So for gift day Martha and Gustavo got me a Metal Earth 3D model kit of a Dalek(probably picked by Mari) . It looks simple, it just looks like a foil sheet with cutouts. But it's more involved than that. It's way more stiff than foil and you have to shape some of it into cones or cylinders and what not. So like most things, it is not as simple as it looks.
It probably took me like an hour and a half total. Although it spanned like 3-4 hours. But I kept having to do work stuff or make lunch, and other interruptions haha
Shaping the flat parts into round things is probably the hardest part. I really enjoyed building it. Now, of course, I will probably want the other cool things they make. I think I saw they make an R2-D2, Millennium Falcon, TARDIS, etc, so we'll see if I end up getting more of these.
I really only needed to use Geli's tweezers, the exacto knife, and the needle nose pliers to build this one.
I like how it came out. And now it joined some of my other things on my shelves. I've already run out of space on them, so I will need to add more shelves soon haha
So I had to travel to southern California last week for work. There was some ongoing issues with a clinical application that one of our clients uses and we had not been able to get to the bottom of it. So the software vendor was sending 2 of their people onsite and my company sent me to investigate and what not. They rented me a car, got me a hotel, and flew me in to LAX. I visited 3 facilities in 3 days. One in Anaheim, another in North Hollywood, and the last one in Alhambra. All within about a 40 mile radius. I knew LA traffic was bad. But actually being in it, is still horrible. I was not prepared, not sure that you can prepare. I spent like 8-9 hours in traffic over the 3 days/2 nights I was there. Brutal.
Welcome to LA.
In my head, I was going to have the energy to maybe visit family, take some touristy pictures, maybe check out some of the things LA has to offer. My hotel was across the street from Knott's Berry Farm, wax museums, all sorts of things. But reality was another thing. Between having to leave 2 hours early to get to the facilities on time, to getting to the hotel 1-2 hours after get out because of traffic, so I was exhausted and nothing happened once I was back at the hotel. I took the dSLR camera, didn't take it out once. One day, an hour into commuting back to my hotel, I gave up on traffic and just went to the nearest vegan restaurant to wait out until traffic chilled out.
So I hit up a couple vegan spots for dinner. The Chinese place was good. I ate chinese at random spots for lunch a couple times. On the last day, I stopped by Doomie's on the way to return the rental car at LAX. I heard about Doomie's because they came to the Portland Vegan Beer and Food Fest making vegan "Big Macs" and they were great. So I went a little out of my way to eat there on the last day. It was worth it:
Seriously, this place. So damn good. The "Fried Chicken Basket" was ridiculously good. I got some takeout for Geli and Sophie and took it on the plane for them haha. But that was it really. I worked, I was in traffic, and I ate. No time or energy for much else. Glad to be back home.
Also, you could see the mountains on fire from the plane :(
So, as I had mentioned I have been pretty obsessed with lightsabers lately. Shortly after my last post about having bought 2 used lightsabers off craigslist(one completely broken, another with no sound), I finally decided on parts and ordered some from The Custom Saber Shop(speakers, battery holders, switch, and vented pommels) and from Custom DarkWolf Sabers(LEDs, circuit boards). Then I had to find the time to put it all together. Been super busy, so that took almost a month haha
First thing, was that I needed to replace the pommels on the sabers I got. They are solid pommels, for sabers with no sound. So I went with the most affordable pommels from The Custom Saber Shop.
New pommel on the saber, old solid pommel on the right.
I had initially thought I might be able to drill enough holes through the original pommels, but in practice it would have been a bunch of skinny long holes, which is not really good for transmitting sound.
Before I even got my parts, I knew I wanted my saber to be green. My hilt is black, so I decided to sand it down to give it a two tone, weathered look.
Tools and parts
The single color sound board, for my saber.
The RGBW sound board, which will go into Sophie's saber.
All wired up! Hadn't soldered in over a decade!
I struggled a bit with the soldering. They kept getting disconnected once I would put everything in the saber. And it took me a while to figure out how the switch was to be wired (old switch only had 2 terminals and it was going straight to the battery, this one had 4 since it's an illuminated switch and going to the board instead. First time I got it wired up, it wouldn't even power on. And I didn't have time to troubleshoot further. So it sat there for like 2 weeks waiting for me to have time to work on it again. Took it all apart, rebuilt it, and same thing. Wouldn't even power on. Again. Not gonna lie. I was regretting a lot of things at that point. Much to learn, I still had. I started troubleshooting, and noticed right away that I couldn't measure any voltage even coming into the motherboard. Tested from the battery pack and nothing even coming out of there. Took out battery, and it tested fine. Inspected closely, and the battery holder is not the right size or something, because there's a gap between the negative terminal and the battery. Doh!
Notice the gap at the top!
So I just did this:
And then bam! The electrons are flowing finally!
During the surgery
It was a bit of struggle to get everything in the saber, but nothing some persistence couldn't fix. At last, my saber was ready!
The final product!
And here's how it was before:
It feels good to build your own saber. I am glad I went that route, instead of just buying it all done. Here's a super short, crappy video of it. Better videos to come haha
I am pretty excited with it. I want to do some light painting with it, take some pics with it, maybe a video or something. It will be fun! And here are some more pics, just because:
So I've been playing indoor soccer here in Portland for almost 2 years now. It's the futsal variety. 5 on 5, 1 player being a portero/keeper. It's smaller than the standard indoor soccer fields. And the rules are slightly different. But overall, it's still fútbol, and I love it. I play once a week. And we never practice haha. It's a vegan co-ed team, because it's Portland and these things happen here. Team name is Killer Tofu. I started playing forward, but we eventually lost our portero and so I started playing portero, Jorge Campos style, so I score sometimes. And sometimes they score on me because I am playing way too far upfield. High risk fútbol!
Sophie looking bored while I play.
Recently, we have to change facilities to one that is further away, which sucks. It used to be a mile from the house, and now it is over 3 miles. These are the new courts, although they will be changing a lot soon. They will be adding nets to divide the courts and redrawing the court lines to regulation size.
It will take some getting used to, to play on hardwoods instead of the fake grass/turf at the old place. But futbol is always fun! :D
We signed up for Moviepass a couple months ago or so. It was a royal pain getting it going. Geli got her card like a month before me for some reason, even though we ordered it same day. And their customer service sucks. I emailed them like 5 times, no replies at all. Their phone number is just a machine saying to email them. Their chat service never gets back to you. It was a pain. But, the actual service, is quite good. We pay $10/mo for it. And you can go to any 2D, non-IMAX movie you want, at almost any theater, for free. One movie per day. So we've been going to the movies way more lately. We try to go at least once a week. Some weeks, we go more though. Last week we went twice. And it's painless. You check in on the app when you get to the theater, then you pay with the credit card they send you. Goes without a hitch. Haven't had any issues getting in.
We usually research a movie, watch trailers, etc before going. Last Sunday though, it was spur of the moment after a comedy show that ended early(9pm). So we just watched the next movie that was playing at the nearest theater, and holy crap. What a total waste of our time. We watched Tragedy Girls. Throughout the movie, I kept expecting it to "get good". IMDB has it at a 6.7, which for the genre, is decent. But nope. Never got good. There was no like-able characters, no character growth, all very flat. No real storytelling either. Not really funny. And I'll stop there, just in case any of you want to go see it, though I don't see why you would. So we will have to do more research in the future, because even though that was free, I felt ripped off. My time matters, and that was not even remotely good. We've also recently seen Mother!, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and some others that I don't remember right now.
Anyway, we like Moviepass. And we like being able to go to more movies. We'll just have to be more choosy in the future, or know that we will see some pretty bad ones also haha
I love Star Wars. Back when Episode I came out, Paco and I got toy lightsabers of the plastic variety, something like these:
These would set you back about $20-$30 at the time. I think mine, the Qui-Gon one was $20, and Paco's Darth Maul one was $30.
Where the blade retracts, but not all the way, and they are really fat at the emitter and get thinner and thinner as the blade progresses. And they were fun! We would duel all the time(and break them) and I really enjoyed having them. So I thought that's pretty much where lightsaber toys still were. I was wrong.
It turns out, there is a whole world out there of more "serious" lightsabers. Metal hilts! Everything from unlicensed movie replicas, to licensed metal hilt replicas, to just standard looking lightsabers, to incredibly complex and exotic ones. And since I never really grew up, I totally want some.
So I've been looking for a lightsaber for a while now. I've been scouting specials and prices at ultrasabers.com, saberforge.com, the Force FX replicas, various smaller custom sabersmiths, ebay, etc. I've contemplated buying it ready made. But as of late, I had been leaning towards buying an empty hilt, and just building it myself from parts. Basic components are an LED, power supply, speaker, and the circuit board, and it turns out there's tons to learn there as well as far as options. I've been reading forums, blogs, reviews, etc. Watching tutorials, comparisons, you name it. I rather like it.
So, like part of any proper Jedi's training, I've decided to build my own. Recently, I found some here in craigslist and close to me. So I got them at a good deal. One is working, one is not. Got both for $50. Neither had sound. So I plan to gut both and install brighter LEDs and add sound. I will also be messing with mine as far as appearance goes. Here are the 2 sabers I picked up:
Sophie picked the one with the silver details, so the black one will be mine. Sophie's is the one that works, and it is white, but we have color discs to change the color, like so:
Using the color discs is cool, but it dims it a bit.
So I'll be working on these for a while, I am sure. I still have to decide what parts to order and then figure out how to do it all. It will be fun. I am looking forward to it!
I know...another post about painting. It turns out, I do a lot of it. And I actually don't mind it, as far as actual work goes. I hate the prep part, of course. But the actual painting, I like. I love the transformation. So, we don't like spending money on things we can do ourselves, for the most part. It turns out that to hire people to paint your house exterior, it costs anywhere from $3k-$6k here in Portland. Sooooo, we thought we'd do it ourselves. Like every project, it's taken longer, and been way harder than we anticipated. We started in August of 2015. And this is one of those projects, where everyone is excited at first, but then as the work goes on, that excitement fades, and work piles up. Like, when we started, Mari, Geli, Sophie, were all helping, and by now, it's just me haha. But, we've hit a milestone. It's "pretty much done". And while I don't like half done things, For such a large project, I consider this one a good place to be, considering it's taken us like over a year to get there.
So here's the house before:
And this is once we were getting going.
All these beams will eventually be white, right now it's half done haha
Those beams still need to eventually be all white.
This side of the house was the hardest, mostly because it is soooo tall!
It was a tedious and tiring process because, the siding on our house has those grooves, which means you can't do it with just a roller. I have to paint the inside part and edges with a brush, and the rest with the roller.
And finally, this past weekend, finished the giant, super tall side (still need to paint the underside white, but that's a "detail" or so I've decide to make myself feel better haha).
That's all we can do for the season, since it's going to be raining until like May next year...or at least that's how it feels. Next year will just have to do the white trim and under the overhang or whatever that is called. But from the "street' it looks done, so it feels like a victory.
