Now that we finished the Millenium Falcon, it was time for me and my son to put together his other big Christmas present.
Yup, that's the instruction for the Lego ewok village. Or, I guess I should say, the non-Lego ewok village.
It's a bootleg, and that fact gave us a lot of trouble. It doesn't come packed the same way as the original. Instead, they put the pieces into dozens of little bags grouped by similar piece. It took forever just to open all the bags.
We put all the pieces into a giant Tupperware-type container so that we didn't lose any. Unfortunately, it's going to take us a lot of time searching through the container to find each piece we need. It's going to be a big challenge. Especially considering that there are 1,990 pieces in the set. Look at that container! That's huge, and it's totally full!
My son and I got to work, and by the end of day one, we had one tree and hut finished.
Emboldened by our success from the day before, we worked on the set from basically dawn till dusk the next day and put all 1,990 pieces together for this amazing piece of toy goodness:
I again want to confiscate it and put it on my own shelves. My son might even be down with that, because he's out of shelf space for all the Lego creations he's made over the years...but then again, I'm out of space too. Especially for something as massive as this thing is.
My son's birthday is coming up in just a few weeks, so I'm sure I'll have more pictures of Lego sets that I can share with you.
For Christmas, my kids got me the Captain Carter Marvel Legends figure.
And the corresponding Hydra Stomper Marvel Legends figure to go with it.
I really wanted to put the two of them in that iconic pose that came from the episode where Captain Carter grabs a hand hold on the back of the Hydra Stomper armor and rides there as the suit flies to their next battle.
I needed a stand for the Hydra Stomper to fly on, though. I figured I could make one similar to the ones that I made in one of my old toy videos.
Those stands weren't enough. It was going to take way more posts to hold this big boy up. I got a much bigger base and put three posts in there, and it looks like it's going to work just fine.
I'm going to need to find a big enough space to put it on the shelf, however. The two of them together are bigger than I thought.
The day after I got back from Green Bay was Wednesday. I was at work when my friend that I'd gone on the trip with sent me this text:
I couldn't believe it, but he was serious. He is a teacher, and had to take a Covid test before returning to work, and it came up positive. Maybe it was just in my head, but as soon as I read that text, I started to feel sick.
I'd just finished spending a weekend with the guy, sleeping in the same hotel room, driving in the same car, eating across from each other at the same table. If he had Covid, most likely I did as well.
That night, I found a 24-hour urgent care, and got a test of my own. It came up negative, however, so maybe it was all in my head, though it seemed to have gotten worse the whole day through. I had sinus pressure enough to feel like my head might burst, and my nose was getting pretty stuffy too.
My wife was taking no chances, however. She said that she just couldn't afford to get sick right now, so she insisted that I quarantine myself in my daughter's old room. She's gone off to college, so it was open. I stayed the night up there...and the rest of the week as well.
By the next morning, Thursday, I was most definitely sick. Now everything was wrong with me. I slept most of the morning through, hoping to be able to go to work when I felt better, but I didn't get better. I called my boss, and he told me to set up the work-from-home computer they'd given me months ago for just this eventuality.
It took a lot of effort to get through all of the proclivities of working from home, but eventually I was set up and ready to contribute to the editing of the afternoon news shows. I did my best to contribute, but I felt like absolute garbage the whole time. I was really sick, but they were counting on me to get the show on the air, so I struggled my way through the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, and fever (especially fever) and got my job done.
On Friday, I called in sick. I needed to get some rest if I was going to get better. Covid-19 is supposed to be pretty intense. I've heard that this new omicron is less nasty than the previous variants, but I didn't want to mess around with it. I spent half of the day asleep, and was able to sleep again at my regular bedtime.
I had tested negative before, but my wife told me that the rapid tests aren't as reliable as the PCR tests. She said that I needed to test again to make sure that my results were correct.
The city had opened up a brand new drive-through mega testing center up the way at the community center, so on Saturday morning I went over to test again as soon as it opened. I should have gone a little earlier, because the line was pretty long by the time I got there.
It's hard to see, but that's a line of cars going all the way out of sight. They were pretty efficient, though. It didn't take all that long before I made it to the front of the line.
When I got under that tent roof in the picture, they shoved a cotton swab up my nose and collected a sample. They told me I would get my results in two to three days.
I went back home, and slept for the majority of the day again locked away in my daughter's room. Every now and then, someone would open the door and look in on me to see how I was doing, but they kept away from me for the most part.
There was a big storm coming through Houston on Saturday, however, and I woke up to my phone blaring a tornado warning for my little suburb at about 4:00 in the afternoon. My wife didn't want to let me out, but the second floor is the worst place to be if a tornado strikes, so she told me I'd better come out and come downstairs.
I spent a couple of hours in the living room waiting out the tornado warning and then went back up to my cell in the spare bedroom. Then at 1:00 in the morning, my phone blared out another tornado warning for our suburb, so I went back down and slept on the couch for a few hours before going back up again.
We didn't get hit by any tornadoes, but the whole town was not as lucky as our house was.
That's a house with a gigantic tree on top of it. The storms did that to one of my neighbors not far from our house. We'd lucked out again.
The next morning, Sunday, I was feeling a lot better. I still had some issues, but my body was definitely over the hump. I don't think I got hit with a fever again.
My wife, on the other hand, was coughing and hacking. It looked like my banishment to the spare bedroom was all for naught. She seemed likely to have Covid as well. Even my seventeen-year-old daughter was showing some symptoms. The nine-year-old, however, was not. He probably had it, but was handling it as easily as we've been told kids tend to handle it.
On Monday morning, my wife and daughter went to get tested at the same place I had gone to. We all stayed home from school or work, but my wife and I did our work from home. We waited for our results to come in, and when they finally did, my wife discovered that she had gotten sick as well.
She was positive. I was positive. Strangely, my daughter was not. She came up negative. Probably a false negative, but it didn't matter. She stayed home the whole week anyway, as did we all.
Luckily, none of us got all that sick. I probably had it the worst, and it was only about as bad as a tough flu would have been in ages past. So, we are all doing well, and are about to be able to get back to life again. It will be a pleasure to do so as well. You never appreciate your day to day life until it is taken away from you.
One of the presents my son got for Christmas this year was a big Lego Millennium Falcon. He worked on it for several days. I'd come home from work, and find it one step further along in the construction process. It looked like it was going to be pretty cool.
Then he stalled. Something was wrong, and the thing wasn't going together like it was supposed to. He lost interest and left it, so I finally had to step in and help him figure out what had happened. Somewhere, somehow he'd done a step wrong.
Last night, I struggled my way through the instruction manual, breaking the ship apart and then rebuilding it, but at least it wasn't from the ground up. Most of the hard work was done by my son, I just had to find the spot where things went awry.
It took several hours, and I was up very late, but at last I found it, and fixed it. We finished the rest of it off today, and behold the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
A box arrived in the mail from Rish Outfield today, and I couldn't be happier with what he sent me for Christmas. It's a little late, but it's still sort of the Christmas season.
In fact, in many places in the world, they celebrate the Day of the Wise Kings today, which is when the three wise men were supposed to have arrived to give Jesus the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. So what day is better to be giving gifts?
And I bet I appreciate this gift more than Joseph and Mary did with the myrrh.
Here's a picture of the major things that were in the box:
That's a Fortnite Slushy Soldier sitting on the back of a custom painted tyrannosaurus. The dinosaur is really cool, but I don't think I'll be posing the two together.
The T-Rex will be better suited with a four inch figure riding on it, I think. But I really do want to have something riding it. I think I'd like to see if I can make a saddle for it. It'd be totally rad.
Rish Outfield did a whole blog post about the painting of the toy, and you can head over to check it out if you'd like. Oh, looking at that post, I see that it's not a T-Rex, it's a Metriacanthosaurus. Though the spell checker doesn't believe me that that's even a word.
I really love how it came out. I love the colors. I need to find a good figure to put on it. I'd like to get some kind of four inch knight figure with a big long lance. We'll see what I can come up with for next December.
Oh, you can see one of the Hulkbusters that he found for me in the background. He also got me the tiny metal figure as well.
The other one is a happy meal toy. My son has some of the other figures from the promotion.
My friend is a Green Bay Packers fan and I root for the Minnesota Vikings. Our two teams are in the same division and play each other twice a season. Every year we talk about going to see a game, but we inevitably do nothing about it.
Well, this year, he was determined that things not play out the same way again. When the schedule was announced, my friend bought us tickets for the game in Green Bay, and told me to start planning to attend.
We got flights, hotels, and hoped nothing would go wrong with any cancellations. It wasn't to be, however. Weather and the new Omicron variant were causing too many disruptions to travel for us to get by unscathed.
In my case, it was a big snowstorm hitting Chicago. My flight to Green Bay was supposed to pass through there, but they canceled it instead. My wife managed to find me a different flight that passed through Atlanta instead, and I met up with my friend at midnight on Saturday.
It was snowy, and cold like Antarctica on Sunday morning as we got ready to go to the game.
All the pre-game shows were talking about the fact that the game should be among the all-time top ten coldest NFL games ever. I've always wanted to see Green Bay's Lambeau Field, but I would have been happy to do so in September. I never really felt the need to witness the frozen tundra. That's what we got though.
So, I put on four pairs of pants, a long-sleeve shirt, a wool sweater, a jacket, a coat, several pairs of wool socks, two stocking caps and a hood and off we went to the stadium.
For Christmas, my wife got me a viking stocking cap that came with horns and a beard, and I wore that around as long as I could stand it.
It actually looked pretty great, but to wear it you hang it over your ears, and that got annoying after a while. It spent most of the game down around my neck.
The cold wasn't quite as bad as I suspected that it would be. Probably because of the nearly 80,000 people that were packed in all around us donating their body heat to the air.
My feet hurt most of the night, but I think it was more because of the uncomfortable boots I was wearing than because of the cold.
There were a lot of Vikings fans sitting in our area, so I had a lot of people to commiserate with as the Packers methodically dismantled the Vikings.
The game was never close, and the Vikings didn't even put up the slightest fight. Their starting quarterback had been ruled out because of Covid just a few days before the game, and the second stringer they put in there was absolute garbage, as timid as could be.
I think my friend enjoyed the game, though. Why wouldn't he? His team was in control from beginning to end. As for me, it was a pretty sad way to mark the first time I'd ever seen my favorite team in person. I'm going to have to try to see them again soon so that I can wash the bad taste out of my mouth.
We survived to the end of the game with a little help from a cup of hot chocolate and a jumbo bratwurst, and before we knew it we were back in the car with the heater on full blast heading back to the hotel.
The next day, we came back out to the stadium again, and took a guided tour.
We saw the stadium from way up above.
And right down on the field.
We saw the giant G at the top of the stadium.
And got to walk out the tunnel with fake crowd noise pumped in over speakers for the full effect.
We saw a Super Bowl ring in the club sections.
And the players inducted into the team's hall of fame.
My favorite part of the day was looking at the trophy room at the end of the hall of fame.
The Packers have four Lombardi trophies, and it was really neat to stand right there in their presence.
It's the only chance a Vikings fan will ever get to be in the presence of Lombardi trophies, since we haven't won any and likely never will in my lifetime.
Good thing I'm more a fan of the NFL than I am of the Vikings, so there is still joy to be had from things like this.
As we left the stadium, we were treated to a beautiful sunset.
We got pictures with the giant Vince Lombardi statue in front of the stadium, then bid our final adieu to Lambeau Field.
We had dinner at a place called Hinterland, which is right beside the stadium.
They sat us right beside the fire, which was blazing hot. We had to scoot our chairs away to handle it. It was quite a difference from the night before during the game.
We ran into another issue with our travel plans when we discovered that my friend's flight the next day left at 8:00 AM. We thought it was supposed to leave at 8:00 PM. He wasn't flying out of the Green Bay airport, but instead out of Milwaukee, which was a two hour drive from Green Bay. If things couldn't be changed, he was going to have to leave at 4:00 in the morning to catch his flight.
He was my ride to the Green Bay airport too, which meant I would have to leave with him, and then spend a very, very long time at the airport waiting for my 5:00 PM flight.
Luckily, at about 3:00 in the morning, he finally got through to someone at the airline, and they bumped him to a flight that left at 2:00 PM instead. That made things a lot easier, but I still had a good wait at the airport.
My friend dropped me off at about 10:00 AM, and headed south for Milwaukee. I went to my gate, and found a seat. I didn't have to look hard to find an open one, because I was the only person there. The Green Bay airport is small. It only has two terminals with only six gates a piece.
At 10:00 when I arrived, one of the gates near mine had a flight leaving, but after they cleared out, there were no more flights in terminal B until mine left at 5:00 PM, and yes, I was the only one there waiting for it already.
I was completely alone in there.
I sat by myself for hours, listening to my audiobook as I tried to pass the time.
There was a store that I visited and bought a soda at when I first came in, but when I went back to buy something else, they had pulled down the gate and closed it up. Not only that, but they had done the same at the TSA station. They'd pulled down the gate and closed off the whole terminal, and closed me up inside.
Every now and then, a worker would come through the area, but for the most part I was totally on my own. I found that they had some games at one of the gates.
There was a fooseball table...which did me no good, because that's not a game you can play by yourself.
But they also had a cornhole set up, what we used to call bean bag toss when I was younger...before they established the American Cornhole Association and started broadcasting it on ESPN.
I messed around with the bean bags for a while until it got too boring.
I did appreciate being completely alone, because then I didn't have to wear a mask the entire day through, but otherwise, it was kind of sad and lonely. I bought a lot of stuff from the vending machine to entertain myself with, which wasn't a good idea. Not a lot of healthy food in vending machines.
At last, they opened the TSA station back up, and started letting people through again, and I had to put on my mask as the waiting area filled with people. Eventually we got onto the plane, and I had the best seat in the house. I was assigned to the exit row, which meant I had no seat in front of me, just miles of leg room.
I'm going to have to ask for the exit row every time from now on. I had no idea that such a thing was possible in an airplane.
I flew back through Atlanta, and arrived back in Houston at midnight and my adventure was over. All I can say is that next time, my friend is going to join me in Minnesota instead. They have a roof on their stadium.
