Sometimes you start your Jedi training...

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!

Sometimes you paint the house...

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.

Sometimes you play Star Wars Commander...

So, I love this game. Been playing it for like 3 years. Which is a long time for any game, but especially a mobile game. It reminds me of warcraft. It is an online strategy game, most similar to something like Clash of Clans, but set in the Star Wars universe. You get to pick whether you want to fight for the rebellion or the empire, and each has their own kinds of units and what not. You build a base, join a squad, attack imperial bases in my case, and design your base in a way that deters imperial attacks. It's got a lot of ins a lot of outs, as the dude would say. My favorite part of it is war. Your squad picks 15 players to face off against 15 from another squad from an opposing faction. You each get 3 attacks, in which to capture planetary outposts to provide attack/defense boosts to your squad and to attack opponent bases to capture uplinks. It becomes like a board game, deep strategy, coordination, it's great. There's a website that tracks squad ranking and performance(ksod.us). We're currently at #71. We've been as high as #38, with about 24,000 registered squads.

We have a pretty solid war machine. We haven't lost since July 15th, this year.

War takes 24 hours, which gives everyone plenty of time to get their 3 attacks in (2 minutes to hit a base or retake a planetary outpost). We war 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It can get tense. You also get 24 hours prior to war start, to fill your defensive troop center, rearrange your war base, and scout enemy bases. We usually prepare a scouting report on a google shared sheet where we make notes of what the enemy looks like and start prepping strategy, calling targets, assigning people to planetary outposts, and then once war starts, tracking progress and intel.

We also communicate outside the game using LINE, which is a chat app. In the game, I am ParanoidAndroid. So you could say we take it seriously haha or not. We like winning. And it's fun.
Here's a super old video of a new unit, infiltrators, that I made to show some squad mates how to use them:




So, this is pretty much the only video game I play now. And I barely have enough time for it as is.

A strategy for taking down this imperial base. 

My base, as it is right now. Almost everything at max level. This is an ugly setup for PvP defense, but it works for Heroic Defense, which earns you crates, and I rather do that than earn medals. 

5.5 million credits on Tatooine. As Watto would say, "credits are no good out here". Can't do anything with them(everything that uses credits I've already upgraded to max level).

So yeah. That's the game I play.

Sometimes you paint the bedroom...

Been 3 years since I wrote on here. Time flies. A lot has happened. Or not. Depending on how you look at it. Since I'd like to do this somewhat regularly, I won't do a summary and will just do 1 or 2 things per post.

We've been "working on the house" since we bought it, in July 2013. So it's a never ending project. Our bedroom had not been touched really. Other than the kitchen, the only room we hadn't worked on. We're finally getting around to it, and Geli let me do a pixel mural, so I did. Here's how it went:

The design

Also, I can camouflage in my wall:

As always, it took way longer than I expected(probably about a month, maybe more). It was way more work. And has me working out of the dining room (desk I had fell apart, it was a crappy particle board desk we got from craigslist used as soon as we moved here) until we build the new one. We got some nice maple plywood and are gonna build a desk right there where the pixel wall is. Hopefully soon haha but that's another project. And it will take longer than expected, and be more difficult than anticipated, because that's how it always goes...