A Transparent Problem

I mentioned a few posts back that they'd opened a bunch of Ollie's stores around the Houston area. There are now two that I can get to on a regular basis. So, I swung by the other one a little while ago to see what it had. Most of what I saw there was the same as the one I went to before. They did have a Captain America figure that I don't have, though.

I guess this is a comic version of the guy, but he makes me think of the costume he wore at the start of  Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I like to get any Captain America to add to my shelves at the Fourth of July time, so I picked this one up. I was a little disappointed, however. The figure was fine, but apparently, the shield is supposed to be an energy shield or a holo shield or something. So, they made it out of transparent plastic. I think it looks silly.

Particularly the parts that would be white...or possibly silver. Those parts are totally see-through, clear plastic, and it just barely even looks like Captain America. You couldn't really tell that was what you were getting from the box. It looks like a normal shield.

Maybe slightly transparent, but that stripe and star are freaking white as can be. I guess This is another reason to hate the closed box packaging. I wouldn't have been clueless about the shield if I could see it through the plastic window. Though I probably would have bought it anyway. It's Captain America. I get any that I can for my Fourth of July shelf, so I'm gonna get this one too.

Startle

I've been doing this thing at work for a while where I go for a short walk every thirty minutes to keep myself active and healthy. I was watching a show on YouTube, and a doctor said that they'd done a study on it, and they found that you got more out of a walk if it was broken up throughout the day than you did if you did it all at once. I guess, remaining sedentary for long periods of time is bad for the body.

So, I set a timer on my phone to go off every half hour, and when it would ring, I'd get up and walk around for a couple of minutes. Usually, I'd go outside and take a lap of the parking lot...but there's only certain times of year that such a practice is feasible in Houston. I actually went a few months without doing my walks at all, because it got so hot when summer came along that I couldn't handle it. I would get so sweaty, and I didn't want to be smelling like a locker room at work or something.

Then I realized that I could just walk indoors. Our building is pretty big, I could just take loops around the hallways inside the building. I've been doing a lot of that for the last few months. Sometimes, I'll head outside and do the parking lot still if it's an exceptionally nice day (which is rare) or maybe after dark when the heat retreats a little (though the humidity keeps those rare too), but mostly I stay indoors.

One of my favorite spots to go indoors is the office where the sales folks are. It's one giant room with a bunch of cubicle-like desks in the middle. I can go there and cruise the perimeter of it at a pretty high rate of speed and get in a lot of steps. I don't like going there when there's people there, though. I don't know anybody in sales. Their job and mine do not co-mingle. I work to make the product that they work to sell, but we don't work together in any way, so we are not even acquaintances much less friends. I always wait until all of them have gone home for the night...which happens pretty early most days...and then I'll cruise their empty office.

Recently, however, I've been caught off guard by a few of them a couple of times. I thought the room was empty, but there was one straggler left, and their head was hidden behind their monitor, so I didn't see them there. I went in, started walking, then found someone still at their desk, and felt like a creep for walking through their office uninvited while they were still around. I hurried back out of the office and waited until it was fully empty to come back again.

I check better now. Now that I've been caught more than once by a straggler, I make sure that there is no one left before I go in there, and if anybody still remains, I casually walk through the office and down the hall to the other office that is connected to it like I always meant to go there in the first place.

Just the other day, though, they decorated the office for Halloween. These guys went all out. There's several fake severed limbs in places, ghoulish heads hanging from windows, and so on. There's not a single group of desks that doesn't have some kind of decorations. Two of them in particular keep giving me problems, though. First, there's this guy:

He's a cute little skeleton that looks like he died at his desk or something. It's kind of funny, and I don't have any problems with it. It's not like it scares me...but it does give me a start sometimes. They've put him in a chair that is a good place for me to miss as I come in the office. I walk in, see that nobody is there and think, "Okay, I'm safe to walk in here without seeming like a weirdo," and then I go around the corner of desks, look up, and there the guy is. Pretty much every time, I've been fooled into thinking that there was someone that I missed and I get a quick shot of nervousness and embarrassment before I realize that it's just the skeleton decoration.

Then there's this guy:

He's hanging from a coat rack in the corner by the printer. It's the same deal with him. I think I'm safe, I walk around the office in a half circle, and when I turn back toward the side I came in on, I catch a glimpse of this humanoid thing standing in the corner, and I think, "Oh, crap, there was one more person that I didn't see, and now they're wondering what this weirdo is up to walking around their office when he doesn't belong here." Again, it's just a momentary shock before I figure out what is actually going on, but it happens again and again.

The rest of the Halloween season is going to be a bit of a pain. I bet they'll just replace them with Santa Clauses or something, and it'll be the rest of the year even!

Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | A Bad Attitude And A Bad Weekend | Week 70 Roundup

How much can a bad attitude combined with a weekend of travel away from home screw up my attempts at going to One-derland? Well, let's just say that neither one helped much, that's for sure.

Halloween Decorations Post #5

Okay, today I figured I'd just show you the goofy alterations I made to my normal toys to turn them into decorations. A while back, my wife found these little plastic skulls at the dollar store. She thought it would be a cute decoration to get a carafe and stuff it full of those skulls. She did so, but had several skulls left over. She was going to throw them out, but I thought I might be able to put them to use. This is what I did:

Yeah, that's a 12-inch scale Spider-man with his head swapped out for that dollar store skull. I tried to come up with goofy new nicknames for all the super heroes that I did this to, but never did get a good one for Spider-man. The Skull-et Spider was the best one I came up with.

This one is better though. Here is Skullbuster:

I actually made a second Skullbuster this year. Check this guy out:

In this case, the skull looks a little closer to the proper size...maybe even a little small.

Then there's Skull Cap:

And Iron Skull:

This one is a new edition. Not sure about a name for him too...maybe Optimus Skull?

He was hard. The neck post for Optimus wasn't in the right place. I had to secure the head to his body using sticky tack to get it in the right place. The slightest jiggle would probably knock it loose.

That's it for those...but there's one more category like them that I figured I'd highlight. When I got my Mythic Legions skeleton figures, some of them came with extra heads. I've used them to spooky up a couple of my regular everyday figures. Like the GI Joe team. They look a lot more holiday-related when led by this guy, right?

And this Biker Scout looks cooler with his helmet off, so we can see the skull that lies beneath...

I ought to mention the bendy vampire guy I have there next to him. I got him a while back, and was impressed, considering the simplicity the figure should have had, but didn't.

I do have two other extra skulls, but they are spoken for now. They belong on the zombie astronauts that I turned Deo and Siona into...I put their picture in the last post, but I guess I can post it again, so you know what I mean. They're the zombies in the back.

Okay, that's it for now. Getting close to showing you all of it. I'll be back for more soon. See you then.

More Of Those People

When my daughter got her Cricut machine a few years ago, she had a pretty distinct purpose to fulfill with it, but as time went by, she learned more and more about the other things she could do with it as well. There are so many things you can do with vinyl. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon we could start cutting our own records using the thing and become a world famous band...oh, wait, people don't do bands anymore. It's just idiots with no talent singing like they're the winner of the voice and then processing the hell out of their music until it sounds nothing like themselves to make it listenable. Maybe not.

Anyway, one of the things my daughter discovered is that you can make window stickers using her machine. She wanted to try it out, so she asked me if there was something I'd want to put on my window. Maybe a Minnesota Vikings sticker? 

I guess I could try that, so I sent her a logo and she made me a sticker. It looked amazing, exactly like a sticker I'd pay handsomely at a sports store to be able to own. I stuck it on my truck and started driving around with it. My daughter made a few more stickers for my wife and for my other daughter, ones that she'd even designed herself. Soon, we all had a sticker on our cars that she'd created.

Unfortunately, the stickers didn't handle the weather very well. They were printed off a computer, and the color began fading out pretty quickly. It only took a few weeks for my Vikings logo to become a plain white sticker in the outline of a Vikings logo. That happened to all the other stickers she'd created as well. We had to peel them off and call the experiment a failure.

Fast forward to very recently, when I decided to turn my truck into one of those trucks that is covered with window stickers. I talked about how I'd become one of those people in a blog post a week ago if you want to know the whole story there. After taking that leap, but being thwarted by the proliferation of oddly oversized window stickers on Temu, I started thinking of other inexpensive ways to go about it.

I noticed that somebody I work with has a sticker for Yosemite National Park on their Jeep that was just a one color thing. It was a white sticker, and the rest was negative space, that became the black of the tinted window. It looked pretty good, and I wondered if my daughter could do something like that. After all, she'd already made me several national park shirts using designs we'd found on the internet that were just like this—one color designs using the color of the shirt as the accent color. She could probably use one of those pre-made designs and print a sticker out.

She sure could, and in no time, I had a new sticker.

It might have been better had it been in a light green, but we didn't have that color of vinyl. This sticker cost us absolutely nothing to make, so it was an upgrade from the ones that I'd paid for last time and then discovered they were just way too big.

Asking my daughter to do this for me, however, got her mind going. Ever since the original failure of the Vikings sticker, she'd been brooding ever so slightly. She didn't like to lose. There had to be a way to make it work. She'd heard that if you laminated the stickers, then the colors wouldn't run off, and when I asked her to make a window sticker for me, she was motivated to give it a try. She ordered some laminate sheets from Amazon...which negated the whole we-didn't-pay-anything-for-the-Everglades-sticker thing. It led us to blow money elsewhere, so we paid in the end.

My daughter told me she going to try the laminate stickers now, and this got me thinking about what kind of sticker I could have her make for me. I sat down and messed around with stuff I could find on the internet, combining things until I came up with this design for a Muir Woods sticker, a place that I've visited several times over the years, but most recently back in 2018. 

I was still in the one-color vinyl line of thinking though. I wanted to make something that we could print out that way if we had to. My daughter had moved on. She wasn't going to make a simple one color design. She asked me if I liked this new version of my design she'd done for me with a gradient that made the trees more tree like.

I had to admit that it looked pretty darn good. She printed the sticker, did the lamination thing, and that night, I had a new window sticker waiting for me on my keyboard. I put it on my truck the next morning, and here's how it turned out:

I have to say, as a creative person, that there's nothing better than seeing your own ideas go from an inspiration to a physical manifestation like they can in this modern day and age. That goes for stickers like this to my stories and novels too. It's just so amazing what we can do now.

Of course, you can expect me to go overboard, and have my whole window filled with stickers in no time. If I can make my own, then of course I will. I think I'll start by having her make some of those stickers that I got from Temu in sizes that are way too big. We'll remake those in sizes that are more appropriate.

From there, the sky's the limit...

My First Patreon Address

I just put up my first Patreon Address over on Patreon.

It's my first time doing this. Rish Outfield and Marshal Latham have been doing them for a while and I thought I ought to take their example and make a Patreon Address as well. In this, I talk about my goals for the year, month, and even day that I have set for myself, and how well I have achieved them. If that kind of stuff interests you, then check it out and see how it's going.

I'll put this first one onto the normal feed in a week so that people who don't subscribe to Patreon will know that it exists, but next time around, this will be a total Patreon exclusive.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

Check it out over on Patron!

To go along with it, I figure I ought to post my charts for the last month to give you a visual guide that you can follow along with while listening, if you want to. Here's my September writing totals:

 

Here's the total for the year to date:

Here's the charts for the year to date...I suspect you'll have to zoom in on those to see what anything on them says, but then again, maybe your eyes aren't as bad as mine have become in the last few years.

Maybe those pics were unnecessary, but I figured I'd include them if for nothing else than that I like to have records of everything on the blog for my future curiosity. Every now and then I like to go back and refresh my memory about when and how these things improved and so forth.

Anklecast 71 - Undo (Part Two) Available For All

The new episode of the Anklecast is up and available for all.

Ronnie acquired a magical stopwatch that can reverse time for one minute every time he presses the extra button. What could he do with that? Well, a great deal of things. We saw many of them in part one of the story. Now, where will he go with it? Let's find out in part two. Enjoy the finale of "Undo."

Afterward, Rish and I talk about several things regarding the story, including why I even bothered to release it, and why I changed one line and had him re-do it before putting part two out.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

You can find the show on the usual feed, or you can right click HERE to download the story yourself. Then again, you could just click the play button below and get it that way. It's all up to you, I guess. We're all about choice here on The Anklecast.