I read or heard from some authoritative source that I do not recall that if you do something consistently for 30 days you can either make or break a habit. Thirty days seems suspiciously convenient, but I have tried this with a few personal habits recently, and it seems to be holding.
My wife is six days into what will be about 30 days out at sea. What kind of feral nerd habits might I develop without direct supervision? We shall see.
One I’m working on now is draw everyday. I’ve yet to decide when or if I’m going to post my results.
Somehow, before she got on board, my wife managed to slip a lovely, heart-felt valentine in the mail that arrived today.
On my end, I drew a picture of a lizard and sent a photo of it by Facebook Messenger.
The first few months of the year is when I traditionally re-think all my blogging strategies. This year my notion is more but shorter posts distributed evenly across my now sprawling blog empire. More about that in Word Count below.
This doesn’t mean I won’t write and post the longer posts when they occur to me. But I’m not going to dig for them – or beat myself up for not digging for them. Short is the new done.
UnObtanium Bazaar has a new website (same URL). It’s a wordpress blog (the devil you know) because we are going to be more about creative content and less about internet commerce. The Bazaar is and always will be primarily a physical pop-up operation. [1000k] [Counting the first blog post]
Revised an Episode of Go Action Fun Time for Friday night. [500k].
Just finished writer’s group. [500k] where we have the kind of writer’s who use the Hilbert Transformation as a plot device (don’t fret – there’s no actual math in the manuscript – so far.).
Plus this post – which weighs in at just over 500.
Through a combination of poor fortune and self-created folly, Dilkon proved to be expensive, with each of the expeditions being more expensive than the last.
Let’s pause here to clarify: I do not mean travel expenses. My company picks that up. And while the work was more troublesome than it needed to be, that was a product of the locale and personnel involved, and not generally instructive. Also, there were more than the three trips I am about to describe, but these were the major expeditions.
We have already described one adventure related to this job. This would turn out to be foreshadowing.
1st Visit- January 2022
Navajo burger
There are two places I found to eat lunch in Dilkon, and by that I mean pick up the food and eat it in your car. The Navajo Nation was (and still is at this writing) 100% masks indoors, and indoor dining is out-of-the-question. There is a food stand in a dirt lot that will sell you a Navajo burger, a double green-chile burger in a pita of some sort. Or you could go to the pizza place, and get a slice or pie of arguably the best pizza for 50 miles in any direction. (It is honestly decent if not outstanding pizza.
Having learned the day before that a Navajo burger will sit in my stomach like a boulder for three hours, I had gotten some pizza, driven back to the jobsite and ate my slices while listening the NPR station I could kinda-get out there on the car radio. When I finished, I tossed my crusts to the stray, or at least unleashed dogs waiting for that, and went back in to work.
I came back out at the end of the day to discover my battery dead. I then discovered that I had not gotten back (or replaced) the jumper cables I had loaned to my child.
Happily, one of the electricians hadn’t left yet. After failing to jump the car with his cables, we ruled the battery dead. Dilkon has a grocery store, and two convenience stores, none of which carry jumper cables, much less car batteries.
Good fortune balanced poor fortune when it turned out the electrician passed through Winslow, where my hotel was, on his way back to north of Flagstaff somewhere.
His daily commute was close to 90 minutes. I added twenty more at the auto parts store (just down the road from my hotel) where I purchased the second most expensive battery on the shelf (cheap parts die with simple radio play in deeply rural parking lots) and a set of jumper cables.
He added five more minutes picking me up in the pre-dawn gloom the next morning.
It’s forty minutes from Winslow to Dilkon, during which I learned a a lot about this man’s family problems and his relationship to Jesus, none of which is fodder for this space. I also learned that people in and around Dilkon have been driving as far New Mexico for simple medical services.
So, it’s nice to be part of a project that is clearly necessary. We have surprisingly few of those.
2nd Visit – Late February – early March 2022
On my way back from Two Rivers (next to last post – I’ve been busy) the power steering died in the truck.
Verity – new to me.
While I bought Verity as a back-up vehicle, Oliver, my child, has been using it as a primary vehicle to and forth from Phoenix College and related young adult adventures. Oliver lacks the size and skill to manage a pick-up truck without power steering.
Warned that it could be a while before I had the time or money to fixt the truck, Oliver convinced one of their young adult friends to fix it – at my expense, but not at a lot of expense.
The repair happened while I was in Dilkon.
Then as Oliver drove the newly nimble Verity about the oil light came on. Knowing the oil had been recently changed, Oliver chose to ignore it and keep driving – until Verity threw a rod.
Throwing a rod is generally fatal to twenty-year-old pick-ups.
Verity + Rattletrap
Yet times are strange. I bought that thing for about $5k – pre-pandemic. The replacement cost for a similar vehicle now would be something like $7-8k as I understand the market now. The part-time mechanic (who likely destroyed the thing in the first place) has offered to replace the engine at cost. He thinks that could be below $3k. I am not so certain. I have tasked Oliver with that research, and that is ongoing.
Bongo at Homolovi
Meanwhile , Lyft charges appear randomly on one of my credit cards.
This visit took place two days before Unobtanium was to appear at the Las Vegas Pirate Fest. My tow vehicle is dead in my backyard, and while Ruby has a towing hitch (that I had installed) the Subaru Forester is not a good towing vehicle. Las Vegas is 350 miles and four good climbs from Phoenix.
My first thought was to rent a van. Inventory inside the van, tent and gear in Rattle-trap. But no one, I mean no one, rents a van with a tow hitch.
U-Haul, however, will rent a pick-up with a tow hitch – even for an out-of-state run. So I thought I had done that.
I burn back home from Dilkon, slide into U-Haul minutes before closing, and discover they have not the pick-up I had confirmed and paid for.
I towed Rattletrap to Las Vegas in a 12’ box truck, which had plenty of capacity but over-all cost me $800 I’ll never get back. Impoverished and emboldened by that experience I then towed that same rig with Ruby, my Subaru Forester, on the shorter and flatter run to Lake Havasu City for the London Bridge Ren Faire.
Ruby+Rattletrap at LBRF
The listed towing capacity of a 2015 Subaru Forester is 1500#. I don’t know how much Rattletrap plus the Unobtanium tent and inventory actually weigh, but Ruby can tow it as long as we stay under 75 mph.
Traversing I-10 westbound at or near the posted limit does not improve the scenic value of the journey.
FTR – London Bridge RF actually takes place on the shadeless, packed dirt expanse of the county rodeo grounds.
UnObtanium at London Bridge RF complete with tent.
When the smoke cleared:
The Dilkon Medical Center is still not open (medical facilities dawdle forever before opening) by my lighting is complete.
Ruby survived her Reservation country and towing adventures.
If you don’t count the U-Haul fee, UnObtanium made money at both events.
We plan to return to both next year.
And Verity still sits in my backyard, with her new roof rack still in place. If you want or need a 2001 Dodge Dakota with a blown engine, make me an offer.
I’ve survived 55 rotations around the sun on this planet, and not much has changed from the last anniversary of this rotation. But things have been set up and are in motion. A year from now the only thing about my life likely to be the same will be my job. I like my job. I’ve had nearly 40 different jobs – I know what to look for now.
On or around my birthday I share my wisdom, and perhaps we’ll talk about jobs. But first we have news.
It will be our fist full set-up since Pirate Fest last April. We are kinda curious what we have in store ourselves.
It will also be my first chance to put the new book on the shelf since its release last November. You can be one of the first to buy a signed copy.
“Life is too short to do a job you hate.”
This was my grandfather’s advice, and I have tried to follow it. Happily, I genuinely enjoy working, so there are few of my 35+ jobs I have actually hated, and I did not stay in them very long.
My current employer, R C Lurie, is employee-owned with profit sharing and an ESOP – Employee Stock Option Plan – in addition to treating me well. It was, when I started, a lateral move financially from Rhino Staging, but that has since improved.
It still feels weird getting a raise without having to threaten to quit.
Most of this is, in truth profit sharing. Because the inmates run the asylum we are employee owned, raises and bonuses tend to reflect how the company is doing as a whole, and have very little to do with individual merit.
I get paid to climb around in other people’s buildings, help them solve problems and write reports about it. These are all things I enjoy, or at least do not mind.
It is my goal to make this the last job I hold. Never say never, but my plan is to keep this until my side hustles (see above) become too lucrative to keep on the side any longer.
Anyway, that’s partly why Cheryl is looking for houses in Phoenix and I am not passing around resumes in Las Vegas.
WORD COUNT:
I try to do 5000 words (or that equivalent) every seven days.
So from last Tuesday:
A half chapter of the sequel to Empress Em (One of 64). = 1500 words
Writer’s Group = 500 word equivalent
[Meeting and interviews count as 500 words].
Revision of Felicity Moore, teenage witch for the sample cast of Go Action Fun Time. = 1000 words.
Felicity Moore – still in progress.
Line-art for same= 500 word equivalent.
Coloring for same = 1000 word equivalent. (Colors take a lot longer than line-art, even inked.)
4500 words.
So close. I took the weekend off to celebrate my birthday.
Somewhere in my strange and voluminous files, I have a folder with notes for a science fantasy setting, a post-apocalyptic Earth where magic now worked because reasons, and that was the tag-line. I think I called it Warp World, but that name has long been trademarked by others.
But I want to move on to real life. Much like my divorce, I am projecting that the only thing that will remain the same about the basic facts of my life in the near to mid-term is my day job.
In short, Cheryl is moving to Phoenix, and I am moving in with her. To be clear: she is buying the house with proceeds from selling her house in Las Vegas, which has a comparably hot real-estate market. So financially, it will be a lateral move for her. Her mother, who co-owns that house, is also part of that financing. I am not. I will just reside there. The legalities of this are both private and, trust me, boring.
I burned some vacation over the holidays, and we spent a lot of it packing and storing the accumulated crap possessions that have gathered over the past decade plus in her 3000’ + residence. Some of that is UnObtanium inventory, which will finally be unified with my portion of that inventory on the same property somewhere close and sometime soon.
Verity (the truck), Rattletrap (the trailer) waiting in front of Cheryl’s soon to be former residence for me to get my shit together.
There were some practical lessons learned:
A hand-truck totally pays for itself when you are moving big piles of boxes from point A to point B. Yes, $120 or so at the hardware store for the good one. Worth It.
You can buy a roof rack at Harbor Freight ($320) that will sort-of clamp on to any pick-up truck, and therefore sort-of clamped onto mine.
Installing a roof-rack that sort-of fits your truck is where you realize how real the disparity is between Cheryl’s collection of household tools and my bags and boxes of accumulated rigging tools. But we now own a set of large size metric sockets, which I am not certain I had anyway. (US theatrical rigging is almost all SAE).
I do not miss beating the crap out of my hands on a daily basis.
I used the roof rack to transport the UnObtanium tent, thereby keeping it out of Rattletrap, because I otherwise filled that trailer with UB inventory.
The bell tent turns out to be 6 meters, not 5, so the pole I had imported from China is too small. That’s a $260 mistake that will require a $320 fix, because…
This is not the way…
We also spent about $200 on garment bags which should both protect the clothes and speed up install and strike.
Having all the inventory at the same address will mean not only can we load and unload easier for shows, but we realistically sell things on-line as well. Between us, Cheryl and I have enough antiques to stock a small shop – at least for a few months.
So we might have a consignment booth as well. But that, like many of our life’s details, depends upon where we end up.
August brought both triumph and calamity is large measure. The triumphs, while modest, are the more interesting to reflect upon.
Unobtanium Bazaar appeared at MaricopaCon. This was our first event without Cheryl.
What we learned:
We can get by with half a table. We shared a table with JD Productions who make plastic minatures and googahs.
Gaming conventions are a good market for miniatures.
They are a terrible market for games – er – well- for 1st edition AD&D books which I had on consignment. I had priced them in line of wehat they go for on E-bay ($70-120), but I expected to have to come down a bit for a live event. Never came up. No-one even sniffed.
Similarly, I sold one copy of Go Action Fun Time, and zero copies of Teeth and Talons II.
All copies still available…
There were at least two gamestores with tables. I do not know how they fared.
Don’t schedule your game demo opposite the one VIP party event of the con.
What we need to learn:
How to move the AD&D books still in my possession. Which may develop into broader lessons about selling on-line and the pros/cons of various forums.
If I have the talent and/or patience to learn digital sculpting, because the good ideas for minatures exceed the availability of designs. (I have taken small steps in this direction.)
A bit more about Teeth and Talons II – for the record:
The version depicted above is the GAFT-only version, a proof of concept I slapped together so I had a new product for MariocopaCon (as if it would matter). This version, besides being limited to one obscure system, has some stock-photo artwork that I am not happy with.
A full version will come out soon with stats for several game systems, and all original artwork. That is in Jason Youngdale’s hands.
This comes out in November. I know because I have a copy of the New Link Publishing’s press release. It is the sequel to Beanstalk and Beyond for those who are new to this space.
Jack, the boy who climbed the beanstalk, has become an apprentice of the bard Taliesin. Yes, that Bard Taliesin. They join the crew of the Sun Seeker, a fl ying ship full of iron-age heroes off to cross the vast and dangerous northern sea to rescue a kidnapped princess. The voyage of the Sun-Seeker is a tale of disaster in its many guises: fi erce storms, unrequited love, starvation, Fey folk who think they’re helping, sinfully poor hospitality and a little bit of time travel. Jack ends up finding Princess Winnowin, who does not need or want rescue. The only way back, to rescue those who need rescue, goes through the lands of the Fey, where time and space do not work properly. Thus, the end runs into the beginning. Jack must choose again whether he wants to be a hero or just another bard.
That’s the blurb I wrote, then they edited, then I pasted from the PDF, and then I fixed a couple of typos. Sigh. It is here more for my reference than yours, but enjoy.
We also learned this month:
A compressor fan motor for an 10 year old AC and a front axle for a 20 year old truck both cost just over a thousand dollars to replace.
First: Go Action Fun Time next Tuesday May 4, 2021. It will be weird, but it will have nothing to do with Star Wars. I will post Discord and Owlbear info in this space when I know them, and we are close enough that they will not expire.
Now traffic:
Given the amount I drive, and how little of that driving occurs under the speed limit, it is amazing that I am not an expert regarding the ins and outs of traffic court. But, as reality plays out, I have not had a ticket since 2001, when paying over the phone wa weird, and paper checks were still sort of normal.
If, hypothetically, you were to receive a traffic citation in Yuma County AZ, [see last post] it is cheaper and easier just to pay the ticket than to try a go to traffic school. Let’s say, for discussion, the cost of just paying the ticket was given by the AZ Highway Patrol as $247.
But according to one of the hundreds of traffic schools, this would be the cost of taking the class:
Calculate Total Cost
Violation Date
Before 04/01/21
As of 04/01/21
Course Fee
$27.95
$27.95
Processing Fee
$10.00
$10.00
State Fee
$24.00
$24.00*
State Surcharge
$45.00
$45.00
Court Fee
$160.00
$160.00
Total Cost
$266.95
$266.95
The only advantage to going through this exercise is to keep the points off of your license.
If you’re in your fifties, and haven’t had a ticket in 20 years, as I have, there is no effect on your insurance rates.
So I paid the bastards, or rather their 3rd party internet service, and felt shame.
Now, business:
Pirates rarely got rich.
For UnObtanium Bazaar, the Las Vegas Pirate Fest represented a best case scenario for gauging the economics of vending. We had reasonable fees (Cheryl is local to Las Vegas), and a huge gate and, as it turns out, a great location across from the turkey legs.
So we did well. We made more money on the Saturday than we had made in the entirety of any previous festival.
Even so, our gross for the weekend was still well under my bi-weekly salary check. So we aren’t about to quit our jobs for this.
That said, our worst case scenario, being London Bridge Renn Faire (Small market over Easter weekend during a heatwave) still made us some money.
So the hobby reliably pays for itself and a little more. Good enough.
Proposed artwork – but damn!
I actually have some editorial deadlines.
I have until May to finish my editorial review of Taliesin’s Last Apprentice – the sequel to Beanstalk and Beyond.
I’ll admit it: I groaned when My Beloved Suns traded Ricky Rubio for Chris Paul. After all, in the shortened 2020 season Rubio was averaging more assists than Paul (who then playing for the Thunder) while scoring only 3 fewer PPG on a Suns team that really didn’t need him to score anymore. And they went 8-0 in the Bubble with Rubio running the point.
The difference is defense and a culture of defense. Rubio is a good defender, but not the legend that Chris Paul is (6 time steals leader, 9 time All-Defensive team). And while Rubio was an established veteran who had won championships in Europe, he did not have the credibility or personality to herd a bunch of young wildcats into playing team defense.
Chris Paul is on those boys All The Time, and they are responding. Sometimes I wonder if Monty Williams’s true role is to attend meeting with management and do the paperwork.
You still feel for Rubio – who was doing a good job, and looking forward to a near-certain playoff run with the Suns this year, instead of maybe playing into the playoffs with his final destination, the Minnesota Timberwolves. But then I reflect that he’s still a millionaire, and the Suns are legit contenders now.
The little mountain range that separates Yuma from the rest of the damn desert is called the Fortuna Foothills. The Border Patrol no longer regularly operates the checkpoint going east into the pass, but it has become a favorite haunt of the Arizona Highway Patrol.
The speed limit on the winding, splitting I-8 through that portion is 55. Not 65.
Just east of the pass there is a safety pull-out and the Az state trooper will be happy to follow you into it, if, for some reason, you are pulled over coming down the pass.
Sometimes its good to be 54, with papers in order.
There are a ridiculous number of online traffic schools listed with azdrive.com.
I got my first vaccination shot. The day after, I came down with what passes – for me- as COVID symptoms: achy with no temperature, but likely elevated blood pressure. (I did not check). This might have been compounded by my thinking “Nah, my arm doesn’t hurt enough to stop me from finishing this yard work”. Two hours later I’m putting away the tools because it has become clear I will not have the energy to do anything else. I was laid up the rest of the day.
I have to bury that story in my blog instead of telling it on Facebook, because I don’t want to hear about from the crazies. Two days after the shot, I was able to go to work, and the only pain I have is clearly from yardwork.
Also, I am officially in the editing phase of Taliesin’s Last Apprentice (the sequel to the Beanstalk and Beyond) and we are hoping for a November release date.
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What Have We Learned? 