Kirit Karkare

(All right, it’s been 4 days since OPI, but let’s pretend I posted this a week ago.) So the water system in Atlantis OPI has been giving us quite a few headaches recently. The basic idea is that we have 3 levels: one just below the dance floor level (around 3 inches off the ground), one at 16 inches off the ground, and one at 7.5 feet around the edges of the elevated platforms. Water flows off the sides of the temple into the troughs around the platforms, where they waterfall off the sides into the 16 inch level. This extends around about half of the party, and every 4 feet or so the water there goes into the ground level through notches that we cut.

OPI is in 5 days! Everything’s been coming together in the last week; we finished up putting the plywood on the temple using the scaffolding, and now the tip (which you can barely see in the picture) goes 28 feet up in the air: We also got up the wallboards on the bottom of the temple, which water will flow over.

This last week, we’ve worked mainly on the temple. It’s basically a giant facade going 28 feet high, attached to several raised platforms at 8 feet and a staircase going down onto the dance floor. Creating the backing for the facade is a challenge in itself, because you need to backbrace it so it doesn’t fall over backwards when people push on it, and also make sure it weighs enough so it doesn’t fall over forwards if it catches the wind! We used a few 16 foot 2x4s nailed together as the main beams going straight up, and then attached a lot of shorter 2x4s to brace them so they don’t move so much. If you look in my second post, you’ll see a picture of just the main bracing, which only goes up to 16 feet.

If we only had construction, every party we build would look pretty pitiful. It’s the art that goes on the skeleton that really makes OPI stand out.

It’s been raining. I guess our party theme is Atlantis, and there’s going to be a ton of water all around, but we’d kind of like all the water to come after we’ve built everything. In the meantime, we’ve lost 3 out of 4 good building days out of the last couple weekends. Luckily it was nice and sunny today, and we got in a solid weekend of work!

OPI this year is on Saturday, March 7th, at 9:00 pm in the Venerable Courtyard. Mark your calendars.