Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

On evenings when we have no social plan, after my daughter goes to sleep, my wife and I usually spend a few hours in the rec room, with the television, or a movie, on. Some things we actually watch intently, although very few of them¹, but mostly it’s background. I usually am working on a laptop, either reading my thousands of RSS feeds, or writing on this blog, or actually doing work. I have a powerful facility for continuous partial attention (developed thanks to the plodding pace of our educational system, I think.) A few months ago my wife expressed the wish that she could have something equivalent to do, but something less geeky than messing about with a computer.

For her, an activity like that has to be less mental than reading, or working with a computer. Frankly, I think she should be a knitter, because that’s pretty much the ideal for her–keep her hands busy with something that requires a very small amount of attention, and frees her to pay whatever amount of attention to the “entertainment” that it deserves. That may still be in the future, who knows?

She also has mentioned to me at several points in the past that she really enjoyed velvet doodles when she was a kid–this apparently in no small part because the velvet aspect makes it easy to stay inside the lines.

So, when I was shopping at the art supply store for some things to do with Sarah, I saw an insanely complex celtic knot velvet doodle in a large size (16″ x 20″) I picked it up for her. And since we all know that the markers that come with velvet doodles are crappy and don’t last until the end anyway, I solicited her opinion on colours and then made another trip to the Serious Art Store and bought some professional art markers for her.

Several weeks later–remember this was something she only worked on when we had crappy TV, or a non-compelling movie, on–she finished the process of colouring it in. I thought it would be fun to treat it like a serious work of art, so I stopped off and picked up a frame for it, and it’s currently on display on an easel in the rec room. It looks like this:

It’ll stay there until either Trish moves it, or it stops amusing me.

As I said, I usually spend me continuous partial attention time with a laptop (I’m doing it right now!), but that doesn’t mean I can’t spend some time on things with more concrete results.

For instance, I spent a couple of hours, over a couple of nights² last week making this:

Yes, a cable-stayed marble track, with a motorized, gear-driven elevator to automatically keep the marbles cycling. It took a couple of hours to get it all built, and another couple of sessions adjusting the various suspension cable lengths to get a track that both steel and glass marbles would stay on all the way around.

I did try to shoot a little video with my camera, but the video quality it uses was not adequate to make the operation usefully visible.

This project was a gift from my wife, by the way. This probably explains why I have been able to get away with commandeering the formal dining room for a week… but soon I’ll have to come up with some other plan for what to do with this thing. (I’m tempted to put a little end table near an electrical socket and just leave it going as kinetic art, but I’m not sure how that would go over.)

1. I think we’re down to one show that require complete attention now, and the occasional outstanding film.(back)
2. It probably could have been two hours on one night, except I had my two-year old “helping” me–and her assistance while adding fun, certainly also adds time.(back)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Storytime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.