Recent figure kits I've worked on

Cardcaptor Sakura kit - I found the image that inspired this kit.

This is the 2nd Sailor Saturn kit I've worked on, but the first that I got to keep.

I had to mix a custom color for Saturn's bows since in the source images for her, they appear to be a muted reddish brown. There is purple on her eyes for the iris, but you can't see them because of the bright highlights.

Sakura got some pearlized white on the outside of the wings to give them a certain look when photographed. I hope to see if I can put a little LED light in the lamp post.

Coming Soon

Hated "shop class" in Junior High

Every now and then, my thoughts drift back to Shop Class of junior high, grades 7 and 8. I didn't sign up for it, I didn't particularly care for it. I got a wallet and a lamp out of it, but little else.

First, how about I discuss the teacher? His name was Gene Hudson, aka Mr. Hudson. Most of the boys in the class (it was a boys only class for what it's worth) didn't really like him. However, if you were of one of the "well to do" families and you talked about things he liked, like Golf, with Mr. Hudson, you tended to do well. I later found out he helped out during school athletics like score keeper and things.

My first or earliest experience in the class that started the whole thing was we were to sit at these desks, much like a drafting table I guess, and he thought he was explaining what we would be doing in the class. And what I figured out years later was some sort of technical drawing. We had to buy special mechanical pencils and erasers for this activity which to me seemed to take up the entire year, the first year anyway. You get your sheet of paper. You were supposed to draw a frame on the paper so much in from the edges. At the bottom was another line and a series of boxes. This was for you to put your name, date, whatever the hell the assignment was about.

He'd hand out these sheets of things we were supposed to copy off the paper. He tried explaining the size of arrows, the weight of lines that are drawn. I thought that last part, weight of the lines, was either understood well enough or graded arbitrarily by Mr. Hudson.

I would do my best to copy something off the handout. When it was done, we brought it up to him. He would look at it, circle a few things (usually he would circle something, more often than not things got circled), and offer a grade on the assignment. There never was any helpful explanation what I did wrong or right. Never any explanations - nothing clear, just some scribbles of what he thought was an explanation but I never did learn anything from the scribbles. I think we were all scared of him, but hate was more like it. We put up with the class as best we could. All Mr. Hudson seemed to care was that we were quiet and he could pick earwax out of his ears with his car keys. I guess as long as he got to do that or talk about Golf, he was happy.

I got only 1 A on those drawings. I usually got Cs or Ds for no reason at all. If you don't explain what I needed to do better, how am I supposed to learn? How do I get the right weight on the lines? Why did this even matter? It could be the experience in the 2 years of Mr. Hudson's class as the reason I never pursued anything similar in later work. Of course, I could have had the associated stigma that my older sister did so well and I was doomed to not be allowed to have similar scholastic success, and Mr. Hudson played his part. If I could ask for those 2 years of grades from those classes struck from my school district transcript, I would have it done in no time.

The 2nd year of Mr. Hudson was a bit more productive. I ended up with a wallet I used for some time, and a lamp I still have and use. I doubt anyone else from that class still uses the lamp they made.

There were a fair share of bumps along that year. My mom had a friend who wrote a check to help pay for the kit for the wallet I wanted to make. A paltry $6.50. However, Mr. Hudson had a problem with bounced checks. I didn't know the person who wrote it would have a problem. I seem to recall Mr. Hudson giving me a hard time about a bounced check. Either way, the whole thing was resolved, he got his money, and I got to make the wallet.

The other bit was during the making of the lamp. I think this was the only technical drawing I did in the class that got an A. It was basically redwood and white pine, in alternating slices. A base, and an electric lamp socket. I guess it turned out a bit less than I was hoping. I couldn't do the entire thing as one unit, but instead 3 blocks of 4 alternating woods, since the drill press in shop class couldn't drill through the entire stack of wood. At least it got glued and sanded well enough. It's never come apart since it was glued. And me being a kid and never worked with wood, I didn't know you can't buy blocks of wood and the slice it (well maybe you could), but instead you had board feet to deal with and you just cut the boards. The choice of wood was to reflect the school colors.

Joe Eltringham at the time was a dick and the bump I had here with the lamp was that for some reason I was forced to share a storage locker in shop class with him and he stole the electrical cord for my lamp kit. He'd deny it even today, but I knew. The way he'd act today was as if I was a friend of his from way back, but as I recall, he was never a friend. Not even a good one.

I was not aware there were options for making lamps. As I recall, we were just asked to design a lamp, so much wide, so much tall, and that's it. Other kids got these lamps with a hollow box and optional sockets for blinking Christmas tree lights and a semi-clear plastic insert for it. I still liked my design anyway. And I'll bet nobody else in those classes that year still have their lamps.

I think also another point of the year was due to my glasses always having problems with other people breaking them for me in some way, and I eventually ended up using an electronic alligator clip to hold them together. While that worked in holding my glasses together at one hinge point, it ended up getting me the dubious nickname of Roach Clip for a while. It got to be disconcerting and eventually someone got around to asking Mr. Hudson if there wasn't something he could figure out for me. I think it ended up with him coming up with some sort of adhesive for that problem and pretty much held my glasses together until I got a new pair. Probably the only time I saw Mr. Hudson be somewhat nice as he worked on my problem.

Of course, that's why I have wire-frame glasses today. All those damn plastic frame glasses and the assholes throwing basketballs at my face sure didn't help things.

The grades I received on the lamp? Even though it was mostly as I intended, with varnish and all, he barely managed to give me these 4 grades, and I don't know why it was 4 but I still remembered what he wrote in the gradebook in order: D, D, C, D. *sigh* Screw you, Mr. Hudson.

Something got changed, but nobody told me

After digging down in Frontier's website for online bill pay, there appears to be a check for "I agree to stop paper bills" or somesuch. Mom did that, but I did NOT agree to that. After today, as soon as I find out my credit card payment cleared, I'm going to uncheck that and cancel online bill pay. What's REALLY AGGRAVATING about the whole thing is that old customer info was applied to the new account. Mom had online pay set up during Verizon, but I always had the paper bills coming. I have nothing but ANGER and CONTEMPT for Frontier for changing something without ANY INPUT from me!!

It's this sort of shit that makes me see Magic Jack as a viable alternative to Frontier, now that I no longer use a land line for WebTV, though inDirecTV's box uses it.
 

Absolutely LIVID

Absolutely LIVID right now. It's probably too early to say that someone at the local post office is messing with my mail, but that's how I operate. An envelope sent June 23rd never arrived (so far), and my payment for my phone bill from June appears to never have arrived, plus my phone bill to PAY for July never got to me! I had a $48 phone bill (2 months) to settle online with a credit card.

I never signed up for online pay with no paper bills sent to me. I had been getting paper bills in the mail since I got the number. I can even locate my bills and payments for April and May of this year - both of which they kindly showed to me online that they got them.

As it turned out, when the number was with Verizon, Mom had signed up for online payments from her checking account. Somehow that information got transferred to Frontier as still being signed up with online payment even though the name had changed.

I'm going to have to call them up and make it clear I do not intend to use online payment as the primary method to get their money to them. I don't want this sort of thing happening again!!!

Preliminary search seems to indicate that I never got Frontier's June 2012 bill. Still I have this memory of paying Frontier by money order - as I have done since I got the number, and since the start of this year. I am not that irresponsible that I would not open a bill nor leave it where I would lose it. I have my places to put Opened Bills That Need Paying, and a place to put Paper That Has Been Dealt With (and kept should I get pissed off like I am now).

The only envelope I got this month from Frontier was some sort of re-verification for LifeLine. I copied that piece of paper and mailed that envelope from another post office.

And then I saw some sort of URL on the PDF phone bill I grabbed that was marked as Free on my bill, but I'm also going to get that removed. I do not want ANYTHING on my bill that I don't want on it.

Well, I thought the plan was done...

It's been a month or so since I thought the business plan was finished, and I was under the impression that my advisor for writing the plan was going to call the people needed and I was to be at the presentation for the plan. So far I've heard nothing about any meeting. I'm not sure who to contact or if I should just wait until I hear something.
 

Both drawers work now

After the success in getting one drawer working again and having it properly installed, I decided to repeat that success on the other drawer. The old flimsy and bent (not to forget shimmed with vintage square nuts) drawer slides were replaced with new slides. It's also surprising that I was able to find usable replacements at Lowe's this time. I was hoping to find 26 inch slides, but settled for 24 inch slides which oddly turned out to be the right ones that were needed!

Again, I attached the drawer box parts first and managed to figure out where the drawer slides go in the cabinet, having already attached and installed the side support where they should have been. And I had to get a metal right angle brace for the left side (also filling the missing gap with the last bits of whatever wood thing I got at Goodwill) since it wasn't cut long enough and the glue failed to work. A friend of mine noted I could have used wooden dowels, something which I never considered. He's worked with wood enough to realize it could have worked. Sometimes he makes complete sense, and that was one of those times. Yes, he's right.

As it turned out, the old drawer slides were never installed right nor were they level for this drawer. When you see this one in action now, there's no rubbing on the bottom of the drawer opening and a paper thin gap at the top on the right side of the drawer. It now glides in and out without touching anything. The only left over problem is that the right side of the drawer box doesn't completely rest right up against the cabinet front, but I'm willing to accept it since the drawer works now.

And the slides I bought this time work with #6 screws (It came with what I correctly figured out were #5 screws), so no needing to buy the longer screws since I already had them.

It's just so odd that these drawers never worked right when we moved in, and now they do. I had the wood needed for side support around here for a couple years at least. My plan took a long time to happen, but when it was necessary to do something about it, it worked as I had envisioned it in my head. I measured nothing in regard to placement of slides. I just wish Mom could see these drawers work.

Now I need strong door latches for 3 cabinet doors so I can keep the cats out. They like to patrol for mice in there.

I managed to install a drawer

About 6 weeks or so ago, before my car began its period of repeatedly needing fixed, one of the drawer slides in one of the kitchen drawers decides to break. Now, keep in mind that these drawers were never installed right to behind with.

The original idiot who put in these drawers didn't use pieces of wood to support the drawer slides, so the cheap slides that were put in would bend and allow the drawer box to fall out of the slides. Plus the drawer box wasn't wide enough for the opening, so there were these square nuts used to try to fill that space, shim it up in place as one way to put it.

So when the one side slide broke, I took it as a chance not only to replace the slides but to properly install the drawer once and for all. That meant (as I had planned some time ago) getting pieces of wood measured and cut to support the sides in the cabinet. At the time (I forget when) I had cut the pieces of wood, I was going to just figure out a way to put them in and support the slides from inside the cabinet. When the opportunity came to actually do something about it because it was exceedingly necessary, I just glued the tight fitting pieces of wood in place which worked just as well. I was going to use nails and screws instead.

Also was the opportunity to replace the flimsy metal slides with something newer. This took a while. Lowe's didn't have the 26 inch / 610 mm aka 61 cm slides I needed. Plus their section on drawer slides was disorganized. I ended up at a Home Depot and found a pair of side mount slides for $7.95, which I thought was more than reasonable. They had what I needed and the section for these things was organized.

I chose to mount the drawer based on the right side of the box which showed me that I needed to make up about a 1/2 inch to a 9/16ths of an inch gap for the left side drawer slide. If I had found a proper piece of solid wood, I wouldn't have needed to find replacement screws that had to be 1.5 inches in length. The screws that come with the drawer must be a size 5, since I found #4 screws to have screw heads that are too small, yet #6 screws are just slightly too big. And the screws with the slides were not long enough!

At any rate, after buying a new electric drill at Harbor Freight Tools for $13, I managed to install the cabinet slide parts. I determined where they needed to be (after gluing in the 1/2 inch thick filler) by putting the cabinet slides on the drawer box and putting that in the cabinet, shimmed from the bottom using matchbooks, and using a china marker to show me where the slides would end up.

I began attaching the cabinet slide parts with a screw in the front, then a screw in the middle so I could adjust for making it level, then tight screws all around. I was worried that the screw heads would protrude above the surface of the slide and knock against the bearing wheel, but ended up having some amount of leeway and wasn't a problem.

So now I have one drawer properly installed and it moves in and out so gracefully. In spite of the packaging for the parts I bought telling me all these things that needed to be measured, etc, etc, I ended up just doing a practical eyeballing of the task and just put it where it should go.

Now to work on the other drawer.

I also noticed the green electric weed trimmer appears to be missing. Aside from the duct tape on the body of it, it worked just fine. I paid $20 brand new for it.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF part 2

So I got the old dashboard back, but yet again I see "this will be removed in about a month." 
NO, DON'T REMOVE IT. GRRR. It wasn't broken, don't fix.
 

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Well, I was going to post something else, but after logging into the backside of my blog, I see Google has crammed the "new look" down my throat without asking me if I really wanted it. Which I don't.

So instead of a post about my long ordeal with my car repeatedly breaking down, it will be this short rant.