Rain Rain, Tour of Distraction, Making Movement

I was looking forward to getting out on the road today.
Rained off and on, the sun never did completely get out from behind the clouds.
It was okay though, with le Tour on tv.
First thing in the morning, I fire up the ole tube and there it is in all it's glory.
Not live of course, it comes on here at around two in the morning, so I'm usually catching the second replay.
Or the the third.
The thing is, the Tour de France has become something of a distraction.
I just can't bring myself to leave the house without watching the end and seeing who takes the day's stage.
It's sort of cutting into my riding time.
Imagine that!
Not riding my bike because I'm at home watching other guys ride their bikes!
Honestly, I don't quite understand it myself.
So anyways, I stayed home today and watched le Tour then decided I had to get up off the couch and do something.
Well, I was going to do another ginormous pinwheel, but when it rains, I consider that good clay weather.
So I practiced my thing.
I need it.
The practice, I mean.
Being out of form is not fun for it's sort of like getting old: the mind wants to but the clay just doesn't cooperate.
I'm getting there though.
Today was vase day:



I practiced my bottle forms a bit; my Jedi skills are not complete.
I need to go back to the Dagobah system and hone my craft.
I'm not really liking that vase in the back; not sure why I even kept it.
The skinny one in the front is more my style.
Here's the ones I did the tape job on:



Not too bad, but you can still see the brush marks.
The lines came out clean, which is the important thing.
Well, I was cleaning up and decided to oil up this thing I made back when I was in school.
I used to do a lot of maquette thingys, just to see if something would work.
Using whatever scrap steel was available, I'd just start cutting and welding and making stuff up as I went along:



I put this together to test out a mechanism I thought up.
I was doing mostly kinetic stuff, so I was trying to make things with movement.
Better yet, here's a video:



One day I'll haul out my BFA project thingy and clean it up. That monster took me about a month to finish, it needed a lot of fine tuning.
I hope it still works.
I was/am a great fan of Arthur Ganson, he makes all sorts of cool stuff. I have his video and watch it every once in a while to get inspired.
I also liked this place called Cabaret Mechanical, where they make automatons.
Anyways, I'm thinking of doing something with those ginormous pinwheels, like some kind of whirly gig, or mobile.
Or something.
We'll see what I come up with.