Finished, Friday and Saturday
Brrr... We put in a good day Friday, quitting at about 10 pm. At around 8:30 p.m. we decided to not wait to take out the support of the heart's bottom and we did that with the keyhole saw, Dan doing the honors. There was no pressure on the saw at all, and our sculptural form was finally complete. My experience tells me that working through the night, legal on this night only, is a good thing to do karma-wise. So I caught a couple of hours sleep at David's condo and came back to the site at 3:20 a.m. It was very cold! Temperature was just above 0, but somehow it seemed colder (maybe my clothes were not the warmest) and it was hard to work. It is also hard to work alone, so I just hacked away at the base a bit and cleaned up things. Hardly worthwhile but sort of fun. The team showed up at 6 am and we cleaned things up a bit before finally starting the hard job of making the 50 slicing cuts. This was done by Dan, using a saw borrowed from the Ontario team: the slices were not easy to do because of embedded ice, but the work does give some texture to our surface. We had never done anything like this before and were slow, so we found ourselves working right up to the 10 am order to STOP.
Here is Dan Schwalbe, working up high, as usual.
We use sails as sunscreen. The temperatures stayed low though, so the weather was not a big factor. But whenever the sun is out things can melt: a member of the Wisconsin team reported that during the day his thermometer in the sun hit 70 degrees, while it went down to 0 at night.
This early Saturday morning shot from the sweet spot shows all four holes perfectly lined up, the heart form visible in the center, and the setting full moon as a bonus.
As the sun rose on Saturday Rich was able to use his experience to get an interesting sunburst effect through on of our holes. Note the slices on the surface, which is an adornment that we left to the last minute. Putting in the fifty cuts took quite a while. At one point the handle of the saw got in the way, so we had to remove it.
Finished!
The team: Beth Seeley, Dan Schwalbe, David Chamberlain, me (kneeling), and Rich Seeley.
