Moving along

This week has provided just enough time for some of my sore muscles to recover. Lakenda said yesterday evening that I'm not moving as stiffly as I did last week (OK, not her words exactly but a fair description). Tomorrow through Sunday we'll do more work at the Pine Ave. house and on Monday I plan to hit the road back to DC.

Here are a couple of photos to show you our progress on the kitchen drywall since last Wednesday's code inspection. Maybe not exciting to you, but for us it's a big deal to see actual building going on, not just ripping-down and repairs. In the first, Alex had just begun to put sheetrock on one wall.

The second shows the last section of kitchen wall that remains to be closed in and smoothed over with drywall mud. The angled wall at the left is the same one that is at the right edge of the first photo.

Two days ago, after lunch with Darcy and Kat at the Spanish microbrewery restaurant Thirsty Bear Brewing Company (nice tapas, almost as good as at Jaleo in DC), I revisited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Almost the entire space of SFMOMA has been taken over by two massive exhibits: a retrospective of the museum's 75-year history, and a new collection titled "Calder to Warhol" for which they will be building a new museum wing.

My big excitement in these exhibits was a pair of large works by Jay DeFeo, with whose work I was unfamiliar. "Incision" is three-dimensional within a frame; "Veronica" looks equally "deep" when viewed straight on but is apparently a flat painting. You can see them on the SFMOMA website.

I'm sharing something more whimsical with you, Louise Bourgeois' "Spider" in the roof sculpture garden. It's a much smaller sister of Bourgois' egg-laden "Maman" which I photographed outside the National Gallery in Ottawa and another that Alex and Sigrid saw in Tokyo.

I enjoyed the museum but for some reason over the last few weeks I've lost my enthusiasm for sightseeing. At this point I'm just eager to see the people I hope to visit along the way: Jamie on a bike somewhere in the Colorado Rockies or maybe west of there by now, Dorothy in Scottsbluff, Francine and Lisa in Iowa City, Kristen in Urbana, Doug in Chicago and return visits that others near there have suggested. So for now I think I'm scrapping the Four Corners and Mesa Verde. I can always add scenic detours along the way if my mood changes.