A few years ago, while looking over the shoulder of a couple of Co-op students that were working for my company (Brett Van Den Berg & Andrew Grant), I saw this guy playing what I soon came to know as Freestyle Footbag. It looked like hackey sac, which I've been known to play, but it was far more artistic - far more fluid and challenging. The video was on Youtube.com, and the guy was amazing. I watched, fairly stunned, until I spotted his name. Tom Mosher? I recognized the name for sure.
I once knew a Tom Mosher. We used to be thick as thieves back in our day, which involved anything from bike-riding to urban exploration to burning GI Joes in fields near our area of town. I hadn't talked to him in years though. We drifted apart in high school, and I hadn't talked to him in years. There wasn't particularly any bad blood between us - you know how things go.
So, I looked him up and fired him an e-mail, to which I received a hasty reply. To make a long story short, I'll say that we now play Footbag every Tuesday at his place. He is all over the footbag scene, and I'm sure you'll hear his name if (or, rather, when) Footbag becomes bigger than it is now. Here is a link to a video of his on Youtube.com that he made about a year ago , he's become far better since then.
So, after we play Footbag on Tuesdays, he usually comes over now to work on the candle with me, along with another friend who I met through him, who is known only as Skippy. Skippy is also pretty good, but doesn't have any videos online. The two of them enjoy working on the candle immensely, since it's pretty hard not to enjoy working with a mountain of wax and a great deal of candles, and they've been integral in the candle's evolution this summer - most likely its last summer.
These pictures were done with my Nikon camera, as opposed to my Canon. The Canon is good for daylight pictures, but I found the Nikon to be far better at accurately capturing night shots. In these pictures, the only source of light comes from candles. This is what it looks like, working on it at night, when most of the work is done.
As you may or may not be able to see, my candle is taking on a 3 colour theme. I have chosen blue, green, and red. They are not only my favourite colours, but they are the foundational colours to light, as well as the colours you'll see if you look closely at your television set to see its pixels. As I may have said before, when the candle stays outdoors for a winter, it looses most of its colour. In the winter, the sun, which is no longer disempowered by the foliage of the green seasons, hits it directly, and causes the colours that it accumulates during the summer to fade into memory. Here, you can see that it is fully colourful again.
Beneath this colour of the summer of 2007, are hundreds (if not thousands) of wax rivers, which flow from melting candles burning at higher points up on the structure. These rivers and streams, flow like water to the lowest point that they can reach. Over the years, through thousands of candles, this effect has created countless caverns (which I've done my best to fill in, in the name of solidity), which now dwell beneath the immediate exterior's colourful coat.
What drips off forms that base, which you can see in a couple of these photos. The base is now, giving it my best estimate, an 80 pound slab of accumulated wax, which grows with every session. It stands about 8-10 inches high all around, and should grow a few more inches by the time that the summer has come to a conclusion.
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In other news, I've struck a deal with a local Dollar Store owner. I've purchased all of the good blue candles in my area. I've bought out Dollar Stores within a 20 kilomter radius of my home, and so it's been hard to add blue to the candle for quite some time. That is about the change though, next week. I'm placing an order, and the candles should be with me by the end of July.
I depart for Vancouver, to live there indefinitely, on August 18th - in roughly 37 days. Before then, I must have the candle completed, and ready to move somewhere. Somewhere? Where? I don't know yet. Please comment on these posts, if you have any ideas.
