Three years later...

I hadn't realized it had been [i]quite[/i] this long since my last post! But oh well, can't do anything about that beyond attempting to do a little better this time around. We'll have to see how that goes, lol. Anyhow, I thought I'd share a little of what I've been doing lately. :) Most of the art I do is little icons like so:

Those are actually the working size believe it or not - the actual icons are only half that size which makes it a little tricky since if you do too much detail it all melts into a mess at the smaller size, but too little detail just looks sad, lol. Some of these are "wearable" items and also have overlay versions that can be combined with other items to dress up an avatar for a variety of looks such as this:

 

 Anyway, so that's what I usually do.  However, since the site is hosting a special event I got the chance to do something a bit different and have spent the last month or so working on art for a game! It's been a HUGE learning experience for me and there's a lot of things I wish I'd known beforehand but eh, now I know for next time. :)

 I was hoping there would be a way I could link to the game here and you guys could give it a try but apparently that won't work and since I doubt you want to join up on the site and complete a whole list of tasks in order to gain access (at the moment it's kind of part of a series of quests that have to be completed in order) I just did a screen recording of the gameplay so you could see how it all fits together.

Everything except for the text on the screen was done by me although one of the other artists helped me out with the designs for the pirate ships and the player planes (since what I came up with was kind of boring and I hated them.). The end result isn't quite as cool as I'd hoped for since the idea was that it would be a racing game and semi-3d and there were going to be fun effects for when things hit the road and you'd have to avoid them while racing the other player planes. Buuuuut as I found out after finishing 95% of the art for all that, apparently our programmers can't put everything together quite like that. At least not in the amount of time they had to do it in.  So that was really really sad. There was a bit where it sounded like it wasn't going to work at all and everything would just have be scrapped but after throwing some ideas around it wound up turning into more of a "dodge the stuff falling from above" type game. So, not as exciting as it was meant to be, but oh well. I'm just glad that most of the art got used in the end even if it did lose some of my favorite bits.

Why is it I can't post without adding pictures?

After searching through a gazillion different colors, we thought we'd found one that would work well for our basement and it did--during the daylight hours. Nice cheerful color, eh?

The catch is that it only looks like that with sunlight--add in artificial light and it turns a sickly greenish shade that was just a tad scary. So lucky us, we got to go back to the drawing board and start all over again. I think we found a better color this time around and I didn't hate it when we finished so that's a hopeful sign, lol.

This last week a snowstorm came through and gave us some gorgeous snow. The downside is that it took Seth four hours on the bus to make it home that day. Poor Seth. :( But he did get the next day and a half off so that helped a little to make up for it. It was kind of crazy with downed trees across the roads and power outages in the area but we didn't run into any major problems and I think most of the people in our ward survived without too much difficulty.

And a pic of our house covered in snow a few days after it fell. It stuck around for a good four days I think.

After a suspicious start, Cuda decided that she liked eating snow and had a blast sliding around on her belly chomping it up like a canine snowplow. :P


While it was freezing out, I got in some good time on the bookmarks I've been trying to get done before Christmas. I think these ones came out pretty well but show that I've got to find a way to get them done faster since I've got a LOT more to get done before the holidays. :D

Remember when . . .

. . . I actually posted on here every once in a while? I 'm working on resurrecting that idea. Um, for anyone who didn't know, we were going to be headed to Virginia for a few months but scheduling changes at the shipyard there changed everything around so it looks like we'll be sticking around home. Which is probably a good thing given the predicted rainfall for the winter--the thought of potentially coming home to a flooded house wasn't exactly exciting. Beyond that I don't think we've got any big news items, so instead I'll just share a sampling of the very few pictures we've taken over the last few months.

First off we have our new wood insert! Now we can have a fire without filling our entire house with smoke, yay! Plus it keeps the house warm enough that I can now get by with just a long sleeve shirt instead of having to stay bundled up in a blanket which is WONDERFUL. It even looks reasonably nice. Unfortunately, we failed to realize that it would not cover over the unpainted sections of the brick which will be a bit harder to fix with the insert in place. Still, it's awfully nice to have it in so all in all I think we're okay with it for the moment.

And here we have a pic from our trip to Crater Lake. Despite living fairly close, I somehow managed to miss actually going to Crater Lake. I did once see it while hiking--does that count? Yeah, I didn't think so. :P Anyhow, now I can say I've actually been to the lake. Seth was having fun with the camera and took all the pics so I don't have a good picture of him to post here so you're stuck with one of me.
I do how ever have some fun picture of him down here. :D This one's from his epic adventures with cinnamon roles. Realizing halfway through a recipe that it makes 4-6x more than what you were expecting can result in unexpected difficulties. In this case, we simply ran out of things to do with the dough. I think we wound up with three pans of cinnimon roles, two loaves of bread, and there was still dough left over in the bowl but we were out of pans and it wound up in the trash which was sad. It did make for a good lesson in reading through recipes before starting them though. :)

Oh, and this one was from the gift shop at Crater Lake. You can't see it too well but he's got a bear hat on--think mickey mouse hat complete with ears but with a bear face instead and that's essentially it--that was just a few sizes too small for him. Cute, huh?

We also spent a little time over in Newport with Mary and Darrel hanging out at the coast which was unsurprisingly windy but was awesome 'cause I got to see Mary again. :D
Also got a nice picture while we were there of Pirate Seth.
Jumping back to what's going on currently . . . well, our dog has a growth on her face. It's pretty hard to miss. According to the vet it's probably a benign growth that should clear up sometime in the next three months or so. In the meantime, it's kind of odd and disturbing to look at. Happily, she doesn't seem too bothered by it although I occasionally catch her licking her lips with a puzzled expression.

And then there's Zuko. Once upon a time he was a happy betta. Now . . . we have no idea what is going on with this fish. He's been slowly swelling up like a balloon over the last few months and just keeps getting bigger and bigger. At this point he looks like he's about to explode which is just a tad disturbing to think about. I'm reasonably certain that fish aren't meant to expand this much. Today, I realized that you can now look THROUGH his expanded stomach and make out shapes/colors on the other side of him. Again, disturbing to think about. I don't know if it's air or water or what but despite his ridiculously swollen shape, Zuko doesn't seem realize anything's wrong. He still thinks he's king of the tank and chases the shark around a couple times a day. Go figure.

So it was decreed from on high that I would write in our blog again, so here I am :P I'm about a month away from finishing my program, and then I will finally be a real nuclear engineer! I've passed the two major exams, and now all I have to do is pass an oral examination. For this they get together a panel of about 7 people. This panel will consist of my future boss, his boss, his bosses boss, his bosses bosses boss, and the heads of three additional organizations. Just a little bit intimidating. But once that's over, then I'll finally be done with school!!

In other news, Char and I just got back from our first vacation since Christmas. We did the tour de Oregon, finishing up the trip at Crater Lake. That is a pretty cool place for those of you who haven't been. We've also finally gotten started on our remodel of the basement. It had flooded before we got the place, and there's some damage that needs to be repaired, and flooring needs to be put in. We're hoping to get it done in time for winter. Well, at least have the wood burning stove in by then. That way Char can keep the place at 95 degrees and we won't have to pay a zillion dollars for electricity :)

Quick update

Okay, now that I'm about 3 months behind on blogging, I've decided it's time to get this all up to date again. So, what has been going on in our life lately?

1. We have callings! Seth is now the Elders Quorum President, while I've been recruited to act as the Ward Camp Specialist and Primary Secretary. So church is keeping us pretty busy these days.

2. Lots and lots of work for Seth. :( He's got some pretty big tests coming up at work so he's been putting in crazy long days at the shipyard. On the bright side, they've got a ping pong table and a swimming pool he gets to enjoy on his breaks . . . okay, it's not a HUGE bright point but every little thing helps, right?

3. We gave in and signed up for netflixs, only to discover that we're rather out of the loop about what good movies have come out lately--any suggestions? :D

4. After a year of storage, we finally got the fishtank set up. So far we've only lost one fish, but there were also two snails and a couple of "aquatic" plants that didn't make it. As a note, never trust petco for aquarium plants. I was feeling whimsical and bought a few only to look them up later and discover that nearly all of them were not water plants and would eventually die. Which they did. On the other hand, the plant I got from our tiny local pet store is growing like crazy! Hopefully it's growth will cover over the space left from the others. :-/

5. Left Cuda at home while we went down for Mary J.'s wedding and she didn't eat the neighbor girl who was watching her. Or even traumatize her too much. :) The wedding was fun and Mary looked amazing! Alex came out to do pictures for her wedding and it was awesome to see him too. :)

6. I put together a fundraiser for the girls in our ward which was . . . odd. I'm not used to being in a position of power, lol, added to which I'd never heard of girls camp fundraisers until we moved up here so the very idea seems slightly strange to me. I think it's great for the girls to put some work into going to camp so the idea makes sense to me--some of the details and restrictions not so much. Anyways, our service auction made about 2/3s of what we needed which I thought was pretty good all things considered, but we did have a few problems that cropped up that we'll need to adjust for next year if we do this again.

7. Seth mowed the lawn! Okay, maybe it doesn't seem like that deserves an exclamation mark, but once you realize that the lawn hadn't been mowed since we moved in it becomes a much bigger deal. Cuda does her best to eat the grass down but we seriously had a jungle in our yard. As in, Seth told me about a baby bird that fell into our yard and he couldn't find it because it was hiding in the grass.

8. Oh, and then there's the death of my laptop. :( Apparently pulling on the cord is a no no--Seth chopped up the cord and rigged it so it kind of works now but it's pretty crazy. However, since it's been getting increasingly quirky to the point of annoyance, I now have a new desktop mac that I'm loving. The only downside so far is that it doesn't fit in my desk so at some point (probably around the some day when we get the downstairs fixed up) I'll have to find a different desk. In the meantime, it's living on our dinning table which is just a tad odd.

9. Seth actually likes our dog. Let's be honest here, he wasn't a huge fan of the dog idea initially and had some valid concerns about it. Now . . . well, sometime here I'll have to get video of them playing when he comes home from work. It's pretty hilarious. And there there was the time we were watching a movie together and he switched from the couch to the floor to be next to the dog because Cuda was giving him sad eyes (and had been for the last 20 minutes to be fair. And she's pretty amazing at doing the sad puppy dog eyes). Need I say more? :P

10. Hmm, well, I feel like there should be a ten . . . ah, Seth finally got the garage cleaned up enough to get started on building his workbench. He's fairly excited about it and has been working on it in the bits of spare time he has these days and it's coming along pretty nicely.

Well, I think this covers at least a good portion of what's been going on. I'm probably forgetting at least one or two things that should be on here but since I'm going to be better about updating for at least the next while, lol, maybe I'll catch them next time.

The door

Our bedroom has technically had a door since we moved in. Sure, it was only primered and not painted, and no, it didn't have a doorknob, and yeah, it wasn't hung right so it didn't actually close all the way but hey, that didn't matter because of everything else, right? Last week, Seth took down the door to paint it. Which was exciting 'cause hey, who doesn't like having doors? Unfortunately, it also opened up our doorway to Cuda. Every night for the last week our bedtime schedule has gone like this:

Turn off the lights, put up the baby gate in the kitchen doorway, get Cuda lying on her bed, and we go back to our room.

*jingling sound*

We exchange looks.

*more jingling sounds*

We look over at our doorway.

Cuda is now standing in our doorway looking at us pleadingly.

We (well, one of us at least) get up, and chase her back down the hallway to her bed.

Leave her lying on her bed and go back to our bed.

Get nice and comfy.

*jingling sound*

. . .

Anyways, so it was really exciting that yesterday the door was done. The paint was good, Seth got it hung up properly so it didn't rub the frame the way it was before, we got the doorknob attached without too much trouble . . . things were looking good. And then we tried to close it.

Turns out the latch hole thingy in the frame is in the wrong spot. It's about a 1/4" too high for the door to latch. :( Go figure.

Still, having the door back on the hinges has cut down on the number of visitations by Cuda at night, lol.

The things you learn . . .

So, since we acquired Cuda (pics of her are here) I've been doing a little more vacuuming than normal. Make that a LOT more vacuuming. I think our carpets are actually cleaner now with a dog living on them than they were before. Sad, I know, but I'm trying to be honest here.

The other day I noticed the vacuum just didn't seem to be working quite as well as it should be, so I of course called up Seth who said it was probably the filter. Sounds reasonable, right? Today, I took out the filter. Wish I'd taken pictures of it because it was awesomely filthy. So, while I'm standing in the kitchen with a trash can and this big plastic filter thingy that I'm not entirely sure how to clean, I notice the little sticker on the vacuum, the one that has the directions for how to take the filter out, did not stop at the point where I did. Inside the plastic filter thing is something that looks an awful lot like the filter I used for my fish tank. Kinda like this.

After a few more minutes of poking, prodding, and twisting, I managed to open up the plastic filter. Inside I found something cylindrical, but otherwise bore no resemblance to the filter in the link. Dark grey, fuzzy, and apparently solid, I 'tapped' it forcefully against the side of the trash can as the sticker instructed, which resulted in a dust cloud rising from the trash, and not much else. Being the resourceful person I am, I thought 'hey, how about a lint roller?' and tried using that to peel some of the fuzz off the filter. It worked better than you would think, but only for about two minutes, at which point all the surface fuzz was gone, and then it was next to useless. On the bright side, I could now make out where all the little ridges were, even if they were still flush with all the dirt and fuzzy lint packed into them. I then proceeded to find a pair of tweezers, and run them down every little v in the filter to clear out the fuzzy dirt. Time consuming, but rather effective.

Happily, I can now say that our vacuum filter is now a somewhat whitish color and the vacuum is doing well. :) The sad part here is that we've had our vacuum for about a year and a half and I didn't even know that filter was in there until today . . . who would have though you'd need to clean it out? lol