Cosplay as yourself: Hivemind

 At work we have to wear radio earpieces. We don't like them because they hurt to wear for 8 hours. I don't like mine because customers think I am on the phone, when really I am greeting them, or think I am talking to them when really I am checking on something for them. Sometimes customers hear one side of a radio game and think one of us is unstable. So we all prefer to use the radios clipped to our belts without the earpiece attachment. I got the idea of playing up the transhuman/cyborg aspect, and ran it by my boss, who said, "You can do anything you want with it." presumably because that would be one fewer person to scold about non compliance with regard to the earpieces. (as an aside, I am about the quietest, least deaf person on staff so the earpiece works better for me as a transmitter than the radio does, so I do wear mine when it's not lost.)

Anyway, I read an instructable about fake sugru and was all over making my earpiece into an upsetting biological thing. The first iteration is pictured above. It looked a little Neverending Story special effects in person, so I scrapped it and used a latex glove to make a wrinkled one, but it was too shiny and bulky so I trimmed it down and put on a lot of tendrils for the current iteration.

These are the supplies, except the top is some other cyborg things I was thinking of coating. Like, can I open a sealed house, write, or slice things, except when augmented? But ultimately I have not had time to mess up my hairdressing scissors or anything. Cornstarch, the kind of silicone that smells like vinegar when it cures, a half credit card wand for stirring, and a colorant. I used eyeshadow most successfully. The foundation pictured combined with the white cornstarch to be too bright for my skin.

So, cosplay. I don't think it's proper to spend more time thinking about your presentation and garb for an annual event than you spend, total, day to day. Or to have an idealized avatar and a whatever self. Sometimes I want to cosplay a Katniss braid but I just tell myself, spend that energy developing your style. So I have purple streaks at my temples and I am medium buff and I never wear pants. I get that doing it this way doesn't connect you to other fans, but my planner is covered in royal blue goatskin and literally I am wearing a dress subduction printed with inaccurate dollar bills. Also not to be too intense but I drive a submarine.

I was going to write about the mechanism of the hivemind but I am pretty tired. In essence, I am the unit able to be gracious with the fifth person of the day who wants to tow without a vehicle equipped for towing, and I can read the scheduling log, so I am the user interface bit. I draw extensively on my coworkers, via radio, for information about where a person might find any given replacement bit for a trailer, who truly needs electric brakes, and then all the regular corporation stuff, where one person is apprised of a weird situation but it's not me.

Right now I am training two of my coworkers to man the counter, to make myself a bit more obsolete in anticipation of starting substitute teaching this term. They are both great and competent, but kind of passive. Like one is three years my junior (so should be running circles around me when it comes to computer things) but waits for me to direct everything she does, and the other is like a finance guy who maybe has forgotten 10-key. Jump in, guys, literally all the mistakes are recoverable.

First Forays with Adobe Illustrator

 Well, I followed some Illustrator tutorials and finally stopped doing this with the pen tool:

It turns out you have to draw everything with rectangles and ellipses that you stretch out and combine. 

I made this worksheet to take to work. The U-Box shipping has a lot of components- the cross-country shipping, local shipping, and rent on the box plus insurance. I'll print some of these out and be able to give out a cohesive quote. This took two extended sessions of drawing rectangles and trying to get the proper rectangle in front. As someone who already put in my time learning to draw, this was excruciating. 

I have found one easy trick so far. It turns clean pen and ink sketches into vector sketches. In the object menu, scroll down to Image Trace and then select "Make".

Good Riddance to Endless Summer

 I got really tired of life guarding! But I don't have to do anything about it (except find a new job) because the season is ending. When I got this job, for about a month I couldn't believe how easy it was and how nice a second paycheck was. Since it's obviously seasonal (and this pool is closed for half the year, so it's not like they could keep me on if they liked me) I felt preemptively sad for impending fall. I loved having people listen to my instructions, getting trained to teach swim lessons, sitting in the sun, and eating free sno cones, and I didn't want it to end.

 Cut to August, where I am very nearly off the schedule but still dreading the few shifts I do have. We're on the third aquatics director of the summer and this one is terrible. Last week there was a fire at the pool. I am tired of tending children whose parents can't be bothered. I want people, even kids, to take responsibility for their own safety. My parent-tot swim lesson is supposed to be cancelled since it's just one student, but it's not, and the parent wants me to teach ISR but I can't because I don't know how and also she doesn't want to put her baby underwater. I don't want to listen to 60s and 70s beach music (except the Beach Boys) any more. I am so ready for fall and my next thing.

I wish I could hold on to this lesson, that endings are often a relief and nothing to dread.

Reusing Zip Ties

I have a friend who is really into zip ties, like he uses them like a book strap to hold his items together, and mends things with them. He has special reusable ones, which made me think there must be a way to reuse zip ties (this was one of my pet projects when I was little, and I never succeeded) and it turns out all you do is push the locking tab out of the way of the teeth. And then the next day at work I had to unpack a pallet of dollies and was able to salvage all but one super industrial tie (it was on too tight). To avoid hurting myself I unpacked the pallet really, really slowly since each unit of dollies was unbalanced and heavy.

I got a free sticker.

I found this on my car this morning and I was so offended. I know I'm abusing the visitor parking, so I only park there when retrieving my car from a tow yard seems preferable to waking up at 5:30 to shuffle the cars so my landlady can leave for work. I like rules, and this notice is so sloppy that it made me feel like the parking enforcement person is not competent. It says "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING," but the sign just says "VISITOR PARKING ONLY." And also I was not parked there overnight, but from 4:21am to 8:47am. And also it says my car will be towed at 7 AM, and it had not yet been towed at nearly 9. And also "TODAY" is not a date.

Lead Shot Comfort Objects

Having camera and video camera and phone camera problems, but I am extremely keen to share my new project, so here is a frustratingly paced video. 

I made a weighted lap blanket, for self-soothing! 

The Donkey

 At work I have been helping out as best I can with our delivery pods. No part of it is a strong suit for me (I'm not mechanical, I am an average driver, and I am quite handy compared to my old peer group-- I can lay carpet or find a fuse box-- and totally useless compared to my coworkers. Is the alternator important-important? What is weight distribution? Yes, I see that the jack is going back down, that is why I have changed direction.) but that's what makes it so exotic and fun.

This is the awesome gear shift for the Donkey-- the ridealong forklift that fits on the back of the delivery truck. The gear shift (black plastic on the left) is just welded to that little red indicator, so they move together. A regular forklift has a 10k lb+ counterweight (ours is 13k) but the Donkey has to ride on gravel roads and people's driveways, so it has no added counterweight. We use the Donkey to pull 5'x8'x7.5' plywood boxes off the delivery truck and position them on people's driveways, but if the road is too narrow for the delivery truck we park nearby and deliver the box via forklift. I was very nervous to use the forklift to travel the last 1/3 mile to a farmhouse because I am very used to using the counterweighted, solid-tired forklift, which responds terribly to patchy pavement and has even caved in the cement on the lot at my storage center (not while I was driving). But the Donkey has air tires, and I could even take it off the gravel road into the dirt when I was positioning the box. I had to drive backward, of course, because the plywood box on my forks took up my whole field of view. But on the way back to the truck, I got to drive downhill, unencumbered, and I got it up to third gear, which was super fun even though I was riding the brake so much that my supervisor let me know afterwards that it might have been a good time to take it out of 1st.