1st Day on the job

I flew in to San Francisco at about 7 at night and promptly boarded the SF Underground  known as BART (Bay Area Rail Transit-celebrating 40 years in 2012!) to the Mission district where I was staying. I've arranged to stay in a few places through a site called airbnb.com where people rent out their spare room as a bed and breakfast affair. This place is located on Alabama Street in the south of the Mission. It's a typical San Francisco house - a small wooden apartment on a street filled with small wooden apartments. I have to admit the architecture is generally pretty fetching. My hosts are three 30-somethings that share this space. They are all very friendly and helpful.
I went to bed that night in my soft bed and was strangely filled with apprehension about the weeks ahead.
Where my other choices of BnB's going to be as nice? Are the suburbs safe? Exactly how do the buses work here? How will I get around? Where do I buy a bus pass? Eventually I fell into a restless sleep.
My big plan for the day was to go and see the Golden Gate Bridge - tick that one off the list.

Golden Gate Bridge

OK so the weather wasn't that great!
 Actually, everyone's been telling me "You should have been here Saturday!" apparently it was sunny.

So then, after negotiating SFs public transport system, I headed over to the FLG workshop.

I arrived around 5pm and there were a couple of people in the shop. The Box Shop is a compound down by the bay made of two teirs of shipping containers stacked one atop the other. These act as artist studios/workshops. Then there's a large communal workshop space filled with welders, rolling mills, pipe benders and assorted machinery. The entrance of the compound is a brightly painted red door with a keypad for entry. I rang the bell and was greeted by Stephanie, a "Lounge Activist and People Connector". She is originally American but is now an Australian resident and literally left for the airport later in the evening to fly to Melbourne. We joked that I'm the token Australian coming in to replace the outgoing token Australian.
Stephanie led me up to the main workshop where the FLG are constructing their artwork - Xylophage.

Box Shop First Impression

Stephanie manhandling the root-substructure for the two-story high tree stump in the background

 

Sara,  who was doing some welding at the time, broke the ice - "So, what can you do?" In a matter of minutes I was grinding some welds back and then disassembling the root substructure.

Meika, a German artist (well...actually a nero-cognitive scientist), was looking for some help to make the bark that goes on as cladding to the root substructure. "Have you ever used a plasma-cutter?" she asked me. To which I replied no."well, now's your chance" and pretty soon I was cutting 18 Gauge steel. There's quite an art to the plasma cutter. It must be applied judisciously - not too fast or the cut won't penetrate, not too slow or the cut will burn and leave a messy edge. By the end of the night I almost had the hang of it.

Mika plasma-cutting

By about 6 pm the crew fired up a barbie and for a few dollars donation a dinner of hamburger was served!

This provided enough fuel to continue for the rest of the evening.

The remainder of the evening involved measuring the bark, cutting the bark, rolling the bark into curved shapes and finally trimming the edges with the plasma cutter to give them an organic look. We packed up shop around 11pm and thankfully someone was kind enough to give me a lift home.


So ended my first day on the job.