"The Jig is Up"

The jig is a dance; when the tune starts or stops, the jig is up.

The jig is a guide, a template that you follow with a cutting implement, or with which you form your material over. Often, it is clamped to the base plate of the equipment with the raw material; once the jig is up, you cannot expect what has been previously completed to align with work done afterwards, and you should take care not to work on the project while it is unsecured.

My Home is a Desklamp Graveyard

I went to architecture school in the mid-90's, so, I was there at the confluence of the smoking experimentation of halogen desk lamps, which coincided with the ushering-in of the CAD era. In my program, we still spent most of our time at drafting tables, drawing, under desklamps. Oh, I had them all. As for the halogen ones. I had both the light spaceship one and the "curry brush" one that actually dries out the paper under it until it warps. But at least your hands stay warm.
As I explained in my last post, I've been drawing again, an interest rekindled after moving all my portfolios and oversized stationery around for a baseboard treatment.
But desklamps are endlessly breaking -- or should I say, are always in a state of disrepair, here. I have two in my car; one's the exact kind on the secretaries' desks in Mad Men, the other is an IKEA model in which the switch got too tight to turn -- I took it to Home Depot, and, standing in the switch aisle, I discovered both that it started working again, and, there was a slight alteration in the switch area that made the lamp non-standard, in terms of replacement parts. Well, so ...
Since my drawing recommenced, the lamp I was using, the big curry brush halogen, stopped turning on. I had been taking notes of where to find cheap desklamps; deciding maybe I should look on them like a commodity, like those big packages of toilet paper you buy every quarter; I could maybe just budget four lamps a year ...

Churning the home ... and the mind.

A baseboard treatment meant pushing everything into the center of every one of my rooms a week ago. I had to ask myself about the things I was keeping.
Among the things were a folio of watercolors I knew weren't all that good, and some very good art paper. Setting the folio into a new home, I had a flash of the folio of drawings I wanted to have.
I moved a lamp, which had seemed broken, to a new place, and switched it on. It worked! I drew three really great drawings in the last week. But finally, the lamp stopped working.