No postings for the past week for this guy as I devoted virtually all of my time to preparing for a talk at Showa College in Boston for the Japan Society. That talk happened yesterday and went fairly well.
Nearly 80 people had signed up to come, however the actual attendance was a bit more than 40. Still, a good crowd. Surprisingly, some of the mundane technical aspects with giving the presentation, involving the computer slide projector and video had various ‘issues’ which made for some minor hassles and time delays.
I had prepared and prepared, and really it was tough to narrow the material on Japanese residential architecture down. It’s such a vast topic really. In the end, I broke the talk into two halves, one on exterior aspects, structural systems, and so forth, and the other, which I will give in the fall sometime, will be on interiors and fittings. Still even with that topic bisection, I was hard-pressed to limit the material, and ended up not being able to get through all the stuff I wanted, despite running a half an hour over the allotted time. It’s tough with these one-off presentations to get the sequencing just right. The crowd were quite enthusiastic and I managed to provoke a lot of great questions and fortunately my jokes ever garnered some laughter.
I was exhausted afterwards and will need a day or two to unwind.
In other news, the first of the classes on joinery I’m offering this summer now has enough people signed up to proceed, so I will be contacting those people shortly. The second and longer class is very close to critical mass, and a full month remains for sign up. As far as sign up for this first class goes, the deadline is tomorrow (June 15th) however I will accept applications for another week yet as the course looks set to go ahead.
Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way today.