Meet Joey Car James

Joey here will be conveying us around for the next several days.

Speaking of milestones

I give you Joey Car Kristofferson II Green.

The View from my Hotel Window: Denver edition

IMG_5332.JPG

Well, la-di-fuckin’-da, Denver.  I’m not even convinced you exist yet.  On the plus side I’m apparently already The Guy Who Brought Painkillers, so everyone is coming to me for help since the air here isn’t fit for humans to breathe.

Dinner had better be delicious.  I have been up since 5 am and it’s 7:48 my body’s time.  I require something heavily potato- and beef-based, dammit.

Photos from history

I wasn’t able to attend the South Bend march yesterday (stupid job) but my wife was.  She took some pictures.

New sofa!

…same kid.

Another social media account

At the request of my kid’s preschool teacher (no, seriously) I’ve gone back to Instagram.  So follow me; I need friends.  There’s nothing actually there at the moment but eventually there will be.

Long day.  Cannot word at the moment.

What the hell is this?

It’s… growing?  attached to?  a tree near the boy’s day care.  Been there for weeks.

Some random thoughts and also I build a toy

Stayed up last night and livetweeted the convention up to the point where Tim Kaine’s speech finished; I’m always amazed that I don’t have a ton of unfollows during these things, as I tend to tweet a lot when I’m watching anything remotely political.  But no!  Only six people all day yesterday, which is a perfectly normal number.  I ended up liking Tim Kaine more than I thought I would– a thought that I think my Twitter feed shared.  There was a lot of making fun of him going on but it felt affectionate, if that makes any sense, and dude has succeeded in making his stupid Donald Trump impression worm its way into my brain– meaning that every time the idiot says “believe me” again, people are going to hear Kaine doing it.  He’s like Ned Sanders, but with a really sharp knife, the kind where you don’t realize anyone cut you until your head falls off.  I still would have preferred several other options, but I’m starting to think I can get to like this guy.

Anyway it’s my day off and I decided to build the Millennium Falcon.  Legos have gotten fucking complicated, guys.

IMG_4264

That’s a lot of bags.  They are labeled 1-8, but several numbers have more than one bag, some of the bags have other bags inside them, and one bag has no number on it at all.  There’s maybe 12 outer bags.  IMG_4265That is one big-assed instruction manual.  I got through about 90 pages of it before deciding I’d had enough for the morning.

IMG_4266This is the part where I realized I’d screwed up for the first time, as you really need to pay attention to the colors in the instruction manuals and the right pieces were inexplicably in the unlabeled bag.  At any rate, you start by building the superstructure of the thing and I made mine too short.

IMG_4267

There, that’s better.  As it worked out, this was my only big mistake, or at least the only one I’ve noticed so far.  The engineers for these things are crazy people and the people who make the manuals are crazy geniuses.  IMG_4268IMG_4269

Adding the floor.IMG_4270Finishing the first step of the build with some work on the underside.  This is crazily complicated already.  All of this was the first bag, by the way.  IMG_4271On to the second bag.  We’re making progress!  IMG_4272The end of Bag Two, which was mostly furniture and detail stuff.  Also, I got to put in some decals.  IMG_4273

The end of Bag Three.  Which, weirdly, doesn’t look all that different from Bag Two at first, until you look a little closer.  IMG_4275

And here’s the end of Bag Four, putting me halfway through the build.  At this point I realized my eyes were bleeding and decided to be done for a bit.  There are at least two more minifigures in the bags somewhere, because I haven’t found Rey or BB-8 yet.  The first four bags took about two hours, so I’ll probably end up finishing this tomorrow.  Whee!