Sefton received a little plush dog for Christmas this year.
I didn’t know they made these animals any more! It’s the same dog Alex had as a little boy. His name was Porch, and he went everywhere with Alex. Here’s a shot from early 2000 where Porch is enjoying the view out the car window:
Sadly, Porch went missing on one of our road trips– we think he might’ve been left in a hotel room, and despite calling all the hotels we’d visited during that trip, no one had found him. Alex was devastated, although I think he’s recovered now.
Anyway, it was fun to see Porch reincarnated for another little boy in the family.
Thom and Katie wanted to bring Sefton over to a place called The Lego Store (zero points for creative naming). I decided to tag along, because hey, Lego!
It turned out to be a ton of fun. There were a lot of “vintage” sets, including the Beta-1 Command Base, which is a set I had around age 10:
Notice the $120 price tag. I’m guessing it cost around $25 when I first got it– likely from Grandma Schroeder, who always had us send our Christmas gift ideas from the Sears catalog. Yeah, inflation and all, but it was interesting to see some of these older sets I remember, selling for hundreds of dollars.
Of course there was a whole section of the store dedicated to Star Wars Lego, another for Harry Potter, and so on.
Heck, it was fun just to look at the hundreds (thousands?) of minifigs on display!
And you can build your own minifig by taking what you want from a huge bin of legs, torsos, heads, and accessories:
All in all, it was an hour well spent. Sefton absolutely loved it, and I have to admit it was great fun for me as well (and Thom, I suspect).
Today I got kicked with a dose of nostalgia. Pepper and I were at a thrift store, looking at the kids’ books to find a few for Ollie. I pulled out this pop-up dinosaur book:
This is the same book I had as a kid! I flipped through it and saw all the pop-up dinosaurs (no surprise, considering the title) and remembered them. So funny.
An hour later, we were at Walmart doing some other Christmas shopping, and I noticed the Lego Galaxy Explorer set:
Thom had this one. I distinctly remember the LL928 number on the side. Apparently they’re bringing back the classics.
Anyway, it was fun to see these things from my childhood, some four decades ago. And yes, we bought the dinosaur book for Ollie.
We were outside in the snow, and the flakes falling from the sky were enormous. I guess I’m used to little specks of white; these were a quarter-inch across and beautifully formed. Here are some examples in Kyra’s hair:
Ollie is discovering that pushing a Tonka dump truck along a sidewalk covered in snow doesn’t work very well. It’s funny to watch him get frustrated when the wheels clump with snow and refuse to turn…
Outside Alex and Kaitlyn’s apartment, there’s a hill. Okay, maybe it’s exaggerating to even call it a hill. It’s more like a gentle incline. But it was snowing, and we figured Ollie might want to go sledding. We grabbed a cookie sheet from the kitchen and headed out.
I rode down with him, and despite my enthusiasm, he acted absolutely bored.
We did it a couple of times, but apparently a slow slide down twenty feet of snow isn’t enough to impress this little guy.
A little over two years ago, I took a creative leap and decided to start working with a digital tablet. It was a ton of fun to draw cartoons and work on some other sketching techniques, but I found that the real value of a tablet like this is in editing photos. It’s so much easier to use a pen (err, “stylus” in the professional lingo) rather than a mouse when working on fine details. The tablet has empowered me to make Christmas cards and do a myriad of other things with photography and practical jokes.
I’ve been working at the high school, earning a bit of extra scratch as a coach. I figured some of that income could go toward a hobby I enjoy, so I did some research and decided to upgrade my tablet.
Here’s the old one in all its 13-inch glory:
And here’s the upgrade, a staggering 24 inches diagonally:
It’s hard to convey the sheer size of this beast in a photo like this; it’s almost as large as my (already crazy large) monitors. And with 2K resolution, the drawing area and details are substantially better.
Hoo boy, this is gonna be fun. As I’m fond of saying, “Now we’re cooking with gas!“
Our annual Christmas cards are the stuff of legend, and believe me when I say we get a lot of comments about them. People usually ask one of three questions:
How do you come up with these ideas?
How do you make the photos?
How do you convince Pepper to go along with this insanity?
My answers are usually along these lines:
I enter a pepperoni-pizza-induced trance and meditate until an idea forms in my head.
A little bit of real-world photography, and a whole lot of post-processing.
She’s happy to go along with whatever I suggest, as long as it means she doesn’t have to come up with the idea or make the card.
This year’s card actually came together pretty quickly, which is either a sign that my creative skills are improving, or that I just didn’t want to spend too much time on it. As a result, our cards went out in late November– far earlier than usual! I’ve had the opportunity to hear from many people asking the questions above, and I decided I’d give my fans a little glimpse behind the scenes.
I should start with the inspiration for the card. Pepper really enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick and was excited to do something with that theme. After some quick research, it was clear we weren’t going to be able to fly in an F-18 like Tom Cruise did for the movie, so I turned to the movie poster. Here’s the official product:
I definitely needed to include Pepper in the card, so I kept looking around the internet. I found a fan-made poster that would work:
I’m pretty sure the shot of Jennifer Connelly is from a still frame late in the movie, but whatever… it’ll do. The next step was getting some photos of myself and Pepper that looked passingly similar. We put on some coats and stepped outside.
A close observer may notice that she’s wearing Harry Potter earrings (the Deathly Hallows) and a Hunger Games necklace (Mockingjay). Call it an Easter egg, if you will. As for me, I don’t have a flight suit, but Maverick did wear a leather jacket in both movies. And I have a ski helmet. Voila!
Wikipedia provided a nice shot of an F/A-18 Hornet on a carrier flight deck:
It took some work to remove the deckhand and make a few other slight modifications to the plane. I also needed a more interesting background, not only to match the movie poster, but also because the blank sky is boring. Cue a simple photo of some clouds:
I found some appropriate fonts to match the movie logo and poster. Bringing it all together, the card came to life:
Often the devil’s in the details, though. The sunset shot required a bit more of an orange tint to everything. The cockpit had to show the clouds through the glass, while still looking like it’s glass and not simply missing. Pepper’s jacket needed to be edited to remove the pink sides. Shadows had to be adjusted. Edges were fuzzed so they don’t look like everything was cut out of a magazine and pasted together. I probably spent four hours working through all of this, but I’ve honed these little skills over the years, and I’m pretty pleased with the result.
In the grand scheme, stuff like this is probably child’s play for a serious graphic designer, but for a hack like me it’s not half-bad.
Of course designing the card is only the first step in the process. There’s the printing, envelopes and address labels, buying a ton of stamps, and eventually showing up at the post office with a box containing 330 cards (our new record). In a way I’m bummed that it’s practically an industrial process at this point; thirty years ago I was hand-writing about 30 cards. Now there’s not really any personalization in them. Still, they seem pretty popular with friends and family, so I continue the tradition…
