she' more like an anal singer!

Working on catching up...been dealing with an injured pet that requires me to break my sleep...

utting this  in my games.

 Hey Folks. When i was a letterCarrier ( and  our  Union ..the NALC..shop steward),  I had our office  join in with  others across the Nation ( America) for the NALC food Drive.

This Saturday is the  day of the largest , one day, food drive in the world. Those in the United states   should have received  some form of notice in the mail. You put   Canned goods  and Non-perishables out  for the lettercarriers to pick Up . Helpers will also be  helping pick goods  up for the Food banks in their area.

If you are unsure, call you Post office  and  ask if they are taking part, and if they aren't ..ask them why!...

 before i made it to the Postoffice, i had a couple really bad years for the family  with Layoffs, thanks  to 'trickle down' crap. we had to use our food bank a couple times. It made me feel bad, But? I remembered where i came from..there were times  we lacked Volunteered, and My  late wife, Myself and my kids  would gather the  goods from porches  and from the letter carriers  trucks .

 Its a great way to help those in need, in your area.....now? back to our  regular scheduled  RP!

Okay...we've made it through light focus (in slightly-above-freezing weather...I think the wind-chill Tuesday was hovering around 35deg).  Got our extra stuff rigged and in the air (so far, at least...they're still talking about hanging four or five things but we don't have definite answers on what or where, yet), all the lights we had to remove so I could paint the stage are put back down and wired up again, and we're starting in on fixing up illusions (found out that two of them belonged to a magician who died under questionable circumstances and was found partially eaten by his pet tiger...made by a guy who used to make illusions for David Copperfield, and then when he started making variations of those illusions for other people, was sued by Copperfield and decided to just retire at that point...so two of the illusions that we have are the ONLY versions of those particular illusions that exist...some people have made knock-offs of the design (once you understand how they do these illusions, it's actually not too difficult to design your own version of them...a guy that used to perform for us at the park actually made his own version of one of them in his mom's garage...using wood instead of aluminum for the frame, so it was significantly heavier.  And it didn't have all the hydraulics and extra lighting bits and pieces.  But it was the same basic illusion...)

  I never  saw  a good Illusion in Real life...  i just wave off the stuff on TV ( a Tank vanishes  , while surrounded by  people  ect ect)

 and  never been to a place  where they had them.. Kennywood  had some kid of show, but my  late wife and I never bother to see it ,because  kids wante dto  do rides and games.

 Idlewild is smaller, and thier shows  are  singing  , dancing  with some jokes , so it would be neat to see something like that  in Real life.

Happy Birthday Don!!! from all the monkeys in your jungle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XRtNltvT8

Thank You Nikki... it  figures  it would be a red head!

Well...were it any other night of the week...or almost any other week this year...I'd already be home.  We had a rental for one of our screens in the late slot, a no-show for another, and the third ended about 40 minutes ago, so I could have closed up shop and gone home.  I've closed up shop...

But I still have a movie to finish copying from the hard drive, and then to the other screens (I think I'll just leave the servers powered up tonight and shut off all the lamps on the projectors, rather than stay until 3 am...) and another movie (Dune 2, so, a LONG movie which means a large movie file) that's copying to all the other screens.  Were it another week of the year, I would have already done all of this...or I would have been able to take the time, earlier, to come in and start everything copying so it would be done by now.

But we're having an interesting time at work.  Spent the day trying to troubleshoot yet another illusion that the director got from the magician who died.  We were in the middle of working on it when his all-purpose-mechanic-type guy started griping about no documentation, no video, no information on what was supposed to work and how, and said the director should call the guy up and demand some answers.  And Macyn and I both kinda grimaced, and said, "Well...he's dead."

"The magician's dead?"

"Yeah.  And the guy who built the illusion for him retired, like, twenty-five years ago and doesn't do this stuff anymore."

"There's no one who knows this thing?"

"Well...Tim (one of the contractors that the director works with on refurbishing a lot of his illusions) was the magician's tech assistant for a while...but that was a LONG time ago.  He's told us almost everything he remembers about it..."

Sometimes, when I stop and think about it, my job really does create some absolutely ridiculous scenarios...

 That sounds like a situation comedy  or even a cartoon..."  the  Guys dead"   " the other guys retired  1.4 of a centry ago"

 You need to write all this  down, and write a book,  Titled  "So you want to work at an amusment park.."

putting this in all my games

Happy Mothers day  to all  the mothers out there, as well as the single Dads  , who must be mothers!. Take time to recognize them on this special day!

Ah the time year where I madly panic that I’ve forgotten to get my mum anything before remembering that we had Mothers day back in March

Well, today was an exercise in frustration...

One of the illusions we're using this year was a recent purchase, and when the director bought it, he paid someone to refurbish it.  It looks great...but it has some mechanical issues.  One of them is a little latch on the inside...it's supposed to hold two doors closed.  When we got the illusion, the latch was positioned in such a way that NEITHER door could close, much less be held shut by it.  One of the first tasks I got when we kicked into high gear on show prep was repositioning that latch...

When the director called the guy who did the refurb, and asked why he got something that so obviously did NOT work, the refurb guy basically said, "Hey, I just made it look pretty, I didn't fix anything..."  So, I moved the latch...but overcompensated, and while it wouldn't stop the doors from closing, it wouldn't hold them.  So, we moved it again, to where we thought it needed to be...and it kept interfering with one of the doors.

So, today, they asked me to replace it with a barrel-bolt latch.  Simple mechanism, should have been a very brief, simple job...emphasis on "should have been..."

I spent all afternoon and a good chunk of the evening working on that damn thing.  Got the bolt section mounted on one door, went to attach the receiver to the other door, and found out the gap between the doors was big enough that the bolt wouldn't fully engage.  Thought I could get away with building a backing plate that would extend into the gap and let me mount the receiver right next to the bolt.  Spent WAY too much time on fabricating that, got it done, but the whole latch assembly in place (I put pop rivets through the holes to hold it in place until I knew...otherwise, I would have wasted even MORE time).  Found out that, with nothing solid to hold onto, the barrel bolt latch was useless...you hold the doors closed, slide the bolt, let go of the doors, and they both swing open together and the bolt slides right out of the receiver....

So, I had to reconfigure and reposition AGAIN the original latch mechanism.  I wasn't working on it non-stop...but I feel like I spent five or six hours on what should have been a ten-minute fix, and the final solution was just a position and minor hardware adjustment of what it started out with.  Beating my head against the proverbial wall...

 That'[s the Most  scary words to ever  say.

 "this shouldn't take  long"....or.." just a few minutes"

I always thought 'Oops...Uuhhh-uuummmm?!' was the scariest personally.

Uh-oh is up there

"WTF!"......"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"..."NO! NOT THTA ONE!"

there are a few.

Oh fuck is another one

:;chuckles:: I used  to  mutter , under  my breath... 'ffffffuuuccckkk." when something i didn't like, or  stupid  happened.

 the first time me and my late  wife  saw the Movie 'Major league"... Ricky Vaugn  got  Glasses and everyone  was looking at him ... Coach was was smiling... the  achololic  older pitcher  said he has a pair just like that.. the catcher   smiled and said..'seeing's the most important thing"

 Westly Snipes shook his head  and  said " its not that important!"

 The  Ricky   looks in the mirror  and says.... ' Fffffuuuucckk" real softly.

 My wife  says ..'he's you!"

few years ago was having day surgery on my hand.  I was awake but there was a cloth so I couldn't see anything. about 1/3 of the way through heard my doctor go "shit! slippery little git!" everyone looked at him. he apologized to me. we all laughed. he had the cyst that was in my hand and was tugging it out gently and it slipped out of the tweezers. he got it out a moment later. went home in my 'baby seal clubbing bandage' as I called it. it got better.

I try to be selective about when I use certain profanity, so there were a lot of times yesterday that I caught myself at "motherf..." as I was trying to figure the stupid thing out.

And, just to prove that you can never predict what I'm going to be doing on any given day...as I was getting ready to leave for work, the production manager texted me, to inform me that the Sign Shop had requested my help, and that what they were doing was a higher priority than anything they had on the list for me...so I was being loaned out for the day.

Turned out, I was still working on the show...they're making a big sign with the show name, and my job was to assemble clear acrylic letters (about 15-18 inches tall) in the way they wanted them displayed (there were two of each letter in the title...connected with clear acrylic spacers about 4" long...this is all CNC-cut 1/2" thick clear polycarbonate...)  Spent eight hours doing that...finished, thanks to the guy from the tool crib downstairs coming up at what would normally be the end of his shift and doing one part of the process so I could focus on the other part.  And then I spent another two hours helping clean up the theater because the park is open during the day tomorrow for school groups.  I don't know if it's tendonitis or arthritis, but both thumbs hurt, and I found out that CNC-cut polycarbonate can give you very nasty paper-cut-style injuries.

But they're done, and that puts the sign shop ahead of schedule on that particular project...

 so, Roy?  the other guy had to help you after his shift was ended?...did you work past your shift as well?

Never saw  letters like that close up or handled them But  I imagine, if they are newer, they would have  Sharp edges from the molds?

I feel fir you - once in the distant past I made a shop sign for a friend, backlit acrylic letters...

Never again. That sort of craft is NOT my thing!

finally got some plants for my new deck and therapy
so been singing this all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVkMoXTlrrI

In reply to Admiral Hack (msg # 180):

Well, my shift was scheduled to be until 10:30 pm with the option to stay later if production meeting ran long, so, no, I didn't stay after my shift.

His shift also started 4 hours earlier than mine did...

And it's been a LONG time since anyone would have tried making letters like that with molds.  CNC machines have been around for decades, and before that, they probably would have used a band saw or something similar to cut clean edges on multiple layers at the same time (limited somewhat by the weight of the material you're cutting, but there are ways to minimize those problems, too...)  I was cutting some ABS pipe with a bandsaw tonight (had to install some plumbing for the output of a fog machine on one of the illusions) and ABS can get a pretty crisp edge from cutting, as well...but a bandsaw is nowhere near the precision of CNC and laser cutters.

only 'in person'  cutters like that i saw , was the plasma torch we had  at the factory i worked at. It was  Class 1, which meant it was a top tier  skill to have..i never  went near it.. one  wrong  cut ( you had to set the automation)..and  100's of Thousands  of  dollar  would  go down the drain...

it was weird waiting  8 torch nozzles  cutting  1 inch plate, under water. like  some  odd looking  Spiralgraph...The funny thing is , the  guy who ran it, couldn't   play a intellivison, let along run a computer  machine..but they learned...and  yes, some of them would flick the machine on and  read  a magazine  or  do busy work..and look up to find out they started it  1/4  inch to the right...

so? i have never  seen a  machine like you talk of!