sugarpops and rainbows

i probably shouldn’t have posted that last ramble, but it felt good to do so. i’m not actually that depressed or disillusioned most of the time, but i have been sick all week and i am uncertain about my future and all that jazz.

i’m hopeful that moving out on my own will actually help with alot of this. most notably, going to the trouble of prepping everything i own, taking inventory and maybe eliminating some of the crap i don’t need anymore, that will be a big step. a proverbial load off my back.

once i have my own space, hopefully i can set up a more ideal working environment such that i can make better use of my free time on nights and weekends.

we’ll see. at the point that i’m an in an apartment my ‘drop down to 3-4 days a week’ options are severely limited.

i realized that my job consumes about 11 hours a day. eight hours of actual work for which i’m being paid, hour lunch, half hour walk to/from, half hour to get ready in the morning and half an hour to wind down when i get home. toss in eight hours sleep, an hour for making and eating dinner, and half an hour for a shower every night, and that’s not even four hours free time on weekdays.

and that’s with a measly half hour commute either way. at least i get plenty of exercise this way. but i get more drawing done during lunch hour than any other time of the week. that’s got to change.

unfortunately, the solution to that problem will cost me about forty-fifty bucks. i have an art table and i have an extra office chair, but it’s too short. so i need a new one. there’s a good basic one at freddies that i want, and i have a larger one in the same style that was totally worth the money, but i just don’t have it right now unless i cancel my weekend in puyallup. and that’s not going to happen.

at least i have that to look forward to, though.

saw the incredibles again at the laurelhurst saturday night, and today i watched the ring which is totally creepy. i want to see ring 2 in march, the life aquatic right now, and i’m starting to be pretty interested in constantine, which i think is due pretty soon. it could be awful but it has potential, and the newest batch of trailers makes it look a lot less retarded than i first thought. he may be keanu reeves with a gun-cross instead of, say, a chainsmoking clive owen, but it has rachel weisz and demons and magic and i’m excited.

i should see million dollar baby but i doubt i will unless/even if laurelhurst gets it. more likely i’ll just go see dirty harry there next week.

the no toysrus thing is working out allright. bigbadtoystore had the new marvel legends ghost rider toy and the hella-good votc yoda i wanted for good prices, so i snagged them. and a guy on ebay had both the ml ultimates captain america and the robotmasters optimus prime for good prices, so i snagged those as well.

while i was at lloyd center, buying new work pants at old navy(i’m two sizes smaller, and they were on sale!) i compulsively walked by suncoast just to make sure they hadn’t gotten in any new lotr figures.

they had! not only did they have the superposable boromir and sp shagrat(the uruk leader at cirith ungul) for six bucks, but they had half a dozen others i wanted but hadn’t seen cheaply, AND the new sp strider i hadn’t found yet. (un)fortunately, sp greydalf, sp samwise, sp strider, and sp denethor(why the steward of gondor is superposable, i don’t really know) weren’t quite what i wanted, so i passed on them.

have to check ebay for the peter jackson as a hobbit figure.

the toy biz lotr figures are very very nice half the time, and not quite there half the time. shagrat is fully posable, even having a mid-chest joint so he can arch his back, under his rubber chest armor. his rubber skirt armor doesn’t restrict his leg movement, so he can be fully armored while still making use of his super-articulation. but his sword looks way too small. i gave him the giant sword from the berzerker uruk-hai, which was too small in my eyes for the berzerker from the movie, but works pretty well as an uruk captain’s broadsword. all the swords feel too small, i don’t know if they really are or if they just feel that way. i could live with inaccuracy if they looked more impressive in the figures hand.

boromirs’ tunic is soft rubber, but his big upper sleeves are hard plastic, which ends up limiting the range of his elbow joints. could be worse i suppose. his ’skirt’ is flexible as well, but it’s ankle length and only open in front so it doesn’t work as well. i need to look around at fabric stores for some nice black cloth that hangs well in small scales so i can make a fully posable ringwraith, and if i can find some nice black leathery stuff, i can rework boromir to have a more flexible cape and tunic.

at that point though, i’m not sure i’ll bother with the small scale. and really, i’m not hardcore enough to want to do that much work. i like the idea of 12″ dolls/figures of the fellowship with full on quality outfits, but i’d much rather just take the fully sculpted toy biz figures and fix them up a bit. boromir’s not going to be riding any horses or anything, so i don’t mind his harder skirt; i could give him a cloth cloak and leave it at that, or just ignore it altogether.

strider is going to cause me trouble. i had been planning a custom by giving the sp helm’s deep aragorn the coat and arms from an x2 nightcrawler, since i liked the look of that coat much better than all the ‘official’ strider figures. then i found out they were doing an sp strider, and i figured it’d be vastly improved, like all their resculpts so far.

no dice. sp strider’s coat feels too bulky to mee, and his head is still way off. so is sp hd aragorn, but if i customize from that, at least i’ll like the coat. have to track those two base figures down though. i already have anduril; i bought a crappy king aragorn just for his sword. then i’ll have my perfect rotk aragorn, legolas, and gimli.