2025, Farming Update, home, Theatre, work

Twist And Shout

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben.

Another week that zipped by at breakneck speed.
I feel like I barely get time to comment on the blog these days. The next month and a half will be this way. Maybe longer, depends how the spring goes.

Monday my friend Paul and I drove to Minneapolis to pick up some lighting fixtures that had been repaired. We enjoyed lunch at Doolittle’s Woodfired Grill, and had an uneventful drive to and from the big city. Tuesday was a trip to Northfield, with just me and loud music and my mind wandering. It was fun to see the farm fields and I saw a little snow in one ditch, and nobody doing any fieldwork yet. It’s early, it’s only April 12th, but when the snow melts and the temperatures are above average, everybody sure gets antsy. And when the weather is all over the place like this, who knows what’s gonna happen in two weeks. Crop Insurance doesn’t kick in until April 15th, so most people won’t start planting corn before then.

I do plan on picking up oat seed and corn seed Saturday afternoon. Remember I talked about that wagon frame a couple weeks ago and moving the flatbed wagon from one frame to the other? I haven’t done anything further with it yet but maybe this weekend. Especially since I use it for seed. Won’t take long once I get my butt in gear.


Our play at the college, Swimming in the Shallows, will open on Thursday. I’ve been busy with that. I painted the floor with a base coat of white one night after rehearsal. I don’t consider myself a good painter, my style with the floor is to thin down some paint, and use a couple hand sprayers and just have at it. It’ll look like something!
Often a show will take place in multiple locations so the floor may have to cover all the bases. Not always, sometimes it is just a house, and I can put a rug down, but often it needs to be rather neutral, and I don’t ever wanna leave it just plain black. A couple of the themes in this show are water and a beach. So first I mixed up some white paint, put it in a typical garden variety sprayer, and just based the floor white.

It’s kind of fun to watch the dots fill in the floor. It’s oddly satisfying. Then I’ll come back with blues and browns…or something. I feel a little like Georges Seurat, a little bit of pointillism.

I’m working with the marketing department for this show because they have a large format printer and I’m making tessellations. Repeating patterns.
My original thought was to use objects from the show like shoes, purses, cigarettes, but I couldn’t exactly make tessellation from those items. I found a free website where I could create and modify repeating patterns and then I include approximations of those items inside the pattern.


This was a sample as the marketing department and I worked out scale. There are six freestanding walls that will have six different patterns on them. I don’t want them so busy the audience is trying to figure out what it is, I just want to turn it into a texture. We talk a lot about texture in lighting and scenic design.
Two of the walls closest to center will have patterns that are just squares with some images inside.
The next two walls are more like diamonds but slightly skewed. And then the last two walls, centered on each side, are very skewed. It’s a visual metaphor for the twisted relationships in the show. Or the way real life can be twisted sometimes.

The electricians have finished in the shop. Three and a half days.
The outlets and the lights are wonderful.


I have lights over the bench!

And I have exterior lights that I’m excited about.

We had some kind of issue with the garage door opener, but on Friday I had the door company come back and fix it. I wasn’t home, but from my phone, I was able to open the door, pull up the shop camera, and watch the door open! I cackled gleefully. Then I watched it close again. From my phone. I giggled.

I got the stereo moved out there last weekend, and I have a Bluetooth adapter for it and now I just need to get the speakers mounted.

It’s all coming together!

PATTERNS IN YOUR LIFE?

WHAT’S YOUR TEXTURE?

36 thoughts on “Twist And Shout”

  3. Your work with the tessellations brings to mind the fabric patterns I designed and had printed for a couple of my shirts. One of the trickiest parts is working out the pattern so that it repeats smoothly in both directions, since the portion you design is only a fragment of the whole. That is particularly complex when the pattern is intended to appear random and not tightly repetitious. Like this:

    Radio Tubes F

    The interesting thing I’ve discovered when wearing this shirt is how few people recognize radio vacuum tubes.

    I also designed a pattern using images of vintage toy robots but I haven’t made that shirt yet.

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  5. I should probably wait and think about my answer to these questions. I tend to be rather warm and fuzzy and idealistic in the morning, when my rose-colored glasses haven’t come off yet.

    I like to watch the clear Lake Superior water move over the stones when the lake is relatively calm. There is gentle movement, and you can see the water moving in and out, sometimes crisscrossing as it moves. This creates patterns which are reflected on the stones beneath the surface, and it can be mesmerizing. I’m grateful to say that I have time in my life now to allow myself to be entranced by something most people would find completely boring.

    When you talk about tessellations, I think of a young corn field in mid June when the corn is about a foot tall. The corn field looks like a carpet or a cushion, but the pattern is uniform for all those acres. And so green!

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    1. Thanks! It’s really not, I mean it’s 24’ by 48’, the ceiling is 14’. But there farm shops that are big enough for multiple semi’s and tractors and implements.
      But this will do nicely.

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    1. Olana, the Hudson Valley home of painter Frederic Church, was influenced by Persian and Moorish architecture and designed inside and out to reflect that esthetic. Here’s an example:

      You can see more if you google Olana or Frederic Church.

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  10. The patterns of our life seem to correspond to the liturgical calendar. Activity patterns, not visual patterns. We are having our Easter dinner tonight, since next week we sing in the choir for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We play bells for the Easter vigil on Saturday and both services Easter Sunday.

    We are having an Italian lamb and pasta dish tonight. It calls for 2 lbs of leg of lamb. The smallest boneless leg we had was 7 lbs. What to do with the other 5 lbs? A Spanish lamb stew and two Greek lamb pies encased in phyllo. One reason I neglected to put in Ben’s header photo was that I was in a cooking frenzy yesterday.

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    2. I haven’t thought of that yet. I don’t have a CD player out there. And not sure how good the reception will be, but the only stations I have programmed on any of my radios are down at the low end of the frequency. A local classic rock station, NPR music, and NPR news.
      I suspect it will be Radio Heartland a lot.

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  13. Rise snd Shine Baboons,

    Patterns: there are notable periods in my life in which the legitimate problems, then crises in the lives of other people affect me profoundly, but I am the one figuring out how to solve problems (i.e. Dad’s MS, grandmother’s cancer and end of the family farm due to that). It is not my problem but if I don’t do something everyone goes under.

    Texture: Bumpy! Due to this pattern.

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  15. Ben, your new shop looks fabulous. Nice job. I bet you’ll be spending many hours contentedly tinkering there.

    Sorry for not participating much this weekend. I’ve been feeling pretty miserable. I spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday, and I may be heading back if things don’t change soon.

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