we destroyed a lot of ice today

At some point today they finally published the correct link to our webcam. If you hadn't found it yet, you haven't missed a whole lot. Mostly Lars and I spent the day working on small parts that aren't very visible from a distance, and we were probably off camera quite a bit of the time.

If you have been watching, you may be wondering why our sculpture looks so blocky and boring! While we were carving giant chunks out of the block early in the day, the central tall piece of the sculpture, the primary lobe of the monster's body that supports the windmill blades, suffered a major crack at its base. We were in the process of removing the large block in front of it, and it came loose and wobbled forward and back! We had to spend some time reinforcing the weak area and were avoiding touching that part for the rest of the day in order to give it time to heal. If the crack were to fail completely it would be catastrophic for the entire sculpture. We plan to spend some time tomorrow morning adding additional support.

We did manage to continue extracting some ice from the block later in the afternoon. We slid the section immediately behind the main lobe out to the side and let it fall onto the snow. I just figured out that it was a thousand pounds!

Despite not being able to carve the main body into anything interesting, we had plenty of other things to work on. This sculpture has many parts. Lars made some axles (including our longest ever - five feet!) and other machine parts.

I worked on tentacles.