Played a game of 13-spot Go with Nik the other night and he whumped me rather soundly. I blame the beer, but he played well either way. I need to brush up on my game! He's been playing friends and improving.
I got the silicon for Robert's hand in the mail Monday, and I'm hoping to cast it soon. Tonight? Tomorrow? Before the weekend, because I want to do the finishing work on it then and get it to him next week.
I will also be getting the mold rubber and gram scale in the post today and tomorrow. This weekend, then, I will begin to cast the squish eggs -- not a moment too soon! Dress and press begins very damn soon.
And Saturday I took the final for CS-121. It was embarassingly easy, which means if I bombed on some of the questions, I'll be pretty darned embarassed.
That wrapped up those 18 credits -- so now I have to finish paying for them, and pony up for the next 18. I'm probably four months behind where I want to be right now.
This school thing just drags on and on. I suppose it's slower since I'm not actually very interested in it; the purpose is for advancement at work (though I would also like to get past it so I could do more advanced work later).
Sigh.
Well, I've been slowly (too slowly, but I think it will work out) ramping up projects for this year's Haunted Trails.
I'm mostly taking the trail off this year, due to residual tiredness from directing *last* year. Just making a half-dozen special props and guiding. Hardly anything at all. Oh, and I may be doing some makeup during runs. Just a token effort, really.
So far I've cast ten plaster cores for the spider egg item. The next step is to cast a one-piece mold for these and then cast the actual eggs in glow-in-the-dark "squish" (e.g. hot-pour PVC).
I went to pour the mold and - tra-la! - my polyurethane Part-A had congealed. I guess I was just lucky to have been able to create the core mold itself. Though it was probably the exposure to our evil humidity when I opened the bucket that caused the congealing (and I even sprayed the protective gas blanket on it). Oh well, it was well past it's use-by date.
So I ordered more, but this time a nice silicon mold material because, frankly, polyurethanes are nasty and poisonous, unless you _like_ cyanide. And I ordered a nice gram-accurate scale that goes to 7kg (13 lbs) so I can mix it properly.
I had a choice between buying a $135 set of mix-by-volume silicon or $85 of mix-by-weight and a $65 scale. I went for the scale. Of course, the cost-per-unit is about the same, I think, for the two types of silicon. The by-volume has two equal parts, both about a gallon. The by-weight has a 10:1 ratio, so I expect to get a lot less of the final product out of it. But the initial outlay is less. And I can use the scale for many other products, increasing the range of materials I can now use.
Now to get a vacuum degassing chamber. Heh.
I built up the mummified arm and hand, doing some decent work defining some musculature, knuckles, and stuff. This will look better than past dessicated parts, though the fingers are still a bit more tattered than I want. It's tricky working with sticky wet latex and cotton in those tight quarters. I think I want to give it fingernails, too... gotta work that out soon.
The latex itself is several years old and very chunky. It's getting close to the time to throw it all away and start fresh.
Now to paint it so make it look proper. The dark grey latex makes a decent base color, but I'm looking at more browns and blacks for the final.
I went to cast the silicon hand for Robert (from Deadbacks, damn I am late on this project), but after much searching, realized that this silicon hadn't been delivered yet. I could have sworn it had, but UPS claims it is due today so I couldn't have gotten it already.
The two projects I haven't started yet are the dead dog thing (which will contain an item, so I'll make it very disgusting on the inside) and the ice-cold water station. That needs to be built on location, so I'll need to go to the Basin soon and supervise that.
I should check to see if there are projects not listed here, that I am neglecting. Hmmm.
Okay, I've booked round-trip tickets and a car rental for the week between Christmas and New years for our vacation in Oregon.
Woo!
We will be leaving on December 24th, so I expect the airport to resemble the foyer of hell, but it was the cheapest day to leave.
Coming back on a Monday, the 2nd, so that may be a bit better.
I had some pain in the wallet, though, accepting the $900 price tag. For that, I could get a computer and a nice LCD monitor! Or two REALLY nice LCDs!
I don't know how the airlines do their pricing, but I do know that it fluctuates wildly within a defined range. My preferred prices for the tickets was $250, but that was just a pipe dream. I got $300 tickets.
I've been watching the prices over the last couple of months, and the do get down to the $250 range... if you don't mind 6:00am departure times, three-hour layovers, or travelling overnight.
Mostly I mind the 6:00am departures. We did in fact get a three and a hour-hour layover. At least we are unlikely to miss our connecting flights. I'm bringing books. And maybe a pillow.
Ooh, and I can see if I have any friends in LA still, who can visit us in the airport.
I spent an hour or so selecting my options, picking a car (the cheapest one), dithering over whether to buy now or see if it gets better later (it won't), and talking to Marla to soothe my fears.
In that time, the price of my flight selection went up $60.
If I waited another hour, would that flight disappear? Go down $100?
I probably just pissed $60 down the rat-hole, but I didn't want to go through the entire process again, in the hopes of finding a better price. The selected trip had rational departure times, and that counts for a lot. Most of the flights I could find did not.
Now I get to worry whether I read it all correctly. So many words for my poor, overheated brain.
I guess I'll check it again tonight when I can see straight.
I finally did it. It took months of hard procrastination and delay, but yesterday I uploaded my scattering of Deadbacks pictures to the Haunt section of Simreal.com and added some brief commentary.
I was aggravated to discover that some photos that I distinctly remember taking were nowhere to be found in my Deadbacks folder. Detailed pictures of the fake rocks. Photos of the final leg. Gone.
What could have happened to them? Everything that came out of that digital camera over the last four months went into a dated folder in Deadbacks.
Perhaps they went to the same place where a dozen ripped CDs went -- into bit heaven. Or hell. Where they will be tormented for all eternity, their limited binary nature mocked by the multi-state quantum demons that reside there.
We'll be getting the universal DVD of all pictures Deadbacks soon, so maybe I can get permission from the various photographes and fill in some gaps.
Mmmm, pictures.
It's beginning to really bug me that I haven't updated my various project areas in, oh, a year or so.
This might mean I'll actually do something about it soon.
I was just reading in the excellent magazine Invention and Technology about the huge assembly building of NASA,and how it represents the dreams they had of shooting lots of stuff into space... dreams that never came true.
After the Apollo programs, NASA had plans for a space station, a moon base, and a visit to mars. All this was to have occured by 1980 or so... which probably meant 2000 or so.
I remember the time when we were in space, when the excitement was growing, the potential and possibilities unlimited, when a nation dreamed of something more than their daily toil.
Dreams that were crushed under the heels of a short-sighted government, people with no dreams themselves outside of immediate profit, who didn't want to spend the (admittedly huge) fortune needed to do this.
To this day I get angry and sad and betrayed when I think about it. These were *my* dreams.
At least I can take comfort in the fact that they used this money for good -- solving the problems of hunger and poverty in this country. A fair trade for a generation's dreams, don't you think?
For the last month or so, I've been unable to get myself to care about any of the various side projects I have -- Robert's hand, the electric shelf, *school*... my mind simply refused to focus.
I think I went through a reboot yesterday. I woke up at 4:30am and wasn't able to get back to sleep. So I went upstairs and did some school stuff, wrote some e-mail. Then I had the joy of feeling logy and unwell all day, even with naps at lunch and after work. That evening I felt like I had been sick but was recovering, that quiet and spacy feeling you get.
Today I feel like weight has been lifted, I feel much better. And I have a sense that I'll be able to work again, too.
I have a couple of intricate programs to write for class -- nothing hard, but they will require actual thought, unlike most of this stuff. So that's annoying -- I had hoped to be done with this class by now.
The whole school thing is going much slower than it was supposed to do; the three month break for the movie certainly didn't help. Ah well.