The hobby store I used to work for part-time changed owners last month. They closed down two of the other stores and consolidated into the main store. Most of the people I knew there are gone, and they've reduced their model train inventory to a ridiculously small selection. Online retail basically did them in. This makes me sad. I really like ( Read more... )

Dragon Con Photos!
All the photos are titled and tagged. The werewolf baby in the stroller is the creepiest thing I've seen since that guy photoshopped eyes all over his cat's picture to make "Spider/Shoggoth Cat".

Savings? What Savings?

Ack! We dropped the home warranty because of the hassle and disappointments we've had over the last few ( Read more... )

Dragon*Con was a much more subdued experience for us this year. We stayed at one of the satellite hotels instead of one of the central hotels, but we did not spend a lot of time going through the hotels, so I feel like we missed out on seeing a lot of costumes--though some costumes we did manage to see seemed to be missing a lot (usually, taste). ( Read more... )

sinclairhawkins's picture made the front page of our free local weekly newspaper supplement. I spread it out on the kitchen table so ealdthryth could see it when she got home. Except that when she got home she couldn't see it. Ignatius was curled up on it. He might be missing his former foster family.

Second Article Idea

ealdthryth and I try to be pretty frugal. I've never ( Read more... )

Each time we go, it is like a completely different convention. We dawdled on Thursday knowing that we'd have to drop Ignatius at the vet's office for the extended weekend. THAT was traumatic for us all ( Read more... )

I've had some ideas percolating for over a year, and took some time to sketch them out a little bit this week. I even had a Brand New idea that will take a lot of work and expanding my skill set to implement--unless I go the "Cardboard Troopers" route with it. My initial sketches of it are a tad lame, and from an articulation point of view, it is ( Read more... )

Five. Five 18-gallon tubs can easily fit in the Prius if we don't take the rolling cooler. Four fit very comfortably with the cooler in between two of them. If I had taken out the tonneau cover, I could have probably gotten six tubs into the back of the car ( Read more... )

ealdthryth went to spend time with our various tribes at Dragon*Con this year. This year was the year of lines. We got late start (which I had been not-so-secretly dreading) and ended up leaving the house *after* the time we had hoped to actually arrive in Atlanta.... It made no difference. The staff had thought to reduce the wait time in the pre- ( Read more... )

Working backwards.... The goggles have been upgraded to sport brass accents and a few gears. I'd really like to put things together in a more coherent fashion. It'll do, though. The telegraph needs a latch to keep the back of it closed, but it is otherwise complete. I did a bit of gilding via acrylic paint and have temporarily hot-glued an ( Read more... )

Well, the much anticipated weekend-long marathon sewing session did NOT occur. I did however, revamp some of the Prisoner accessories [Badges? We know we need stinking badges!], and they look much better now. I let ealdthryth convince me that I was wrong about how they should look--until she watched Dance of the Dead and agreed that I should redo them. ( Read more... )