8/29/2005 - 63 days...

I awoke Sunday with a sharp pain in my throat, which made it difficult to swallow... so, naturally, I found time to work on props.

How hard is it, exactly, to sit down in front of a skeleton and apply gunk and paint? Compared to, say, going to a meeting at church where my voice would be non-existent and I'd be sweating and wincing and a total mess?

Without further ado, my wife took the kids to mass and food shopping, which gave me roughly three hours to blast through some much-needed and oft-ignored side projects, which included: creating dials for my Frankenstein life-support chamber, a process involving found jpegs of old electric meters, glued to 1/8 mounting board and cut by hand and backed with acetate to achieve a window effect, and finally, a duplicate copy of the jpeg glued to that, giving me a semi-translucent dail that could be lit from behind and look convincingly like an old junky dial.

Then, it was on to the boxes that the dial would it on. Black foamcore worked great, once I found my rabbet cutter (used to make joinery-quality joints in foamcore). Some old knobs, a few dials, and I had my life-support electrical bits.

Then, I moved on to my alien FCG... adding elbows, forearm texture, sash cord and basecoat to him...

Finally, I turned to my two-headed mummy, and in a fevered pitch, gave him the delightful blue cheese patina you see here...

... then the car pulled up, and it was off to take in the groceries.

A question... why is time stolen always so valuable and enriching?