Sunday, September 30, 2012

Click to enlarge.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Just doesn’t sound right.

My painting project is done.  Up close you can tell that it was the first car I ever painted, it’s far from perfect.  But I did learn a lot.  Like if you’re going to spend $400 for a gallon of paint, don’t use a $80 house paint sprayer to spray it on.  Like over spray gets e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

But I’m happy with it, I really like the color I picked, and unless you’re up close it looks pretty good.  And although it’s no longer green, I think I’m going to keep the name “Big Green”.  Mainly because “Big Brown” conjures up bad connotations.  Although my niece did have a brown car she called “The Poo” and I always thought that was cool.

Anyway, here it is, before and after.

And just in case you didn’t believe it was the same car…

Playing with yet another camera.

Have you ever seen The Slo Mo Guys?  They did some of the slow motion action on the Sherlock Holmes movie, and have a YouTube channel where they do various weird things and film it at various slow motion speeds.  If you’ve never seen them, I would suggest watching this one of theirs, it’s the first one I saw and gives you a good overview of what they do.

When I went to talk to one of our science teachers after school and found some students doing experiments with the slow motion camera she bought with some grant money, I just had to join in.  My tech students and I borrowed it one day, and then she actually let me take it home for the weekend.

So, after I painted the car, I went out for a walk to see what I could get.  Here’s some of the videos I filmed.

Look at the car’s signal light.
Is the twirling thing too much?

Friday, September 28, 2012

Grounded for life.

I saw this lamp post on my walk around the park a had to add it to this week’s theme.

Grounded

Revived for 2012

The “Obamacon”.  You can make your own here.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Arrrggh!

Summer is officially over;  There be snow in them thar hills.

So what if it didn’t stick, according to the weather people today, it was coming down.  That’s enough for me to prove we’re on that slippery slide downhill to winter.

Bleah.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Oops.

This week, Carmi’s theme is “Grounded”.  I think this plane was grounded for quite a while.

2008, Moab International Airport, Terminal 43-B

Ok, it was 2008, it was the Moab airport, but the rest is a lie.  The airport is nothing even close to international, and even if the terminal is named 43-B, it’s the only one there and quite the misnomer.  And I don’t think I’ll be flying with that airline any time soon.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Let the games begin…


BACKGROUND

At the end of last school year I took over the technical side of the announcements at my school.  Because we switched from closed circuit TV to intranet streaming to teacher computers, I had some failures and some successes.

And all along the way one of our science teachers, I’ll call him Mr. L, was quick to congratulate our successes, and make fun of our failures.  He even left me a voicemail giving me crap on one of our less successful days.  I downloaded it and played it for the entire school at the beginning of the announcements the next day.  (He hasn’t left any voicemails since.)

This year things have gone relatively smoothly, but he still pokes fun at our small blunders.  We actually get along really well, and have developed a relationship where we willingly partake in giving each other crap when things happen.


FOREGROUND

On Tuesday Rite-Aid came to our school to give out flu shots to the teachers.  Mr. L got his while I was doing lunch duty, but when I came in to get mine I found out that he has a little phobia of needles.  Seems he came real close to actually passing out when he got his shot.

After I discovered that he wasn’t too embarrassed by his reaction, I decided it was open season.  I sent him an email that contained nothing but this photo:

We then traded notes back and forth a couple of times, both of us using words and phrases like needling me, poking fun, taking jabs and any other similar euphemism we could think of.  He was demanding an apology, I was giving him back-handed ones.

Then, during one of my classes, one of his students showed up and handed me this: (click on it to enlarge it to read)

I sent back a tootsie roll, with a post-it note with this on it:

After school I brought him his soda and we had a few laughs over the whole thing.

Friday, September 21, 2012

The search is over.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Retro.

One simple word, but it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  Here are some of the retro things I have surrounded myself with in my home.

I got this from my little brother.  This poor thing has absolutely no idea how to deal with digital TV signals, so all I can get is snow.  Which, in itself is retro, since when digital signals go out all you get is that bad-DVD look, or a blue screen.

The thermostat I found somewhere in my house when I bought it.  It wasn’t in service at the time, but the previous owners left it in the back of one of the closets.  Now I have it on the kitchen wall, still not in service.

I wouldn’t dare try to make waffles in this thing, probably would short out the whole house.  Not to mention it would need a thorough cleaning first.

I found this old gas stove at a second hand store.  It also isn’t functional, but looks good in my kitchen.

Another retro gift from my little brother.  Notice how nice and compact it is.  That’s because…

…it’s SOLID STATE.  None of those pesky glass tubes.  Quite moderen.

Looking out my front window, through the lens of…

…Yashicamat.

Remember taking pictures with one of these in the winter?  You had to slip the photo under your armpit to keep it warm enough to self-develop. 

Some things from the by-gone days are better off gone.  I cut my foot more than a few times on one of these discarded pop-tops.

Milk.  In glass bottles?  Sheesh, people probably expected it to be delivered to their front door too.

Metal toys.  Made in the U.S.A.  With relatively sharp edges.  How did we survive as kids?

My front door.  Probably from when they built my home in 1912.  Even with the weather stripping I’ve added, it’s not the most energy saving door around, but I’m not getting rid of it.

And finally, you don’t find woodwork like this on small middle class homes anymore.  The owners before me restored all the woodwork, including the floors, in the front rooms of the house.  That’s the stuff that sold me on the place.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Stupid move #3.5943x10^24

You know what happens when you forget to put 2 little drops of oil in those each of those 2 little holes in the power sprayer after cleaning?

Nothing, until you try painting again.  Then this happens:

Instead of coming out in a nice smooth spray, you get some big obnoxious globules of paint in with the even spray.  Ok, maybe they’re not that big, about ¼ inch or so (the size of the gap between the hood and the fender), but splatted on an otherwise smooth painting of the hood of a car, they look like the Grand Tetons.

The back was done before I ran out of paint and had to go out and get more, cleaning the painter before I left.  Now I have to sand down the hood and paint it all over again.

But that’s ok, I was going to put 2 coats on anyway, now it’s just going to end up being 3.  And since I rearranged it so the car has the whole garage to itself, the painting goes pretty smoothly (as long as I remember to properly prepare the sprayer.)