A Very Good Day

While at the barn today Laurence called to tell me Tesla had contacted him about the delivery of my new car! (I really am not an exclamation point kind of person, but it really really needed one.) I handled it pretty well, I screamed at my friends, Tracy and Devon, "MY CAR IS HERE!"  (Several weeks ago when I went onto my Tesla account and saw the scheduled delivery window I could barely breathe. So, you know, improvement.)  Luckily, the horse Devon had turned loose in the arena did not seem bothered by the outburst.

My lovely (that adjective is directed at you, Laurence) green Model S has left Fremont, California, the only home it has ever known, on a truck heading for Colorado. It will arrive this week and I get to pick it up on Friday afternoon. I'm not sure I will be sleeping between now and then. I have calculated the hours until the appointment (65 hrs and 45 min) but that cannot possibly be right. It feels much longer than that. 

The only drawback is that our outlet for the car has not been installed in the garage yet. I can plug it into the regular outlet with an adapter so it isn't a huge problem. Unfortunately, I will have to back my brand new scratch free perfect Tesla into the garage. (The outlet is on the back wall and you plug the cord into the back of the car.) Maybe Laurence will back it in for me. Of course, then I run the risk of never getting to drive my car again. I've been on the Tesla Forum. You would not believe how many people have begged their spouses to try the car just once and then regretted it because now they have to share. I'm sure Laurence will give it back, I think. Perhaps I'll just practice backing the van in. I have nothing else to do till Friday.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, I had a horse to saddle and a riding lesson with Devon. Poor Raymond, the horse, I'm sure he thinks he is going to be forgotten once I get my new car, which will not happen. (Although, I do have to admit, I did toy with the idea of changing his show name to Tesla, but since he does not accelerate nearly as well I dropped it. Tracy did point out that he probably jumps higher than the car can, so that's a point for Ray.) I got Ray and myself all ready and then went into the arena (which is indoors) and started warming up. 

My lucky day continued. Instead of working on transitions or jumping or whatever else we always do,  Devon saddled up Dot the school horse and we went outside to ride in the snow. We had had a big storm on Sunday so there was lots of snow on the ground plus it was snowing again. We went into the little field next to the outdoor arena.  I have never ridden in the snow before and in my mind's eye I kept seeing the Budweiser commercial with the Clydesdales galloping through the snowy field. We were much less spectacular. Ray was his usual self and simply lifted his feet high to step calmly over the snow. No high spirits or beautiful slow motion running for us. We did trot a bit and I was just getting up my nerve to canter when Devon mentioned she'd seen a horse hop through the snow like a big dog once so I figured trotting might be good enough. As it was after about half an hour I could feel Ray's gait change from nice high steps to more of a trudging sensation. Devon and I called it quits and took the horses back in. Ray, after being unsaddled and brushed, was delighted to find more hay had been added to his stall in his absence and I left him contentedly chewing away.  

Then I had lunch, ran some errands, returned home and now I am just waiting...

64 hours and 45 minutes to go.

Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in Serbia, moved to America, invented and promoted alternating current, became a nemesis of Thomas Edison.

Elon Musk was born in S. Africa, moved to America, co-founded PayPal (made a fortune), co-founded SpaceX (sounds like what it is, develops space vehicles, currently making runs to and from the Space Station), co-founded Tesla Motors (named after Nikola, see above.)

Tesla Motors, based in Palo Alto, California, designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars. So far they have produced a roadster and a sedan (Model S) and will be starting deliveries in 2014 of an SUV (Model X.) They are not a subsidiary of another car company, they are a brand new company. Tesla is not the model name, it is like Ford or Honda. (I may be over-explaining here, but people aren't really sure what I mean when I say Tesla. After all, when was the last time there was a new car company that wasn't from Asia? Never mind, just googled American automobile manufacturers, at least eleven have been started since 2000. Apparently I am just not in the know.

The point of all this, though, is that Tesla cars exist and I will be getting one!! And it will be dark green, for those of you who care about such things.

Laurence put down a deposit before Christmas (as a gift) so that I could test drive one, which I did in early January. Now, unlike other car manufacturers, Tesla does not have a lot of dealerships. They have one  in Palo Alto. In Colorado their equivalent is a storefront inside (yes, inside, near Stride Rite and the food court) the Park Meadows Mall. They have a white Tesla Model S sitting there plugged in. To test drive you go out into the parking lot and in the covered area there is a charging station and a silver Model S plugged in and ready to go. Of course it was the performance version (I will be getting the regular model) and can go from 0-60 mph in 4.4 seconds. (The regular model does it in 5.6 seconds. I do wonder if I might need that extra 1.2 seconds one day, but Laurence is fairly emphatic that I won't. Sigh.) It is an amazing car. Quick and nimble. I fell in love with it, despite Laurence heckling me from the back seat, and I quote, "Oh my God! You're driving one of the fastest sedans in America at 30 mph!" In my defense, we were on regular roads and I was driving someone else's car. Highway driving was crowded and moving at 50 mph so what did he expect me to do? Of course the person from Tesla was also urging me to go faster, so maybe Laurence had a point.

Anyway, even at 30 mph it's a fun car. And, with the back seats folded down it has enough room for my horse show trunk. And with a 300 mile range I can make it up to Estes Park (for the big show) and back. And when you approach the car with fob in hand the door handles, which have been retracted for aerodynamic reasons, slide out. And when you open the hood it is just like a Volkswagon Bug, no engine! Just trunk space. See? Even when not moving the car is fun.

So after driving the car and loving it and tallying up the pros and cons and adding in a healthy dose of why not? I opted to get one. Of course, nothing in this world is straight forward. I had to configure my car. This entailed a trip back to the mall to talk to the ever helpful Tesla personnel and figure out if I needed the bigger battery (yes, major range anxiety here) or the Active Air Suspension (again yes, you push a button and the car raises up two inches!) or the Sound Studio Package (no, not sure I could hear the difference in quality and also do the Car Talk guys really need to be on 12 separate speakers?)

But then we had to figure out the color. Here is a major problem with Tesla not having a dealership, there are no cars on the lot to check out the colors. All they have are these color panels. We knew what the white and the silver (actually a lovely soft grey) looked like, but what about the blue or the red or the green? A paint chip does not tell you much about what your wall will look like once painted and that's how we felt about the color panels. The Tesla person who was helping us handed us several panels and pointed us towards the door so out we went to the parking lot to see how the colors looked in the sun. Then Laurence had the brilliant idea of matching the colors to actual cars in the parking lot. We found a Mazda that was close to the dark grey, and a Honda that was similar enough to the red, and several makes that had a very close match to the blue. We couldn't find the green and we'd probably still be looking if security had not driven up and wanted to know what we were doing. We explained but he still looked at us funny.

Back inside we returned the panels and sat in front of the computer to configure the car. We settled on (and by settled on I mean I chose) green (Laurence preferred the silver) and picked out all our options. Then we pushed the button and waited for the estimated date of delivery. Everything we'd read and everyone we'd talked to had a waiting time of at least six months, but it came back Feb/Mar. Yippee!!!

So then I went home and waited and waited and waited for Tesla to call. This weekend I logged onto the web site and they had posted my delivery window dates. Between March 2nd and March 16th the car will arrive!

So now I'm at waiting and waiting and waiting. Laurence and I already cleaned the garage in preparation for the electrician (to install the outlet needed) and in anticipation of the new car. I have gone on the Tesla web site and read all the forums. I have looked up who Elon Musk is. I have annoyed my brother by pointing out that I will have a Tesla soon and he will not. I really must find something constructive to do.

I think my car will never get here.

Van Gogh

Earlier this month we went to see the exhibit "Becoming Van Gogh" at the Denver Art Museum. Let me just say that I have never been to such a crowded exhibit in my life. It was packed. So packed that the museum is taking the unprecedented step on its last weekend of remaining open from eight in the morning on Saturday until midnight on Sunday. Of course, it is completely sold out.

The exhibit focused on Van Gogh's becoming, well, Van Gogh. Works covered the entire span of his career from his early sketches (which should give any aspiring artist hope because they were certainly not his best work) to some of his masterpieces. I loved it because while great art is nice to look at, seeing that great artist's work progress from the my-little-nephew-can-do-that stage to the ok-I-give-up-that-is-so-far-beyond-anyone-I-know stage is a revelation. The exhibit is a wonderful example of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour thesis, that anyone practicing something mindfully for 10,000 hours can become a master. (Which of course leads a person to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are only so many 10,000 hour chunks left in their life and oh-my-God! what am I going to spend it on? And why didn't I know this when I was twenty?)

So, to distract myself from thoughts of how I may have squandered my hours I will now describe for you some of my favorite parts of the exhibit.

Van Gogh used a perspective frame. This was a frame that showed the lines of perspective (think of the Last Supper with those diagonal lines drawn on it.) You place the frame in front of you and look at the landscape you are drawing through it. Then you use the lines as guides. He also had a grid frame. Same thing, hold it up between you and your subject and then transfer what is in each little square to the corresponding square on your paper. I'm not sure how this simplifies your life, but Van Gogh was a big fan.

Van Gogh copied copiously from other artists. Of course, how else do you learn a new technique if you do not copy and practice? But it is still a bit jarring to see it. The fun part is that sometimes, especially as the exhibit progresses, his work is so much better than the work he is copying.

Van Gogh did not love color in the beginning. He had to work and learn about color. His earlier works have very little color in them but as the exhibit unfolds it becomes more and more important. One of his techniques to strengthen his color sense was to use yarn. He would take two colors of yarn and roll them into a ball so he could then see how the two colors affected each other, thus simultaneously improving his ability to paint the colors side by side without mixing them and endearing himself to all the knitters.

Van Gogh was friends with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. And they took an art class together in Paris. The class consisted of learning to draw the human figure from plaster casts. Since he and Toulouse-Lautrec were assigned seats behind the plaster casts because, apparently, they did not draw very well, we are treated to sketches of the backsides of nude women. For what it's worth, in a side by side comparison of sketches Toulouse-Lautrec's seem a bit better than Van Gogh's. The exhibit does not mention which students in their class sat in front of the models.

Van Gogh's ears were not referred to once. An odd omission since that is the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of Van Gogh. Not to worry, though, I looked it up. As we all know Van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to a prostitute. (OK, I didn't know that. I knew he cut off his ear and sent it to someone, but I did not know she was a prostitute. Nor did I know that because she was, understandably, horrified she alerted the police and they found the artist before he bled to death.)  He supposedly did this after an argument with his friend Gauguin. Well, good news! According to two German scholars none of this makes any sense at all and they have put forward an alternative theory. Instead of Van Gogh chopping off his own ear with a razor and sending it to the unfortunate woman, Gauguin, who liked to fence, cut off said ear during their quarrel and then Van Gogh sent it to the poor woman. No explanation of why he would send his ear to anyone, which, really, is the least understandable part of the whole story. Neither Van Gogh nor Gauguin could admit to what really happened because cutting off someone else's ear with a sword was illegal and Gauguin would have been jailed. That was the last time Van Gogh ever saw Gauguin.

Which brings us to the end of the exhibit and Van Gogh's death. He was thirty-seven years old which surprised me considering how much he accomplished. Now, again, we all know he shot himself and, again, we are all wrong. Since the gun was never found and the angle of the wound was odd and Van Gogh gave conflicting statements, people who study these things have come to a new conclusion. Van Gogh was shot by a friend's teenage son during a quarrel. Yes, yes, I know, shocking. You would think he would have learned from his encounter with Gauguin not to argue with people holding weapons, or at least to choose a better class of friends. And yet, he did not and we are left with some great works of art and the itch to know what he would have painted next and whom he would have quarreled with if he had lived.