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October 8th, 2009
01:24 pm - Birfday stuff
I don't know if any of you still use livejournal that don't use facebook, but here's a copy of an event posting I just put up over there. RSVP RSVP RSVP! I want to know numbers to expect!
Start Time: Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 1:30pm
End Time: Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 12:00am
Location: Highland Ice Arena
I be turnin' 25, so y'all need to come and celebrate with me. In my grand tradition of the past few years, it will be a costume ice-skating party. After ice skating, we can return to my parents' basement for movies, revelries, what have you, unless someone wants to suggest a better location for the evening portion. I demand RSVPs so I can plan food accordingly.
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October 6th, 2009
01:29 pm
So, a Pizza Hut commercial just came on, at the end of the ad, it says 'Now you can order on your iPhone!' Ordering pizza on a phone?! Madness!
Also on the commercial front, apparently mothers of babies and toddlers watch a lot of SVU, because Fisher Price is advertising pretty heavily here...
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September 15th, 2009
06:50 pm - Robin 2.0
The first BJD I tried to make back about 5 years ago was a personal rendition of Robin Goodfellow and as many first dolls do, he came out somewhat awkward. New day, new plan. I'm taking on Robin again, as the character is still important to me, and tackling him with the skills I've learned and the knowledge I've gained, as well as advances in joints that have become more common in the intervening years. This Robin I'm planning to ultimately mold for casting in composition-slip, so I'm aiming at making him 64.5cm to account for a 7% shrink rate. He should come out about 60cm in the end. I've started the process following the methodology of Yoshida Style, Aimi Dolls and Noah's Dolls.
I'm planning to complete the main body of the doll using wood-clay and then cover that in a thin layer of stone-clay, into which I shall also add the finer details.
I started with a pink-foam core, this is insulation foam that can be purchased very cheaply at a hardware store and doesn't crumble as easily as polystyrene. I wrapped all the core pieces in shrink-wrap as recommended by the Aimi Dolls tutorial (I realized after I'd started that the tutorial is actually probably using cellophane, but shrink-wrap has come out with interesting results).
 
I've finished wrapping the cores in wood-clay now (It took 4 and a half packages) and the pieces are hanging from a tie-hanger to air dry. I'm expecting a 3-4 day drying time before pieces are fully hardened.
I'll try to remember to keep track of my process and post updates regularly.
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September 8th, 2009
07:06 pm - This is one affectionate cat.
Apparently the cat thought that she had really and truly been abandoned this time. She hasn't stopped purring since I got home and today she even allowed me to pick her up (during which, she continued to purr.) For those of you unfamiliar with my parents' cat, just trust me that this is highly unusual.
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September 7th, 2009
06:25 pm - Home again.
Back from con and the cat is deliriously happy to see me; she's following at my ankles as I walk around the house. I've just washed the con grime off and now I'll go down to check the mail and eat my dinner. I am extremely tired. It will be an early bed-time tonight.
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September 4th, 2009
04:03 pm
Oh, BTW, finished up all the bakings last night, no, this morning, about 3. Bakings was successful. Half of the blintz has been eaten and the quiches are hangin' out in the cooler.
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September 3rd, 2009
09:42 pm
The quiche Lorraine is out of the oven and cooling and the spinach quiche is half-baked now. The blintz casserole sits in two separate bowls now and I'll put them together and start cooking when spinach quiche is out. Now I have waiting time though, as I've gotten ahead of the oven. Of course, waiting time just means that I need to work on my costume! I probably need to eat dinner too, but I just can't seem to get hungry...
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08:58 pm
Quiche Lorraine recipe was too big for it's pan. The oven will need cleaning because the goo managed to get all the way off the baking sheet that was protecting it. I cut the milk in half for spinach quiche, I thought it was an awful lot when I was mixing up Lorraine...
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08:02 pm
I'm frying an onion in bacon-drippings. Can you even imagine what my kitchen smells like?
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07:05 pm - It was tough, but I persevered.
I got to the bottom of the hill today when the truck died. It decided to behave as though it had no gas at all (it had three-quarters of a tank) and made me very upset. Three nice men stopped and helped me push it off the rode and then I called my sister and then our brother-in-law (who is also our mechanic). After getting off the phone with said brother/mechanic, I turned the engine over and kept the peddle to the floor until it warmed up and remembered that it had gas, then I started the trek to the garage. The hills on 15th gave me trouble because the truck did not think it should have to go up them. I had to pull off to the side and rev the engine a few times, but eventually I got to the shop. Left the car there and walked over to University Village. Oh hey, I forgot there was a Sony Store in UV, so I went in and asked if they had the camera that I'd looked up in Consumer Reports and tried to find at mall stores and the mall stores only had the older version of it. The nice man at the Sony Store informed me that the one I'd found on Consumer Reports was now out of date, so apparently all the mall stores are currently two models behind. The newer version was a hundred dollars more than I had anticipated spending however, but the nice man said that the version in the other area of the counter was a hundred dollars less and exactly the same except fatter. Well I want a camera-sized camera anyway! So I got a better camera than I'd been looking for and he gave me $25 off of it and 15% from the card, so happy times. They didn't have the fat one in red, and I knew my sister would take it away if I got the blue one, so I went with 'bronze' (which is definitely not a bronze color; it's far too pale.) From UV I then walked up the hill to the Ave and attempted to run my errands there since I obviously wasn't going to be doing a whole lot of traveling today and I have to go to con tomorrow. I managed to get the bits I needed and a bowl of teriyaki chicken since I hadn't packed a sandwich (I thought I was only going out for an hour...) and then I tried to catch a bus back north. I missed it by 30 seconds and so sat down to wait a half hour for the next one to come. The next one did not come. An hour later, I finally caught a bus up to Lake City Way, where I transferred to another one and got myself up to LFP. There I went to the grocery and got food for the weekend and to replace all the essentials that Elfy gobbled up yesterday. I walked to the other side of the mall, now carrying half my weight in stuff, and waited at that bus stop a half hour for the bus back up to home. That bus was ten minutes late, but it did come in the end. So now I've gotten the cold things put in the fridge and I will spend my evening making two quiches and a blintz casserole as well as putting sleeves, buttons and lace onto my costume. I may be up late.
And also, my feet hurt. I did not wear my walkin' sandals today.
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August 9th, 2009
08:12 pm - Thai food
Parents brought me home pud thai from Lotus, down in the Greenlake area. I have never had pud thai that spicy or that flavorless. Also, the tofu in it was slivers of baked tofu, like you get in the dense little bricks? Yeah... it was... unelegant. Although, I did have foreboding from the get-go, as when I opened up the take-out bag, the box of food had been packed together with a napkin and a set of disposable chopsticks... So... Yeah, that was pretty damn special... Apparently this is some sort of 'Asianese' restaurant that has mistakenly labeled itself as 'Thai.'
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August 8th, 2009
10:25 pm - Who got mah shoe?!
My left shoe disappeared from Nicole's house tonight and though three of us all thoroughly checked every nook and cranny of the area, we could not find it anywhere. The thought is that it snuck into somebody's bag and hoboed its way out of the house. Did anybody have a dark red flat turn up in their stuff? It's life-partner is very worried about it, and try though I might, I'm not very good at consoling a shoe.
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August 6th, 2009
08:51 pm - My efficiency is amazing!
Mom god the Jasc robot program for me to put on little computer and now I'm batch-processing all the images. This would have really saved my hand a lot of grief if I'd figured out how to do this before cropping, resizing and reformatting 600 images one at a time... Although I think I'll probably still have to do that cropping by hand because it's kind of irregular, but this will still up my efficiency significantly.
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10:49 am - Oh my God! Just let me eat!
I've been answering the phone every three minutes this morning since I got out of the shower. The sister gave me my wake-up call this morning and then I'm not even sure how many calls there could have been while I was hiding out in the shower. So as soon as I put some breakfast together to eat, the lady from Sears starts calling. I get up, run over to the phone, tell her that no, we only want one refrigerator, and then go back to my breakfast. Two bites, two and she's called back. No, we only want ONE refrigerator. Back to breakfast, manage to finish what I'm eating and get back to my morning comics. Sears-lady is back again. Do we want the one with an ice-maker or the one without? I don't know! It's not my fridge, I told you that last time! So I give her mom's cell phone number. Sit back down, get through three quarters of my comics. The phone rings again and if it's the Sears-lady, I'm going to cry. No, it's the sister, updating me with info on vintage diesel engine manuals and asking if I've made progress. No! And it's all Sears-lady's fault! After hanging up this time, I get smart; I go and get the hand-set from the living room so that I don't have to keep jumping up and running across the room every time the phone rings. I get back, finish my comics. Then the cell-phone rings. I nearly scream. It's mom, telling me about the fridge. And that's where I am now. What is usually a 30 minute wake-up routine has become 50. Now I will go take a look at these engine manuals.
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July 26th, 2009
12:11 am - I am so confused
I asked for pictures of a particular doll's body-type on a doll forum the other day, and then said that I wasn't sure it was what I was looking for for a particular character, then the girl who posted the picture got all mad and started chewing me out for not wanting an exact copy of her doll or something... It was... surreal... (and it's not a very good doll-body for that point either, the parts look miss-matched because, I don't know, the company couldn't be bothered to make their optional parts match the original sculpt.)
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July 23rd, 2009
11:31 am - Firefox update
So I let Firefox install updates yesterday and all of a sudden I'm getting a million pop-ups. It's the same on both computers. Is this happening to anybody else?
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July 9th, 2009
08:25 pm - Mental-Maps
So in the last year I've been learning out to fly. The dreams come more and more frequently (and I know that they're strongly influenced by playing NiGHTS) and I've gotten progressively better at it the more practice I get. The big accomplishment of the last couple months is that I no longer need any tools to fly. Each time I go to this world, I have a greater success-rate for getting air-born. After I was done with the tools (like a ski-lift or a boson's chair attached to nothing), I would take off with a little hop, at first about one-in-five times I'd manage to get into the air, then one in three, then about half the time, then I became consistently able to take off without trouble. Now I don't even need to hop, I can take off from standing still. Now the thing to work on is keeping my feet up, just like when I swim, my feet want to sink down when I'm flying; I'm also too heavy. It takes a lot of work and concentration to stay airborne; it's almost hard to pay attention to the scenery.
But I do get to look around a bit and the night before last I made a discovery, because I'd managed to fly much farther than I ever had before. I started out at the school, a place I've been a couple times before, and I took off east over the forest. I passed some power-lines, the kind that are really high up and strung between steal towers instead of just regular poles. I flew over trees on the east side of the lines too, but looking to the north I could see the university in the distance. The university is different from the school, and I've been there a few times before too. It never occurred to me that the two places were in the same world. I didn't go towards the university though, instead I kept on going east and when the forest gave way I found myself a dense city area. The buildings around me were mostly inner-city apartments with red-brick facades, but unlike the apartments of this variety that I usually see, they were twenty to thirty stories tall. Between them there were streets and alleys, some busy some not, and parking lots here and there. It was generally a very inner-city dynamic.
I wandered back to the school for some reason, but there were some jerks there and I ran away from them and flew east again. This time when I got to the power-lines, I decided to follow them south, rather than continuing past them. I followed them down over the dam, which is a fun but scary place I've been in twice before, and then out to the delta beyond that and discovered that the waterfront city (charming little place, but I don't usually have much fun because I'm getting stressed out trying to find the right bus to catch) was also part of this world. Tonight I mapped out the locations I now know the relative positions of... I also have a great suspicion that there's a small amusement park on a pier somewhere around here... I think it's probably to the east of the city but I'm not sure. Anyway, for anyone who finds my mental-mapping in the slightest bit interesting, here's the map so far.
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June 24th, 2009
June 22nd, 2009
09:39 pm - GENTLEMEN! BEHOLD!
Here is my new baby. I am so in business.
It's not just a toy! It's my future! I swear!
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June 20th, 2009
03:11 pm - Trashed-no-jutsu?
So, when I drank the 'pink panty-droppers' the girls made at Montague Manor, it was basically like a trashed-no-jutsu and I didn't have the chance to watch the stages go by. First I noticed was getting kind of ADD, the second stage was that I was salavating more than usual. The third stage was when my vision seemed wrong in some indefinable way and my eyes were getting a little watery. Last was that I started getting dizzy, not in a normal spinny way, but in an odd indefinable way like with the vision, where my internal gyroscope is slightly off-kilter, but I'm not feeling sickish. Now we've gotten back to Jesse's house, after our wine-tasting adventure, and I'm feeling dizzy and vision-odd, but the other effects have left. This is a lot more interesting than the trashed-no-jutsu 'cocktails' since I've been able to keep track of the stages. Also, because my mind hasn't split into the stupid, giggly half and the overly-critical and embarrassed half that his horrified by it, which is nice. I don't like it when I spend the evening going 'OH MY GOD, WHY AM I ACTING SO DUMB?!' So anyway, this is my summary of wine.
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