The Monster

This is the Fat Monster, Thin Monster exhibit we have just installed at the Children's Museum in North Conway. Children can choose food to put in the basket on one side and an activity on the other. Everything is weighted so if you give the monster a hamburger, and ice cream cone, a glass of milk, french fries and a piece of cake and then have him settle down in front of the TV, his belly pops out. If you just give him a sandwich and a glass of milk and then he goes snowboarding, he stays thin.

We hope the kids will get the idea.

The monster design is from Ed Emberly who has generously offered to let us use any of his designs for the museum. Ed's drawing books and monster books have been delighting children for years.

Big Green Book

Olof works on the Big Green Monster book for the children's museum. It is a big replica of the book by Ed Emberley.

Big Yellow Skiddah (and Cat)

This is the skiddah all painted. Olof has since added some neat lights, one that spins around on top and a headlight. All the lights work and there are dials too. The kids are going to love it. Next up is a model of the Great Green Monster by Ed Emberley. The book will be about three feet high and made of birch plywood.
I will be editing a family video for Camp Sunshine and producing an endowment piece for the Flying Yankee restoration. That is a unique train built in 1938 (I think that is the year)

The train was purchased from Edaville Railroad where it was sitting going to ruin, transported up here to NH and a group has been working to raise the millions to restore it and see it run again. Exciting project and one I am pleased to be involved in. I'll post some photos soon.

Skiddah

Not painted yet, but here is the skidder Olof built for the Children's Museum. It is about eight feet long and I bet it will be a big hit.

The Children's Museum

I haven't been writing here a lot mostly because of losing Fergus January 12th to heart failure. So I have just been trying to deal with that loss and writing on Caturday.
The last couple of days we have been working on projects for the Children's Museum and above are two samples of buildings for a townscape. They are made of lightweight MDF and will have velcro on the back so they can be placed on a carpet wall ( a big green mountain). When we are done the whole town will be represented there. The businesses are donating to help get this open.
Next up we are building a skidder. It will be about six feet long and bright yellow and black. I will post a photo when it is done. Then a three foot tall book of The Great Green Monster by Ed Emberley.

A Water Toy

I don't know what we'll call this if it is built but for now it's just the Water Toy. This is a model for the children's museum we're involved in here. It's kind of a Rube Goldberg type thing with water coming down from the bottle and going up with an Archimedes screw. Also one of those Chinese things where the water flows in and then drops. There is a Loch Ness Monster you can't really see and kayaks and ducks that will swim down stream. Kids will be able to change the water flow.
Next to it is the puppet theater we are going to build as our donation.

I am re-writing Maggie by Moonlight for a workshop in Vermont in March. It is with Carolyn Coman, Norma Fox Mazer and an editor from Candlewick Press in Boston. Expensive, but limited to 20 people and you get a lot of critiques on your project. I looked at it and Olof agreed I should do it. If I don't get some real encouragement with the writing I won't pursue it the way I have in past years, except for client projects. But I am excited about going to this one. I haven't been into going to these kinds of things, for one thing, they are usually expensive and for the other, I figure if you are going to write then you might as well spend your time writing. But this one looked good.

Working on the children's museum we got to meet Ed Emberley who is a well known children's illustrator. It was funny because I knew I would like him and his wife as soon as we met and we ended up going to our house for lunch and talking about all sorts of possible projects. Ed and Barbara come up here to ski so I hope the skiing improves soon so we can hit the Ellis together.

Weather has been very very mild. That's a good thing for our heating bills and the fact that we haven't had a working furnace, but a bad thing for the skiing. Today the sky is grey and it looks like rain. Rain is predicted for the next few days. I think it's about 40F out and the snow has become soft. It really isn't that great to slouch through it. So we will probably have to hop on the exercise bike. Or, we can put on our back country skis and go up to Jeff the Neighbors, just to get out. But you can make a mess of your ski bottoms if you hit rock.

The furnace did arrive today and Olof will be finishing the duct work. Then it will get hooked up Monday. We haven't needed it so far. Unusual. But we could suddenly get a spell of 15 below with wind and that is when we do need it. The no skiing is making me a lilttle gloomy. I love blue winter skies and white snow. I hope we'll get more of that soon. The few days we have been out have been wonderful.

Home Improvement

The sky feels like snow but we're not really supposed to get much. All week it's been rain and the valley is full of tourists trying to ski. It's funny living in a resort area, on bad weather days you can hear the traffic humming on the highway across the river and it sounds like a hive of angry bees. No cross country skiing, or rather, just not great skiing, nothing else to do but shop and eat and spend money. Especially when it's pouring rain.The mountains call it "frozen granular" the locals know it means crushed ice. Or what we call New England Hardpack.
So no skiing for us this lovely week before everyone decides to start on the video or web projects that we could have finished up nicely in November or December. There's something about the New Year, everyone hits the deck running as we say. We already had the first call for a project I thought was dead. There's about a dozen more lined up. Sigh. It's great to have work but boy, downtime is nice for learning new software and writing and we had time for the project pictured above. Or rather we had time to do it well.
Because the furnace decided to quit just before Christmas we went ahead with our plans to take down the old furnace room and move the location for the new one, which is smaller and more efficient. I didn't take a before picture but just as well. Friends know what it looked like, since it's the first thing you see coming into the house. It was what you could call the elephant in the room. And when it went on it sounded like a jet engine.
We were amazed at how big the room was with the furnace room gone. It's a nice, airy space with the high ceiling. My art room is off to the side (currently a mess with everything piled up because of the construction). Olof does his ski tuning here and he has his easel and there is a light table for looking at slides. We're going to move the washer drier down here too, we'll finally have a closet for towels in the bathroom. It will become the room for doing stuff in.
I've done so much home improvement over the last thirty years I don't know if I'd make it through building another house. We're finally getting to the point where this one will be finished off. Amazing.