Been spending the last week actually doing The Work in my new space and making it feel like its name would suggest. Wonderful to work out there, to tinker and toil, to feel as though I’ve found my footing for the first time in a long, long time.
Solar install wrapped up today. Other than shelving and details, I’m considering this particular project finished. And there was much rejoicing…
First day working in NuSanctum – though much of that Work involved installing the air conditioner as the space was uninhabitable by 1030, a placeholder until the heat pump – and it's been exactly what I've wanted in a workspace for years (the knowledge that my useless creative meanderings are no longer contributing to planetary climate decimation is also rather therapeutic). Still have to add shelving and organize things – and decide which (if any) items from The Collection will make their way out here – but that's for another day: for now, I'm going to let myself bask in the victory.
I have the (solar) power! Mini-split and house-generator hookup to be done at some point soon - but the main point: after three months of destruction, construction, design, and hurled combinatorial profanities, I can start working out there (once I get a small window AC unit to make it inhabitable in the afternoon).
Hank and Aiden, the local sun gods, are at work: four panels are on the roof, the boxes are installed inside, big batteries unpacked, Derbz is going crazy with people in his backyard, and, by the end of the day, I'll have 12kw of renewable solar power surging through NuSanctum. Also nice: not only will NuSanctum be my studio, my escape across the yard, one in which my useless creative processings will no longer be wasted contributions to the climate apocalypse, but NS will (later this week) also function as a renewable backup generator for the house when the power goes out (read: I won't have to worry about my insulin stores going bad). If that wasn't enough, I anticipate being able to ward off vampires just by opening the doors. Win/win/win.
One of my five favorite comics of all time is Denny O'Neil and Michael Kaluta's 1973 run on THE SHADOW for DC - and owning a piece of original Kaluta Shadow art has long been a dream, a dream delivered via post office this morning:
And very soon it will find its new home in NuSanctum…
This whole slowing down – this whole letting myself slow down – thing is wonderful, yesterday being the first (non-hospitalized – and even that's been almost eight) morning in more than 10 years that I said to hell with it and took the day off. Might become a regular Sunday thing, especially since the NL is now monthly (releasing next Sunday) and I'm hoping NuSanctum yields more work / make during the week.
Perhaps I can owe figuring out how to move forward with the post-ink therapy reanimation of a project I long thought dead (method being the same as my usual method of reanimation: start a new document, put it next to the old one in an infinite project canvas, copy and paste and rewrite in(to) the new from the perspective of now, junk everything else) to this slow down and day off? If so, more please.
Moving things out piecemeal to NuSanctum, though most of today will be spent prepping the cardboard and rubble from yesterday's mini-heatdome desk assembly session for the recycle bin.
Finished the flooring and trim yesterday, the desk today. Other than solar (leaving that part to the pros on Tuesday) and shelves and moving all writing / making stuff out there, major DIY NuSanctum construction operations are complete. Aiming to be Working-working in there by the end of the week.
My grandfather wouldve been 98 today (though 96 good years and two royally shitty months of 97 are a solid record; we should all be so lucky) and, with the exception of one row by the door area – on the docket today, along with floor trim which I'll be sourcing from the already-stained pieces of what was once the first desk I built –, that fucking floor (its official name) is in NuSanctum: if hell is, indeed, a thing, and I'm sentenced there, my own personal slice of it will consist of me having to do flooring for eternity while my mercifully long-dead stepfather attempts to impart life lessons via radio-blasted high school sports metaphors in that fucking swamp-creature-love-child-of-Jimmy-Carter-and-Jimmy-Stewart voice of his. And with that visual, I leave you to your day.
