We were invited to a colleague’s welcome back party on Sunday. People brought their children, and they were all delightful and well-behaved kiddos with over-developed intelligence and the precise amount of rambunctiousness. The kids’ presence meant toys, which also meant bubbles:
And somewhere since then Allie The Black Cat ate the scraps off of my plate:
So things are going about as you’d imagine, which is to say wonderfully busy with nice dashes of color, just for the sake of variety.
And today, despite a busy day at the office I was able to spend the evening, the entirety of it, in fact, working on The Project. You might remember my previous notes on Operation Splinter from this space:
I also wrapped up the first stage of The Project. It needs a better name, but I’m not yet ready to name it, or even discuss it at length. What if it doesn’t work? What if I have to scrap the entire thing? What if it is just terrible? Do I really want to talk publicly about my time machine without knowing how it turns out?
I’ve said too much.
Anyway. The first stage is done. I suppose the true first step was material acquisition. This took place on Friday and Saturday. And then the first stage took place on Saturday and Sunday, and was more taxing than I’d imagined, even as I knew it would be time consuming. By Monday, though, I’d figured out how to to make the process move more quickly, and it did. Only to be slowed down, yesterday, by an equipment failure brought on by user error. So I fixed that issue today and completed the first stage.
Then I performed Operation Clean Up. The first stage took up a half of the garage, and so that ultimately led to reorganizing much of the shelf space in the garage and in bits and pieces these last few days and so even if the time machine it doesn’t work, the effort has been fruitful.
That was two weeks ago. Well, this evening I was able to do a considerable amount of the work involved in stage two of The Project. See, in order to build this rocket ship I figured the second stage would have three big steps. Tonight the first step — which some combination of common sense and necessity found should be doubled — and the second step were completed.
Now I will have to work on two separate series of precise calibrations — Werner von Braun, help me — so I can complete the third step of stage two. I might also revisit a bit of the second step of this stage. But that part should be easy. I’ll do both of those next Wednesday and then the second stage of The Project will be completed. After that there are only three stages remaining, and two of those will go quickly. This project will be wrapped up in two or three weeks. Huh. I thought it would take longer.
Did I say rocket ship? Ignore that. Just imagine I said something else like … hot air balloon or … post-modern remote controlled pterodactyl model. Yeah. That’s what I’m making. I’m about 12 to 14 hours into a remote controlled pterodactyl.
