Remembrance of Things Past, Kind Of in Everyday Ramblings

Not the greatest picture but you go with what you’ve got. This is the kitchen window of a small house with a kitchen pretty close to the sidewalk. The back of the house hangs over a hill and has a view. I noticed all this walking by the other day because the garage is right next to the kitchen, the door was open and right outside the kitchen door there were ceiling to floor pegboards and a large variety of saucepans were hanging on those pegboards.

Having just invested in a high-quality saucepan my eye was attuned to them.

The other thing I noticed was the Bubbleator lights in the window. My family called them that. It was a big deal when I was a kid, putting those magical colored lights on the big tree with the bubbles rising inside. We called them Bubbleator lights because the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was a huge big deal when we were kids. I was 8 when it opened but we went over and explored practically every weekend while everything was being built.

“The Bubbleator was a large, bubble-shaped hydraulic elevator with transparent acrylic glass walls operated from an elevated chair built for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. These transparent walls gave the illusion of looking through an actual ‘soap bubble’ by refracting light to obtain a rainbow-like effect for the riders inside. It was originally part of the Washington State Coliseum (now a sports venue known as Climate Pledge Arena), where it lifted 100 passengers at a time up one floor through a structure of interlocking aluminum cubes to the “World of Tomorrow” exhibit. T. C. Howard of Synergetics, Inc. designed the Bubbleator and the exhibit. After the fair, the Bubbleator was relocated to the Center House at Seattle Center. By 1984, it had been removed and put in storage to make way for the Seattle Children’s Museum. It was sold to a private owner in Des Moines, Washington, who recycled the upper part of the dome into a greenhouse.[1] The control chair, which had also been in private hands, was donated to the Museum of History and Industry in 2005.”

I left Seattle in 1978 so I did not know about the future history of the installation.

The Climate Pledge Arena name and the fact that it was recycled into a greenhouse are kind of cool after-effects.

I am very lucky that when I was a kid, we had magical Christmases, and now I know how much work my parents, but particularly my mother, put in to make them happen. That work paid off in that I love this frosty time of year and appreciate when folks decorate and get all festive. I hope on some cosmic interdimensional level she knows that. :)

A few days ago, I had a breakthrough on putting up the video recordings of my classes, go ahead and laugh, but I figured out how to choose a thumbnail from the video as the facing shot when you choose that video to play. So, you don’t have to look at me making scowly faces concentrating on making everything work and can see me relaxed and smiling instead.

I find it fascinating that in spite of the fact that I am making the recordings of two of my classes a week available to be watched most folks are still joining the livestream even though the times are a bit awkward for many… and when I am actually teaching, I spotlight myself so they can’t all see each other. It is the fact that they, we, all know that we are there.

This worked out well on Wednesday when I got creative and turned the camera and after a few minutes one of my students called out that she couldn’t hear me very well. I appreciated that feedback mightily. The only way you know these things is to try stuff and get feedback. The folks that participate in my classes are the best and I am so grateful for them.

Last night on my teacher’s call I asked for and got advice about how to handle the circumstances around all the intense drama in my class a few weeks ago. How cool is that? Smart experienced teachers from literally all over the world. I was glad I waited a few weeks for things to settle before I brought it up so it was more about the structure, the framework, and not the individuals and their suffering.

One of the things we all agreed on was that older students need an opportunity to chat either before or after class. And younger students are like, get in there, and get it done. Particularly in New York.

There were some lovely remembrances of a chair class in Brooklyn that is no longer extant in which the neighborhood ladies would come early and rib each other and share before class. In that case the good looking 30 something male teacher couldn’t have hurt. :)

Nothing I can do about that, but I do, at least, live with two handsome cats that regularly make an appearance.

Last updated December 18, 2020