place. Sometimes there were movie shoots on the streets and was able to grab breakfast on my way to work from a catering cart. Now the building that where my loft was is no longer there, but a new high-rent luxury apartment is standing in its place.
When I got home that night I was too tired mentally to do any folding, so I went to bed early, which turned out the be a good move. I was able to get all my weekend chores done by midday Friday and had some time to finish preparing my exhibit and tweak some of the models I had. Each year my exhibit gets better and this was the best one yet.
More on the conference itself in part 2…