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A good number of folks were on travel for their Thanksgiving Day gatherings with family and stuff. I would have figured that Christmas would be a bigger event. Regardless, another successful gathering. Dan (Funaka) gave a quick little demo for scratch building. I missed it as I think I was cooking. We were sort of short on food, so I’ll have to make a note to folks to bring stuff next time. I didn’t really get an accurate head count of all the folks that were coming so it is kinda hard to gauge food prep when the people numbers are not there…. on the plus side, we didn’t have any left overs. A quick run to In and Out later in the evening seemed to solve things. Here are a few more pictures of the various activities that have become normal at these gatherings…<\/p>\n
Click here for more pictures.<\/a><\/p>\n Along with Gtetra’s idea for taking more pictures and motivating folks to actually finishing things, I’ve separated the model build gathering page links from my in-progress page as the build gathering is pretty much it’s own entity now. http:\/\/www.gamerabaenre.com\/model_build_gatherings.htm<\/a> At at the bottom of this page, I’m starting to add the model builders who have finished projects to go along side of their in-progress pictures of their works. So far, Angel<\/a> and Sean F<\/a> have pages; and I hope to add pages for all the other modelers that come. It should work as a nice history of our builds, what we finish, and show our improvement as a whole. Physical proof that these gatherings are helpful, that they do work, and that they are totally worth the effort!<\/p>\n In other news, I was called to my mom’s house today to help clean up four boxes that have been in her garage since right before I got out of the Air Force – September 2000 was when these things were moved from my house in Yuba City. A little over eight years has passed since these boxes were last opened. Just about all the clothes went to the local thrift shop for donation. A good box full of stuff was just trash – old notebooks, books, folders from my first couple of years at Sac State. I found a brand new vcr still sealed in the box, I’m utterly puzzled by this, but I have no use for the damn thing, so I just left it at my mom’s house. I did find some interesting old odds and ends that I had forgotten I owned. <\/p>\n The real gold was the box of old photos. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a photography nerd, and I just took pictures of everything. These were developed pictures. So I picked out a few and scanned them in…. <\/p>\n A long long time ago, when I first got into UCSD in 1994, one of my friends introduced me to an online game called Dark Castle, which was a MUD<\/a>. My life was pretty much intertwined with this game for the next 6 or so years… and in that time, the people from the game met up many times with people flying in from all over the country, to meet each other, drink, hook up (some even got married), and others just wrapped an extending baton around their online enemy’s neck…Such gatherings were held in Seattle, San Jose, Chicago, etc… and with these gatherings, some bonds of friendship were forever welded together.<\/p>\n Sometimes, I wonder how my friends and I would get such low purity scores… then I look at what was actually captured as photographic evidence, and remember all those moments that were not captured… I now wonder how we managed to score so high….<\/p>\n Next are some pictures I found from the very first ski trip… well, sort of. This was me, Pete, Claire, and her friend Vicky. At the time, I believe Vicky was the only one in a committed relationship. It was a trip up the California coast, hitting Santa Barbra, Monterey, San Francisco, Sacramento, and good old Beale AFB – I was still in the Air Force at the time and I was still living in the dorms on base…. This was the first extended ski trip I took with a pack of friends, and eventually, I combined this with the fun MUD related gatherings which have resulted in the annual mid-February Ski Trip that has been on going for the past 8 years….<\/p>\n And finally, some random pictures I found from my Air Force days….<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n