Get Stacked!!!

So, for today's post, I was going to post some more pictures from the Youth Expo we went to a couple weeks back, when I discovered the folder from the last time we visited Stacked.

One of my two favorite places I've recently discovered. You can see from the outside, it has multi colored glass walls, giving the interior an orangish hue.

Their gimmick is that you order via an Ipad, choosing what toppings, buns and cheese you'd like on you burger, pizza, hot dog and even ice cream sandwich!!!

Of course, doing so, you come up with an amazing, epic burger!!!

This was only the second time we've gone there, it's not exactly cheap, especially if you put a lot of extras on your burger or pizza, or must have an ice cream sandwich at the end. Of course, all these things are what make the place so awesome!!! To help in the cost area, you can go during happy hour, from 3 to 6 I believe, when everything is discounted.

And, it's not really that close to our house. This particular visit my parents wanted to get together somewhere, so there we went!!! It was their first visit. They both got pulled pork sandwiches, which I always see and think would be tasty, but never get because you can do so much with the burgers.

Every time I go to a build your own burger place, I almost always get bleu cheese and sauteed onions. MMMMMMMM!!! I wants some NOW!!!

The other place which is on my top two these days is Slater's 50/50 burger. Same idea, design your own, only via a notepad checklist. Their gimmick??? Burger patties made of 50% sirloin, 50% ground bacon!!! Enough said... My firstborn ordered a hugely optioned burger, then when it came and it was too tall for his mouth, he sat there holding it muttering "How do???" over and over. I must return, next time with my camera. last time we went there, it was a two hour wait, and worth every minute!!!

Where's My $43.2 Million???

Inspired by a previously posted Roy Lichtenstein painting, I did this likeness and tribute on my cup. Most everyone who sees it at my work loves it!!! I then get to share how it's based on a painting that sold for more than 43 million dollars!!! If you didn't know, that's the area of my work that I'm employed in, the bin structure.

I got to try something in Paint Shop Pro, stitching in the radius from another shot to get the whole quote bubble in. It looks funky and not right, but at least you can read the whole text!!!

About the title of this post: For you, the valued blog reader, I'll let it go for half of the price of the original, along with a signed certificate of authenticity!!!

He Said, I Heard...

Over the weekend they were having a Youth Expo at the OC Fairgrounds. My younger & I met up with my parents, niece & nephew there. I've got a lot of pictures I'll probably share, but for now, just a short little true story.

We're walking along, and my boy sees this...

He says, "Look at the giant chess!!!"

I heard and was looking around for the "Giant chest"!!!

A Little Artwork...

Here's a little sketch I did up. Don't know what the inspiration for it was, but it came out OK, if not a little lippy and big headed!!!

My firstborn did the second one here, just a little potato face!!!

UniDuck

Bought a pack of Orbit gum a couple weeks ago. Melon remix, I believe, was the flavor. Pretty tasty.

The thing that I found to be blogworthy about this occurrence was the artwork on the package. The target duck appears to have a unicorn horn coming out of its forhead!!! Everyone I've pointed this out to has been duly impressed. I think it's actually just the end of the spiral behind it, but an actual UniDuck is much cooler!!!

Bonus XP Weekend

Last Thursday afternoon the supervisor who does the scheduling comes up to me and asks if I want a middle shift for Friday. "Yea, sure, thanks", I'm usually up for getting out of work an hour 15 minutes earlier than normal, even when it means having to get up earlier, and usually worse traffic too. Then she says, "And you've got Monday off..." Huh??? I do??? Apparently I'd selected it when they were doing the vacation selection at the end of last year, and I was just throwing on random Mondays. Cool.

Saturday and Sunday weren't much different than normal weekend days, although it was wet and rainy most of the first half of the day, and it was pretty cold the rest of the weekend.

I have been doing a little work on the walls in the kitchen, trying to get 'em evened out for fresh paint. Did a bit of sanding on them.

This morning it was bright and sunny, but still chilly. Got the family together and we went up to Mount Baldy!!! It was an awesome day for it!!! Much better than the last two times. The drive out didn't take long at all, and it wasn't crowded.

There was a good amount of snow, around 6 inches most everywhere, and a good 4 inches or so of that was fresh powder. We got to do a bit of sledding, rolled up some snow balls into snowman size balls. A great way to spend the last day of Winter!!!

One of my co-workers had a half day of Friday for his birthday. His wife and him were going to Souplantation. I haven't been there probably more than 20 years, and that got me thinking. On the way home we stopped there.

If you've been following my Twitter feed, you've seen what else I did this weekend. Runescape was having their bonus experience weekend. I did just over 8 hours, racking up about 950,000 experience points. Started off with herblore, which I leveled 3 times, in the first half hour when the bonus factor was 2.7x. Next I did construction for 2 levels. Got 2 levels of agility, and one each in thieving, crafting, fletching, and prayer. Not leveled but heavily trained was smithing, which I did a lot of right after the herblore and construction. Did around 3/4 of the way to the next level, not bad since I'm at 86.

Oh yeah, the first picture is a snow apple core my boy made me!!!

AppleCup

I've always got things I should blog about, but I often delay and then they go away. I have a post (with no images as of yet, probably I'd just web source 'em) about a couple of really good burger places I've recently come across. Just last weekend was my boy's birthday celebration, it came together pretty well, and that one I do have a few good pictures of (but I missed the one I wished I got).

Anyway, here's one that I've had for a while that I've been meaning to do. Not long after I came up with my OC I did his cutie mark on my cup, leading to the rather lengthy explanation. Even people who didn't get the back story liked the art. My older boy did a link to that particular post on his tumblr, so a lot of the bronies got a chance to check it. One of his circle was complaining about everyone making up alicorns, and my boy asked him, "Even my dad's trollicorn???" and the guy responds, "No, that one's awesome!!!"

I've got some of Applecore's back story worked out in my head, and I can picture a comic of him telling his story to the cutie mark crusaders...

Second shot here, I saw in a parking lot a few weeks back. I LOLLed, Manther was one of the cats we used to have. Full name Samantha, but as that name is too long, it was naturally shortened to Manther. She was mostly black fur, so Manther the panther. That reminds me, the older boy was taking some pictures of our cat the other day, wonder if they are on his tumbler now???

The Frickin' Lions...

As alluded to on an earlier post, here's a shot of the lion casting I had been doing some work on.

Actually, the first shot is one of the beam being shot up into the sky. Not a great shot, but it came out pretty cool, seeming to split the clouds it's shooting into. Nice intense beam, huh???

And, of course, the second shot is how I pictured the lion shooting the beam from it's mouth. Dr. Evil would be proud... "The frickin' lions, with the frickin' lasers shooting out of their frickin' mouths!!!"

Happy Valentine's Day

I've had this picture saved for years, and somehow I always seem to forget to use it on Valentine's day!!! Ferrets to you!!!

Found the first couple of images on I Can Has Cheezburger. The last one, I don't remember exactly where I found, but it's been one of my favorites.

Googling the text at the bottom of it didn't help figure it out, but adding "kinky" to the end of the search did come up with some interesting images!!!

Aurora

Happened across this on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and found it too cool not to post!!! I would love to see this with my own eyes!!!

Aurora 2012 from Christian Mülhauser on Vimeo.

512 to the Shirt!!!

So, I finally did it!!! Years ago I came up with this 512 logo, along with a few other variants. I've seen it put onto beanies and hoodies, as well as having put it on many of my cups at work, but up until now I've never had any of my own gear. That was one of the things I had asked for for Christmas was some fabric paint and a dark green shirt. My wife got some paint (not fabric paint, though) and a nice green polo shirt. I'd picked up some foam from my work (the same kind I made the Minecraft Diamond Sword out of, I should give some detail on how I made that, it seems to be a popular search) and I cut it into a stamp of the logo. Of course, I also exchanged the paint, as well as located a T-shirt. I actually had enough foam left to make a small one, that I was going to use on one side of the polo shirt, and possibly on the upper back of the T-shirt.

That was what I tried to do first, but unfortunately the shirt was rather coarse and absorbent, so it came out very thin. In attempting to add onto it and thicken up the design, I smeared through one of the numbers and proceeded to rinse it off as well as I could. It may still come together. A few days later I put together the T-shirt version seen here. It also soaked up quite a bit of the ink, but I've left it pretty much like that. Perhaps a more porous foam would do a better job??? To keep the paint from soaking through to the back, I had used a piece of cardboard box inside it. I hadn't counted on the flap seam coming across the print, just a bit above the equator, and leaving a distinct stripe. The actual inspiration for this whole idea (I'd had the idea to attempt to do actual silk screen for years) came from one of my co-workers. One of her shirts has a series of multi colored dinosaurs down the front. Having seen it several times, I finally asked her when we were working together if there was any significance to her shirt. She replied that she had the fabric paint and the shirt, and that the dinosaurs just happened to be the stamps she had. Inspiration struck.

The cool part was wearing it to work. I got a lot of responses to it, and everyone knew what it was!!! The semi-weathered appearance of the paint soak was universally regarded as a good look.

When I got my camera out to pose for the picture, I also dug out my Mind Expandy Smurf shirt to get a shot of it for this post. Right on top of it was the tree shirt that I'd gotten as one of the last three random shirts from Woot (along with the robot-skyscraper from Big and the 8-bit Princess Bride shirt for my younger) and thought that it would be good to get a shot of here, too. I don't know what it is about that shirt, but everybody LOVES it!!!

I took a few of the stars and orbs from around the Smurf and added them around my own head for effect.

I notice in the three shots of me, my head goes progressively higher and to the right...

Of course, for the last shot, here's what a cat looks like in a dress shirt and bow tie. I was amazed that he stood still for this!!!

Where Is Everybody???

There was a picture of this Roy Lichtenstein painting in the paper today. I love it!!! I can imagine someone looking at it hanging on a wall and going, "... HEY!!!"

I'd totally get this and display it, but not at the price that it sold for last year, $43.2 million!!!

What I Did This Weekend...

I'm sure it's not the ONLY thing I got done this weekend, but it's pretty much the most major thing. My dad's Studebaker had been getting a bit tired in the engine leading up to the later part of last year, and he decided to replace the vintage 327 with a fresh 350 crate engine.

He did a nice detail job on the engine compartment. He'd picked up what he thought was some catalyzed black paint at a fair discount, but as you can see, it came out an... INTERESTING shade of brown!!! Good enough, he thought, it rather compliments the yellow outer skin, and I have to agree, not to mention it's something you don't really see. He tends to never show it with the engine compartment open, anyway, as it looks much better with it closed. Not that the engine and compartment aren't on a showable level.

While he had the engine out, he made up a custom recess for the firewall to clear the distributor better, which was always a tight fit. The final touch was the addition of a Dynamat type sound and heat insulator. Two last things once all the parts are back together are going to be the replacement of the air conditioner condenser, which seems to have some seepage, and eliminating the leaks in the power steering system.

It was no small job, but all that was really done was to swing the engine in, bolt it to the transmission, bolt the torque converter to the flexplate, and bolt down the engine mounts and tighten up the transmission. A series of twelve bolts turned.

Anything else??? Yea, spent quite a bit at Big Lots! for their 20% off day, and visited a seafood restaurant my wife had spotted in Glendale.

I'm doing a bit of work for a neighbor. He has a couple of cast bronze lion faces that were originally for a fountain where it squirts from the mouth. The studs were frozen in it, and one snapped off. Spray penetrant loosened 'em up. He's going to mount them and use them as wall hangings. I was thinking of the intense green laser I got for my son, and got the idea that it'd be pretty cool to take the element from one of those (or possibly two), hook it to a wall transformer instead of the batteries, and set it up so the lion would shoot a laser beam from it's mouth!!! Would that not be awesome??? Now I'm thinking of contacting my foundry guy and see about getting a couple duplicates cast up!!! Set 'em up with motion detectors, set up little mirrors and bounce a grid of beam all about the ceiling, set it up with a little motor to make the beam track back and forth... the possibilities are pretty cool!!! If I get anything together, I'll take a picture...

Gusher

Coming home last night, the road opposite ours going up the canyon we live in was blocked off with cones and a parking enforcement vehicle. "Odd", I thought to myself, "Must be some sort of parking emergency!!!" This means I was forced to drive up our street, which is counter to my normal routine, as usually I drive up that side so to be pointed the proper direction to park on the street or pull into the driveway.

As I ascended, there was a flatbed tow truck idling right opposite my driveway. Hmmmm... I get to the top of the street, turn around and park, and go to investigate. In addition to the tow truck, there's parking enforcement and another flatbed tow truck on the opposite street, and cones set up there, too. A few people are milling around over there. I thought maybe someone had wrecked over on that side, or maybe someone managed to drive into the canyon. From the days when my grandfather lived here I'd heard tales of parked cars rolling down into the canyon, yet I've never seen the likes of it.

The property opposite us on that street has some nice river rock retaining walls. I finally notice that the portion by the corner is fallen down into the street, of course followed by much of the dirt behind it. Hmmmmm again!!! I make mention to one of the neighbors out there that it's a shame, I really liked that wall. They agree, and then say something about how there was so much water. ??? It had rained that morning until around noon or so, but nothing serious, only about half an inch at most, I'd guess, and probably less.

Well, you probably guessed from the pictures, I was missing a key element here. Somehow, the fire hydrant over there got sheared off!!! Apparently it was pretty loud and of course went on for a while. My oldest had the presence of mind to take the camera out and get a few shots, as well as a video. Used to be able to post video on here, but I don't see the link for that anymore. The second shot I cropped for effect, you can see the spout is going about three times as high as the basketball hoop!!!

I like the last shot, with the water just cascading off the yard. I still wonder exactly how it happened!!!

Christmas 2 Random

Anyway

Seems like a lot goes on, doesn't it??? Yesterday I had it in my mind to change the master cylinder on the Maverick, as it seems to have developed a leak past the seal. I've been considering various destinations for this coming Summer vacation, and they were having the Los Angeles Travel & Adventure show... down in LONG BEACH!!! So, I was thinking that if I got through the master cylinder job I might go down and check that out.

As plans often change, my wife wanted go go to the Golden Star restaurant in Long Beach for breakfast. It had been a while, and sounded pretty good, so instead of wrenching on the car, we headed there instead, then to the travel show after.

My younger boy was going on quite a while about My Little Ponies. I had to come up with my OC, original character, and I came up with Apple Core, a Pegasus-Unicorn hybrid who launches apple cores at other ponies from his horn. Today I did the drawing & spent entirely too long modifying it in PaintShop Pro.

On the way between those destinations, they had several streets to the West blocked off. Found out, on the news that evening, they were having the MLK day parade. The parade looked pretty ghetto. MLK would have been proud.

For the most part, I found the travel show to be a bust and a waste of money. Did, however, discover that for driving into and out of Canada, you can get by with a Country of origin drivers license or some such instead of having to have a passport, so this may open up a possibility...

A few shots of the final 2011 Christmas celebration with my parents, or the Best Christmas Ever. My older boy got a gorgeous acoustic guitar, and the younger got an AirHogs Hawk Eye RC airplane. I 'shopped my arm out of the picture of it.

Funny how they have the MLK day parade on the Saturday before. Is that for the people who would like to attend, but actually have jobs where they have to work on Monday??? Like everyone who doesn't work for a bank or government???

Discovered something quite interesting while checking flight and lodging prices. From here, it costs very nearly the same to fly and stay in Oahu, Hawaii, as it does to fly and stay in Iceland!!! Mind blown!!! Iceland hadn't really been on my travel radar in any serious fashion, but now it really is!!!

I didn't get a chance to finish this post off the day I started it, so some of the references to yesterday and such aren't going to come out exactly right, unless you time travel with me.

The second to the last picture is my mom's ICD implant. Funny thing, all the pictures I took of her showing it off, she's got her eyes closed in. It seems to be suiting her well, but as you can see, it's fairly prominent on her. The heart medicine they've got her on makes her "woozy", but she's getting her strength back, walking around the neighborhood and the park and stuff. The burn on her leg is getting better, but it remains a pretty serious burn. Third degree, it was.

Today I wore a shirt I got from my parents for Christmas for the first time. It's a tie-dye look, but with incredibly vivid colors, and a picture on the front of a smurf (Brainy) sitting on top of a bunch of mushrooms with spots & stars whirling around his head. I call him mind expandy smurf. It got a lot of comments, somewhere around 18, and everyone really liked it.

As always, I'm sure I'm leaving out more than I can remember.

Oh yea, the second picture scan!!! It's just a piece of paper I found with some weird doodles on it.

DropShip Like it's Hot!!!

I had meant to include this one in last night's post, even to the point of expressly posing these pictures before I did, but then completely spaced. That's OK, give me a chance to get a jump on starting this year off. Besides, I think the last post had plenty going on.

This was one of the items high on my younger boys' wish list, the Mega Bloks UNSC Pelican Dropship from the Halo series. Not only is it pretty massive, it's pretty cool and pretty detailed.

Of course, I ended up being the one doing most of the construction. Lego does a much better job of organizing the parts, and much of the assembly process was akin to a jigsaw puzzle where you spend more time searching for the right piece than doing the assembly.

Unfortunately, I was just getting the sick when we started. Went for an hour or so, and my headache became unbearable. The ticking of the animated clock decoration on the Christmas tree and my wife's application of Rapture perfume were both exacerbating this condition. I showered off, then soaked in a hot tub of water, then went to bed for several hours. Woke up in the middle of the night and did a little more, then went back to bed.

Did a lot more the next day, and wrapped it up on the third. By that point I'd gotten a clue and was building both sides of mirror image parts, that worked out much better.

In other news, yesterday got a shipment of things I'd ordered from Focal Price for Christmas. Didn't think I'd get it in time, and I was right, but that's OK, everyone liked their swag. Bought lasers for all the guys, a green one for the youngest (very intense beam, and it goes through the batteries), a purple one for myself, and a red one for the first born. The red isn't too exciting, I know, but it has a second button that gives the presser an electric shock. Got more headphones for the older, as he seems to go through them. Got an MP3 player for the younger boy, he'd been wanting one, and it seems to be pretty nice and fairly rich featured. Found a nice watch for my wife. Focal Price has some great deals and free shipping from Hong Kong. I've already thought of another order I need to place with them!!!