Ren Faire 2019

During the football game at Ridley last night, Grace texted me to say that some of her friends were going to the Renaissance Faire out toward Harrisburg the next day (today), and did I want to go? Being the needed mode of transportation, I said sure. Julia was interested in going as well, but Amp was busy with costumes for the play, so the three of us decided to drive out and meet up with her friends (and the parents that were taking the other group).

We had been to the Ren Faire once, quite a long time ago, but when I went through old blog entries to find exactly when that was, I was surprised. Turns out it was mid-September 2010. Grace would have been 6 and Julia would have been 12. Wow. We enjoyed it and had discussed going back at some point, but for whatever reason it never bubbled up to the "let's go" stage. But now it had.

It was much as I remembered it. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure if much of anything changed at all in 9 years. Ridiculous traffic getting off the Turnpike exit and to the venue, but efficient people keeping cars moving and into the fields that you park on. Lots of people in costume. "Period" merchandise to buy at generally steep prices. A wide variety of food options, none of them healthy. All sorts of venues of all different sizes for performers of all kinds.

We found the other group quickly, and spent some time as a larger group of a dozen or so before Grace and her friends wandered off, leaving me and Julia with the other parents. Which was fine. We watched several street performers before settling in to watch Circus Stella, a husband and wife team doing a circus acrobatics show. They were entertaining, and ended their show with some trained dogs doing tricks, which is always fun.

Circus Stella

We did some more wandering and some eating, and then settled in to watch Aaron Bonk do whip tricks and juggle swords and other sharp objects, adding fire for more fun. This was probably the most enjoyable part of the day, as he was extremely talented (holding several Guiness Book of World Records titles) and very funny. It drizzled a bit during this show, but that was the only tiny blemish on  an otherwise fun 4 or 5 hours.

Aaron Bonk - Whips, Fire and Swords

Grace had an interesting lunch: a Meat Sundae. This looked like an ice cream cone, but was made up of some sort of pastry/bread/roll cone, filled with a few tater tots on the bottom, then some sliced beef with gravy, then a scoop of mashed potatoes on the top. She pronounced it good.

Grace with a Meat Sundae

For comparison to the 15 year old Grace shown above, I found a picture of the 6 year old Grace from our last Ren Faire trip. It seems like just yesterday and at the same time a million years ago. Weird...

Grace at Ren Faire 2010 - Age 6

Julia had a good time with me and Grace had a good teenager time mostly without me. Hanging out with the other parents was fun, and we all agreed we should try to remember to go back again next year. With Mom next time...

Twenty One Pilots - Bandito Redux

Grace's favorite band is Twenty One Pilots, and when they announced they were coming around again on a later leg of their very long Bandito tour she wanted to go again. I had fun last time so I had no problem taking her. I ended up driving two of her older neighborhood friends, making us a group of four. The link to my post about last year's show is here. For a description of the show, reference that post, as this show was very similar to that one, with a few minor differences. But basically the same. And just as good this time as last time.

Don't drop Tyler...

Like last time, the crowd was young, and leaning female.

Finale - Trees

The energy in the place was amazing, and other than an interlude of a few slower songs in the middle, everybody stood all night. Which I suppose works better when you are 15 than when you are 50+.

Taking a bow on the crowd

The only bad part of the show was getting trapped in a back corner of the Wells Fargo Center parking lot and taking a long time to get out and on the road. Oh well. Small price to pay for an evening of fun and a happy daughter.

Next year if they are still doing the Bandito tour, we'll probably go again...

Homecoming Dance 2019

Continuing a very busy week, tonight was the Homecoming Dance. What started as a couple of friends coming over to our house to finish makeup and hair and take some pictures turned into a bunch a band friends coming over for pictures. And then a bunch of Drama Club friends. And then Grace had an escort to the Dance (yikes!). All of which was great.

Grace and Friends

We had friends...

Mandatory Back of Dress view

And more friends...

Drama Club sophomores

And Julia!

Grace (in heels) and Julia (not...)

And more friends...

Too dark for more outside pictures

And a lot of happy parents taking loads of pictures. On the deck, on the front porch, on the stairs inside, in the family room, all over the place. In every possible grouping and combination.

Grace and escort and friends

It was great. Everyone looked absolutely wonderful (and growing up way too fast). I've known some of these kids for a long time...since they were little. They aren't little anymore.

Hamilton

Julia's 21st birthday present was her favorite thing - tickets to see a Broadway show. We were able to get 4 tickets for the whole family to see Hamilton at the Forrest Theater in Philadelphia. This is something that we have all been wanting to do for a long time, but had been unable to get tickets in the ongoing ticket lottery for Broadway.

The tickets we got were fantastic (4th row of the balcony, right in the center), and the Forrest Theater is a wonderful old theater in which to see a show.

Hamilton

I won't bother with a lengthy review of the show, as they can be found all over, but I will simply say that it was terrific in every regard. The kids have been playing this soundtrack to death in the car since it came out and got popular, but actually seeing it onstage with the sets and choreography was obviously a whole different experience. Our cast for this touring company was fantastic, especially Edred Utomi as Hamilton, Paul Oakley Stovall as George Washington and Peter Matthew Smith as King George. Bryson Bruce as both Lafayette and Jefferson was also terrific. There really wasn't a weak link in the cast, and we only had one understudy (Tre Frazier as Aaron Burr); he was solid.

Hamilton - Forrest Theater stage

Julia was thrilled (as were all of us). Highly recommended for anyone who likes musical theater (or pop culture phenomena for that matter...).

Digital Art - Baby Steps 1

I've had some time the last few evenings to play around with the new Wacom Intuos tablet and Corel Painter Essentials 6, the free software that came with the tablet.

The picture below is the very first thing I have ever done, which is to follow along with a YouTube tutorial introducing the features of Corel Painter Essentials by way of a follow-along "paint a mountain scene."

Mountains -  A beginner tutorial follow-along

It's not high art by any means, but it's a passable pseudo-impressionist painting. I've seen worse.

The biggest challenge was to keep moving along and resist the temptation to keep stopping and trying to fix things.

Baby steps. But you have to start somewhere.

Digital Art

Wacom Intuos drawing tablets are pretty cheap. Photoshop is complicated. So I bought a new iMac.

OK, so there's more that comes before that and more in between. Something like:

Over the last few years I have become interested in digital drawing and painting.
Seemed like something that would be fun to try.
But there are so many different tools and software.
So start small.
Wacom Intuos drawing tablets are pretty cheap and still highly rated for beginners.
Drawing tablets hook to computers via USB, and the computer runs the software.
Software choices are endless.
Many of them free.
Most have their own fairly steep learning curves.
Abode Photoshop is considered by many to be one of the best for digital drawing.
Might as well tackle the Photoshop learning curve directly.
A good start might be to get an inexpensive Wacom Intuos and try Photoshop for a while.
Adobe software is now only available by online subscription/download.
Online subscription is the current version only.
The current version of Photoshop only runs on Mac OS one version higher than I'm running now.
I could upgrade my 2010 iMac one version and hope that Photoshop would run effectively.
Any Mac OS upgrades after that one bump are not possible on my old machine.
I've been looking at a new iMac for a while now.
There's a few other software things that wouldn't run well, or at all, on the old iMac.
iMacs are pretty cheap, relatively speaking.
So I bought a new iMac today.
And a Wacom Intuos Medium drawing tablet yesterday.
And a $2.99 per month iCloud upgrade to 200 GB of storage so I can get the 16,989 photos and 437 videos off the old iMac.

As of now, 14.07 GB out of 102.8 GB of photos and videos have uploaded to iCloud. In ~5 hours. There are 15,637 items to go. So... maybe 30 hours to go at that rate. iCloud bulk uploads like this are notoriously slow the first time. Or so they say.

I won't set up the new machine until the backing up of the old one is complete, as I guess I have a fear of confusing the iCloud by putting a new machine on the same Apple ID while it is doing all that work on the other one. Seems reasonable to me. It might even be correct, who knows.

This also addresses the many-years-overdue issue of 9 years of my family's photo history being on one hard drive with no recent backup. Which is a good thing. The backup, that is, not the 9 years of neglect prior to that.

When the new machine is set up, I'll download the Photoshop trial and give it a go. I have played around with the new tablet on the old machine (last night) with some free software that came with it. It's fun. But hard. I think I will enjoy the challenge posed by the learning curve with the tools, although I know that there will be times that I will get frustrated and want to throw the whole bunch out the window. Hopefully those moments will pass. Or maybe just the Wacom tablet goes out the window and I keep the nice new computer.

I'd add some pictures to this blog post but this old computer is really busy right now...

[As a footnote, the current Mac OS is Mojave. Before that was High Sierra. Before that was Sierra. Before that was El Capitan, which is what the 2010 iMac is running. It can be upgraded to Sierra, but that's the end of the line for that hardware (no High Sierra or Mojave). Grace's 2013 iMac is running Sierra. Catalina is the new Mac OS due out this fall.]

Spring 2019 Painting

I've done a good bit of painting over the last few months, especially in the past few weeks since the new range of Citadel Contrast paints came out. I'm always a sucker for something new. The Contrast paint range is basically just a highly pigmented glaze, so in that respect it's nothing new, but the new range release is notable in that they have released about 3 dozen colors at the same time. More on those particular paints later. In the meantime, here's a few of the smaller odds and ends I have painted over the course of the spring.

WizKids unpainted minis has a blister pack of 3 giant spiders. I bought two packs and painted them in about 10 minutes using just the Contrast paint "Blood Angels Red". One of the molds has wrapped victims on the base. These were painted khaki and washed with a brown shade. I have lots of spiders of various manufacturers (you can never have too many) and these 6 red ones add some variety to an existing mix of predominantly blacks, browns and grays.

WizKids Giant Spiders

I also had a blister pack of 2 pack animals. These were painted over the pre-primed white base coat with a variety of Contrast paint colors (browns, tans and greens, with a couple pops of brighter color). These were good examples of what the Contrast paints do - color, shade and highlight all in one go. These are nice little minis, and can be useful on the table (I like everyday scatter/clutter like these), but with the limited amount of painting time I have available, investing a bunch of time in these to paint them nicely in the traditional manner wouldn't have happened very easily. In an absolute minimal amount of time, I have these 2 done. Not great paint jobs by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly serviceable.

WizKids Pack Animals

A Shambling Mound. A classic D&D monster, and one of the nicer WizKids figs. This was painted the traditional way, using a muted palette of greens and browns. I should have put a human figure in some of these pictures for scale... this miniature is ~2.5 inches tall and ~3.5 inches wide at its widest (the outstretched arm). I have another one of these in stock which I will probably paint in a more "fantastical" manner (whatever that means).

WizKids Shambling Mound

The Treant model is another large WizKids fig (being about 5 minutes tall). I don't like the paint job, but it's done, so that's something. This ended up being one of those models that looks good up close or in person, but will probably look very dark and dull on the table. Maybe I'll find another and try it again.

WizKids Treant

You can never go wring with some torture chamber furniture... Or a mirror.

WizKids Torture Chamber stuff

Lastly, I painted 4 Games Workshop Hormagaunt figs in a hive fleet Kraken color scheme. I posted some pictures of my Tyranid Genestealers in the cotton candy explosion color scheme, and after Grace pointed that out I have trouble painting anything else in that scheme. Maybe I'll do some more Genestealers in these classic colors. [These actually have a little more detail work before they are done, but while I was taking pictures...]

GW Hormagaunts

I've also made some progress on some larger efforts. More on that soon.

Long Time Comin'

So on a recent late January day at the USCIS office in West Philadelphia, only a few blocks from where we lived back in the late 1980's, Amp was sworn in as a US citizen. She was eligible for citizenship about 26 years ago, give or take, on the basis of our 1990 marriage, but for one reason or another never bothered to file the necessary papers and slog through the subsequent bureaucracy to get it done.

She filed the first application (with its large check attached) in March of 2018, and was given an estimated completion date of September 2019, about a year and a half later.

We waited. Filed some additional forms. She went down to the above-mentioned office for an interview and paperwork review in May of 2018. Went for an additional review in late 2018. Was scheduled for her citizenship test (on American government, history and geography) in early January 2019. Passed the test. Was scheduled to come back for the oath-taking later in the month. Did so. And then immediately, on site, registered to vote.

Which I suppose brings us back around to the reason for finally slogging through this process. Having lived in the US since coming to college from overseas in the fall of 1984, the idea of having a voice but not a vote was brought painfully home in 2016.

She missed the 2018 midterms, but that's the last one.

Along with a voice, she now has a vote.

Painting Table January 2019

It's been a while since I've done one of these, or for that matter a post of any sort. This thought struck me while I was looking at the giant mess pile that is my painting table in the basement. Most of what is on the table is stuff that is more or less recently-ish in process. So without further ado...

The whole mess

At far right, we have a tray of Warhammer 40k figures used for games of Kill Team with Ryan and Josh. Genestealers in front are basically done. The Eldar guardians in the middle are maybe 50% done. The Space Marines tactical squad and scouts in the back are perhaps 80-90% done. There are some other bits less done on other parts of the table.

Warhammer 40k for Kill Team

Middle-ish we have a bunch of blister packs of unpainted D&D miniatures. Some character figures, some monsters, and some torture chamber scenery. Plus a very large remorhaz figure in the box in the back. There's an earth elemental and an arcane altar on the little paper plate. And the box for a fantasy ruins terrain kit.

Unpainted D&D minis

On the left side of the table, which is the more active side since it is where the lights and the paints are, we have a variety of things. There is a mostly done Shambling Mound figure for D&D, and a group of Umber Hulks. There are some black primed tyranid warriors and smaller critters for Kill Team. I see a torture rack. A few treasure chests. An iron maiden (the torture device, not the band). A couple of character figures that have been started. And the first test piece of the Azyrite ruins set whose box we saw in the prior picture. Oh, and an owlbear with a little paint on it.

The more active bits

On the gaming table, we have odds and ends of a waterside terrain board I am making. And the main bits of a Tamiya 1/35 scale Panther ausf "A" model that I am building. More on that in a separate post. I think I built this exact kit in the early 1980's (it is copyright 1975), and again in ~2000. I felt like building a tank model kit, and I love the Panther. A pretty tank if there is such a thing. And this particular kit is crazy cheap on eBay, relatively speaking.

Waterside scenery and a 1/35 Panther "A"

So that's some of the multitude of hobby bits that have gotten some attention recently. If I ever actually finish anything, I will post pictures...

Cold Weather Dog Cuteness

It's been a little while since I posted some gratuitous Ryder pics, so here we go. Feel free to skip...

With the onset of cold weather, Ryder has turned out to be quite the fan of stealing some warmth from someone else's flannel pajamas...

Hangin' with Julia

Or someone else's fleece blanket...

Hangin' with Grace

Or if nobody else is around, lying on a fleece blanket that someone in the family will then be kind enough to drape over and around him. He likes being bundled up.

Hangin' with a fleece blanket

And as a general rule, follow the sun. Wherever the sun hits the ground, he will follow it around. This position was a new one...

Follow the sun spots

Anyway, thanks for humoring me. More hobby stuff soon.