Busy bees.

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Where does the time go lately?! I have a bit to catch up on, and most of it wasn't properly photographed, sigh. Lisa and I went to Les Halles restaurant in DC and then to the Warner Theater to see The Kids in the Hall this past weekend, and it was awesome. Excellent food and excellent comedy. I also started catching up on some major cleaning/reorganization of the basement... we have lived in the house for a little over two years, and it sometimes takes a couple years to get your rooms exactly as you need them to be. I'm still working on my "workflow" areas. Today I finally updated the work computer to the latest version of OS X (10.5.2), and I upgraded my laptop hard drive.

Here we are from a few weekends ago, out for coffee with Tom and Jane!

Here they are, mocking me. Hehehe.

I finished a few commissions, and took some quick pics. I need to build the web pages for these fellas still. So much to do!

This guy was completed as well!

Here's the guts of my MacBook Pro, mid-HD transplant. I now have a 7200rpm 200Gb playground!

See? Do not cover breather hole, buddy.

This part was kinda cool - grafting the wires onto the top of the new HD housing.

I should also mention that I found Simon and Coco hairs inside my computer... not just at the edges of ports, either. I'm talking "laying under motherboard" hairs. Sneaky cats!!

Porch!

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

As I type this, our front porch is being reworked. Better, faster, stronger. Well... better and stronger, in any case.

Edit - three hours later!

Finished!

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

In a week or so, I will paint the porch, post, rails, and stairs a nice grey.

Not to copy Jane too much (heeee), but I want to try my hand at painting the mailbox!

359-555-0100!

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

A new Cure single was released today, which would have absolutely been as important as the second coming of Christ if I were still a teenager. 1989 was a spectacular year to be a sixteen year old Cure fanatic. So here I am, smack in the middle of my 30s, and with an almost casual click of a button, I purchase the new tracks on iTunes. I'm listenening now, and I like it, which is a relief. The A and B sides are strong. I'm noticing that Robert is using a little more of the old school inflection in his voice, where he makes squirrely noises, goes "awooooooooo", uses echo/delay, etc. Harkens back to 1984 in a way, which is fucking awesome. Lyrically there's nothing ground breaking (the old standard words and phrases "eye, kiss, I, scream, "stop dead", etc are in effect), but damn, this is a good classic pop Cure single. Porl's return to the fold must be doing a world of good. Huzzah, Mr. Smith. Thank you.

So I was working on the Monarch sculpt last night, and finished up his beard around 11:30. I can't wait to take a pic of that tonight - it is hilarious. Since it's a delicate part that requires the Apoxie Sculpt to cure over night, I decided to play "a half hour" of GTA IV. Two hours later, I thought "I better crash this helicopter and get the fuck to bed". I jumped out after hovering above a high rise building, making it inside the top floor before the pursuing 'copters could shoot me, and then fucked it all up by jumping down into the center of the stairwell. I had little health to begin with, since I got shot up earlier before dialing in the helicopter, so I died after hitting a couple of railings, and then fell another solid minute or so in that slow mo black and white thing that happens when you die. Fun fun fun!

I feel kinda tired. But it was worth it. Cheating like a madman to spawn the helicopter, the racing bike, and the sniper rifle. Pow pow!

Yesterday I monkeyed around with possible porch ideas. Sadly, my favorite idea cannot work with the color of our house. We want to get grey vinyl siding eventually, and if we had it now, this idea would be amaaaaazing - impossibly rich Chinese red with gold leafed accents. Indian in feel, and gorgeous, but with the reddish of the house, a no go. Check out the comp below, and see how it shifts the house color to a gross purpley mess.

So we're going to paint the porch in a grey monochromatic version of above for now (maybe paint a stylized cherry blossom on the floor in a lighter grey), and eventually change it to the red concept when we can afford siding in a couple of years. I'm going to paint the mailbox too, but that will be a surprise for later :)

Molds and casts

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Spent the weekend doing yardwork, priming the porch (Killz paint refuses to sluff of my hands, arms and legs - I need to be more careful when I'm slinging primer), and making molds and castings of all manner of items - Tom Wynn lent me his ingenious mold box gear. I'll take more photos tonight.

Also got some donor kits in to make some models that Kow Yokoyama designed, and we finally got a Wii. It's a busy time!