Weekend Update

It’s been a fairly busy couple of weeks. This will be a mixed bag of things for this post. I’ll cover a little bit of the May build gathering over at Funaka’s house, my Memorial Day weekend trip out to Arizona, the recent addition of another corgi to my family, and some Anime Expo 2011 updates.

So the last few weeks have been fairly busy for me; hence the lack of updates, both model building related and personal. I had a week of class I was attending that was work related and a couple of weeks of an intense work schedule. I didn’t even get to post up about the May build gathering over at Funaka’s. I had taken pictures, but had to come and go at various moments. Funaka had a full house, I think it was probably the largest gathering at his place to date. Even Nicky started working on a resin kit, which she technically started at an earlier time. More work on the GMs was done and we planned out our project base. We should be ready to start working on the bases at the next gathering. We also took some shots out of a HGUC sized bottle of Petron towards the end of the evening.

This past weekend, a group of up headed out to Arizona, just across the river from Needles Calif. for some fun on quads, on a boat on the Colorado River, and shooting some guns. The first few days was up in the high 90’s to low 100s; perfect weather for enjoying the river. Yuki and I brought Hugo, Beanie, and Duke along with us to AZ. To prep Beanie for the car ride, we took the three corgi’s out for a mile long walk that tired Beanie enough that he could relax a bit during the 3 and a half hour trip. Having gotten to AZ earlier, Dave, Erin, Yuki and I went to the local theater to catch the Hangover II. The little teens and everyone just saying hi to one another just reminded me of my old Air Force days of small towns and everyone knowing everyone. Little groups of people going out invariably turns into a massive greet session, as if seeing one another around town wasn’t enough. The movie was entertaining at least – well within my expectations. The rest of the weekend crew showed up a short while after we got out of the movie.

We got up the next morning and make breakfast, then headed out to the river with the boat and the dogs. It was fairly crowded since it was a long weekend. The trip out to our spot took about an hour. Hugo doesn’t care much for the boat ride. He didn’t care much for being on the boat, but seemed to enjoy the trip back up the river at the end of the day. Beanie and Duke were ok. We got to a nice little spot and tied off. The water was damn cold, but felt really good and it was fairly easy to adjust to the temperature. Nicky ended up losing her engagement ring as well as her wedding band. Last time she helped Angel lose his glasses. Guess the river really has something against her. And like Angel’s glasses, we spent some time trying to search the muddy bottom without any luck. Again, had I brought the scuba gear… then again, it’s a friggin river, why would I scuba dive it? Then again, next time we come out, I will definitely bring the equipment.

We were in a beautiful canyon area. Right where we tied off, there were reeds and small blue dragon flies hanging out. A very relaxing site.

I grabbed Beanie and put him into the river, he swims around but I can tell he’s a bit anxious. So I put him back onto the boat. I do the same with Duke and he’s ok. While he’s on the boat, I call out to Duke and surprisingly, he jumps into the water and swims around before be put him back into the boat. After jumping in a few time, Beanie makes his first jump into the water and swims out to us and back to the boat. He does this several times and is quite comfortable in the water. Damn fast swimmer too. And then there was Hugo who was no where to be seen as he’s just laying down in the middle of the boat, refusing to even look around beyond the boat’s boundaries. Poor Hugo, then again, he was the only dry corgi.

Being out in the sun burnt the crap out of my back, arms, face, and knees. We headed back up river and made a few stops for gas and checked out some of the crowded areas. While Dave went to get the SUV to the loading ramp, I drove the boat to get it ready for hitching back up. Dave puts the trailer into the water and I head in but miss aligning the boat, so I put the thing into reverse to try realigning it. Unfortunately, this is when the line that controls the reverse and forward function breaks so I’m stuck going around in circles, in reverse, with other boaters watching and waiting for us to figure out our shit so that they could get their boats out of the river. Fun times. But we get things settled and then headed back to the house, made dinner and several people crashed out before 10pm.

The next morning we woke up and had brunch. Then headed out in the two quads and the SUV loaded full of guns and ammo. We set up some targets, some old model kits and bottles, lined up and fired away. as .45, .38 special, .22, 357 Mag, and shot gun got some action. Nicky tries out the quad, but gives up around a small little loop. Yuki rode around in it the previous day and was more interested in taking pictures of us shooting things. I did get Yuki to fire the .22.

Having gotten my fill of gunpowder residue on my hands, I suited up and headed out in the quad. I got up one of the close up hills and just rode around and then the thing died. And I wasn’t able to start it up. At least I was up hill. I coasted the sucker down and only had to push the sucker up a small hill to get to the final long slope down. Leaving the quad in the middle of the road, I headed back to where everyone else was. Once done, we drove out to where I left the quad, only about 500 or so feet away. The started was fried. First the boat, now the quad. I need to stop touching the fun things. Dave grabbed some cables from the SUV and we tied the quad up in a decent tow rig. I climbed on and enjoyed the dusty ride back to the house, hand hovering the break to make sure I and the quad didn’t go slamming into the back of the SUV at any given moment. But it was fun.

The rest of the day was spent hanging out at the house watching movies and everyone getting drunk off their asses. Nicky gets quite touchy-feely while drunk. Highly entertaining. Fun to see both Angel and Nicky drunk at the same time. Even more fun to see Nicky passed out on the bathroom floor.

So that was the excitement of my Memorial day weekend. Work was normal, a little busy, but then I got an email from a girl that I had met at AX. Her sister is an excellent modeler and usually wins at the AX model competition. A year ago or so, they asked if I could recommend a corgi breeder as they were looking for a boy. Well, this time, the email was about a litter they just had of AKC Corgi pups. They wanted me to forward their ad and contact information to people that may potentially want a little corgi. Yuki gets an interest so I tell her to call and set up an appointment. The earliest appoint was Wednesday evening, so last night, we drove out to one of the sisters’ houses to check out the pups. And when we left, they were short one corgi pup and us, plus 1 tri corgi.

Ok, enough of that. Now for some updates for Anime Expo 2011. The model contest is on, and the information for the model contest is here: http://www.anime-expo.org/programming/model-contest/

I’m also set for presenting a Gundam Model Building Seminar. The information for that is here:
Date: 7-2-2011
Time: 10:00PM
Room: WS 1
Duration: 01:50:00

This is the first time for such a late time slot, so this should be interesting.

And of course, there is the Bandai World Cup US Preliminary Contest: http://www.bluefincorp.com/catalog/bandai-gunpla-model-kit-world-cup-2011-us-championship