Anne and I went back to work on Tuesday, but it felt like Monday. I should instead take the attitude that my brother, Frank, advocated in his movie, Monday Holidays. To quote Frank, “The great think about Monday holidays, is it is like getting two days off. First you get the holiday on Monday and then you get a four-day week. It is like getting another day off.” Now that is some positive thinking and more positiveness than I could muster on Tuesday morning. Maybe, I don’t notice it, because it doesn’t show up until Friday?

According to Anne, we were a family whole again for some thirty hours this last weekend. Now we are empty nesters again. Dave flew back to DC, via O’Hare, Monday evening, but didn’t make it back to his apartment until the wee hours of Tuesday morning. We bade farewell to Dan, until later this summer, on Monday morning. We’ll likely see both of the boys again, in late July or August. The first photo in this post’s gallery was taken after coffee with Val, on Sunday morning.

The other two photos were taken by an associate of Dan’s at CalArts, Andrew James Cox. Mr. Cox posted these photos to Facebook and I lifted them off of it. These photos show Dan’s latest art project, as it was displayed for CalArts’s 2011 MFA Open Studio show. Because Dan was not graduating this year, he was not eligible for a gallery space suitable for displaying his work. Next fall, he will assemble the two parallel rows of houses into one longer row, end-to-end. The long row of houses will be mounted on flatbed model railroad cars, which in turn will be mounted on model railroad track. A section of this track is at the bottom of the picture. The track in turn will be mounted on IKEA birch-wood sawhorses. A few of them are in the picture too. The final picture shows a close-up of a section of the row houses. Dan drew this design using Computer-Aided Drafting, or CAD software. He transmitted this design to a manufacturing house that laser etched the 32 copies that he had made. The laser etching process scored the wood blanks in the process, giving them a nice finish. I look forward to seeing at least pictures of the finally assembled art piece.