Swift Display

I remembered to bring my camera today, so I dragged JD over to Building 7 to look at the new Swift display that I put together. It’s supposed to be a light box display, but I hadn’t been able to figure out how to turn the lights on.

The display is on a walkway around a high bay area, on the second floor. We followed the wires from the display down the wall under the walkway. To figure out where it went from there, we went downstairs, and followed them straight into a wall. Oops. JD counted the steps to the door so that we could try to figure out which room the cords went into from the hallway outside of the high bay. Unfortunately, they went into a closed room, since this wasn’t our building, we didn’t feel like we could just walk in.

Someone in the hall suggested that we talk to the facilities manager in the building. Well, that would be too easy, plus we didn’t know his name. Fortunately this random person did know his name, and we went to hunt John down. (Actually, his office was right across from the room where the wires disappears…convenient.)

Sadly, John didn’t know how to turn the light boxes on, either. He led us into the room where the cords disappeared, and at the other end of the cords, we found a plethora of circuit breakers. Of course, none of them were labeled.

John did claim to know someone who would know how to turn on the boxes, but was unable to find him. I took a few pictures of the display, anyhow, since the display is bright enough to see without the lights on (unlike the Cobe display that preceeded it).

John called me later in the afternoon to tell me that he’d found out how to turn them on. Sixteen new light bulbs ought to do it. Apparently, they are always on.

Here’s the whole display:

Panels #1 and 2

Panels #3 and 4

Panels #5 and 6

Panels #7 and 8

Naughty kitten

I heard a creaking in the hall behind me as I was working from home this afternoon….

…and this is what I saw when I went to investigate.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

3/5 stars

Typical Terminator movie. Not much else to say.

Blanket Bears Aplenty

About a year and a half ago, my brother showed me a blanket bear that his mother-in-law had bought for my niece. He asked if I could make her another one, because she had become so attached to it, they were worried about what would happen if something happened to the bear. I’ve since made her two more, so she has three, and she’s very attached to both of them.

Once, when my sister-in-law and niece were at a small shop in Bloomington, MN (where I grew up), the owner asked where they had gotten the bear. She told my sister-in-law that if I ever wanted to sell them, that she would happily buy some.

Well, I decided not to do that — it takes too much time to make the bears for me to make any actual money. Instead, I will stick to making them for friends and family. To that end, I finished three this weekend — one for my friend Melissa’s best friend, one for my aunt’s daughter-in-law, and one for the next member of the Mattson clan. Here’s a picture of them:

I have three more that I’m making for another friend. I’ll post pictures when I’m done with those, too.

The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert

2/5 stars

Actually, this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but that might have been because I was sewing while watching the movie. I can imagine that if I had to actually sit and pay attention through the whole thing, I would have enjoyed it less.

Mitzi, a drag queen, discovers that his ex-wife needs his help. So he and two friends, Bernadette and Felicia, head across the desert to Alice Springs (Australia), to put on a show at her hotel. I was distracted, though, because Mitzi is played by Hugo Weaving, the same actor who played Agent Smith in the Matrix movies and Elrond in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I can imagine that the next time I watch The Matrix, I’ll be picturing Agent Smith in drag.

DC’s Big Flea

I went the the DC Big Flea Market at the Dulles Expo Center today. I was expecting a flea market — mostly filled with other people’s junk where it takes a bit to scour through the booths and actually find something you like. Instead, I found what would be called an antique sale in Minnesota — what fun! (Here, in Virginia, it seems that an antique sale has to be hoity-toity stuff that no one actually buys.)

The flea market took up both of the buildings, which means it was HUGE! I found lots of things I could have bought — slide rules at several booths, a Pigs in Space lunch box, Empire Strikes Back thermos (though I don’t have the lunch box yet, so there’s still hope I could get the two together, and a few gifts for family (which I can’t mention, in case they read this).

In the second-to-last aisle, though, I found the piece du resistance. An armillary sphere. Andrew and I have looked at these before, but they are generally prohibitively expensive, so we figured we would have to wait until we were wealthy. I decided to look at the sphere, though, just to see how far out of my budget it was. But it wasn’t! I thought I had to be missing a number, but I wasn’t. I could afford it! Yay! Needless to say, I got it, and here’s a couple pictures:

Lesson 03/03/2004

Not much to say about this lesson. We played part of one of the duets I’ve been working on, but didn’t actually make it through the whole thing — I kept messing up, losing our place, and coming in too late or too early. Ugh.

Cute cats everywhere!