Lee.org

Fri
10-6 work (and some constructive commenting on TVR’s practices (I find that more rewarding than work))
6-7 commute home
7-7:30 freshen up & walk to Dark Room
7:30-9:15 Perform at the Dark Room
9:15-10:30 dinner with Crism and AJ at Cancun… and then dinner with the rest of the cast who strolled in as they were getting ready to leave
10:30-1… umm, those are the mystery hours. I have no idea what I did then.
1 sleep

Sat
10-12 futz
12-1:30 watch English Wheel video and clean house
1:30-2:30 lunch at Paplote, chat with a nice lady in line and then we decided to eat together. She loves doing stained glass art like I enjoy building giant art.
2:30-3 drive to Box Shop
2:20-6 bang metal and oogle at power tool drag racers under construction
6-7:15 drive home, freshen up, walk to The Dark Room for my performance
7:15-9:30 perform and hang out backstage
9:30-12 wander the streets, find a broken vacumm cleaner and drive it around. pizza at Arinells, look for but not find Michael (Improv classmate) at Uptown at 17th (not 16th!) and Capp
12 sleeeeep

sun
10-12 wake slowly & futz around house
noon-2:30 power tool drag races and talking to Charlotte
2:30-3 drive to improv
3-5:30 improv class
5:30-6:45 hang out with improv classmates Michael and Harmony outside class, talking and balancing balls on our heads
6:45-7:10 shove dinner down throat having just realized that there is a $5 improv show at 7pm
7-9 watch improv with Michael and Harmony (oops! I missed Bad Movie Night! It was Battlefield Earth, which promised to be REEALLLY bad!)
9-9:30 drive home
9:30-10 try to make auto-darkening welding helmet work right, pretty sure I’m not succeeding
10-10:10 write this, invent new emoticon: :^9
10:05-sometime take a long bath
Then sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

weird: A woman I met in line at East Bay Rats Fight Night… Nina(?) is good friends with Alicia, who played Rod Serling.
I missed Bad Movie Night, Saturday Kite Fight, a gun show at Cow Palace, and Running of the Bullshitteers

Tonight through Saturday, I’ll be performing in “The Twilight Zone” Plays at The Dark Room! Last night was the dress rehersal and it went really well. The 2 episodes we’re performing are funny, intense, campy, and profound all in one show. And it’s only $15. You should go!

I bought a large backpack the other day to put all my disaster stuff in. It’s really a nice backpack… good zippers, strong material.. and an innovative design; it’s actually 3 bags zipped together… a fanny pack, small backpack and large backpack. So you can unzip parts of it for day trips etc. And all of the straps can be tucked away to turn it into a regular piece of luggage.

But what stuck me is the price. Not the price I paid… which was an astoundingly low $30 at a little shop at 23rd and Mission. The shop very much an independent business, the salesman an eager hispanic man with few English words and the cashier a Chinese man with only a bit more English. I’ve seen vaguely similar bags for $100. And a few years ago, that bag would have cost $180. What got me was the tag I just found attached to the bag. The price tag reads “888.00 Yen”. The Yen trades at 113 to the dollar. That means somewhere in the world, this bag sells for the equivalent of about $8!

Wow.

Here is a photoalbum of my recent Easter / Ostara / Chobunnpeggelly luncheon party. (the 2 videos at the end only play in Internet Explorer, sorry)

It’s not a party until someone loses a mind!

Ordered from Harborfreight Fucking Harborfreight!

I just ordered from Harborfreight.com:

1 91310-4VGA 100 PC. SECURITY BIT SET 9.99 9.99
because I always wanted to be able to get behind those panels that I wasn’t supposed to. Not because I want to do anything bad, just because someone said, “No, you may not look here”

—

3 39440-5VGA PENCIL TORCH 5.99 17.97 I’ll be bringing the art of Peep Flambe to Burning Man. We had so much fun at the Chobunnpeggelly party torching peeps and making s’mores out of them, I thought the rest of the world might like to do so as well.

Update: 2 of the 3 pencil torches leaked. After the event, I tried the last remaining one and it refused to fill. I threw them all out.

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1 4807-0VGA 5 PC. PRECISION PLIER SET 9.99 9.99 I’ve misplaced a pair of pliers that my grandfather owned. They’ll turn up, they’ll turn up. But in the mean time, I need some needlenose pliers for all my working with model airplanes and such.

Update: The pliers suck. The wire cutters won’t cut even 28 gauge wire.

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2 42428-2VGA SPLIT LEATHER WORK GLOVES 0.99 1.98 Ninety-nine cent gloves! And they might be good gloves. They’ll probably end up being either alternative gloves for working in the shop (instead of always using my welding gloves) or go in my disaster go-bag.

Update: The leather work gloves are awful. They stink of some awful awful rubbery-chemical smell. I tried to wash the smell out and the sink turned black black for several minutes. Apparently, they hadn’t been dyed well at all. Now I have 2 pair of slightly damp, terribly smelly, color bleeding gloves. I put them in the closet inside a plastic bag to keep the smell at bay but the smell leached out and gave me a headache! I discarded them.

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2 3015-1VGA 80″ x 60″ WOOL BLANKET 5.99 11.98 I had said to myself that I’d just put my sleeping bag in my go-bag but then I remembered that it was snug -inside- my duvet cover… so I’m getting a spare blanket.

Update: The wool blankets smelled like another kind of death. I tried putting them in a washing machine. The second they hit the water, the water turned bright red. The dye apparently hadn’t set. When I took them out of the machine, my hands turned red and they smelled just as horrid. I threw them out.

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1 46157-1VGA SELF-POWERED AM/FM RADIO/FLASHLIGHT 9.99 9.99
disaster go-bag. I’m a bit miffed that I recently purchased a $60 Freeplay radio that appears to do everything identically.

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1 47873-4VGA 16 OZ. RIP HAMMER WITH FIBERGLASS HANDLE 4.99 4.99 It’s good to have a hammer for occational tasks. It’s not a snazzy $30 hammer but an acceptable pound of steel on a stick. It’ll do.

Update: The hammer is a laughing stock. This is the pièce de résistance. How do you screw up a piece of metal on a stick? How?! I’ll tell you how. I can understand that the fiberglass handle transmits vibration poorly in a $5 hammer, I’m cool with that. But then, you make the head too convex and very smooth so that the hammer has no sweet spot; every strike glances off. You put the center of gravity far away from the head so it twists out of your hand when you miss the (non-existent) sweet spot. Friends have tried the hammer and they agreed with me.

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4 40030-1VGA 2 PC. COOLMAX(TM) DISPOSABLE RESPIRATORS 3.99 15.96 For my go-bag and to be brought to the playa.

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1 91214-2VGA BLUE FLAME DESIGN AUTO DARKENING WELDING HELMET 59.99 59.99 This is the only thing I -needed- in this whole order. Why did I get all that other crap? I’m getting this for my summer project MIG welding waaay too much this summer.

Update: The welding helmet works perfectly 90% of the time, making it completely worthless. 9 times out of 10 it auto-darkened instantly. That last time, it would take a full 1/4 second and I’d be fucking blinded.

Blogging has just taken a back seat lately to actually doing the things I might blog about :-)

When Charlotte was here, we went non-stop… From the 13th til the 22nd. I was -going- to chronicle it all for you my gentle reader but what do you care? So I’ll just blather about it randomly (isn’t that so much better?)

Shopped at Rainbow Grocery for like 2 hours for a fantastic Chobunnpeggelly Easter/Ostara lunch. Had fun frustration with all the fun things to buy… such that we needed to rest on that bench near the cosmetics.

Astounding Chobunnpeggelly lunch with 6 people in my tiny place (Crism, AJ, Vickie, Charlotte, Ion, and myself) with toys and eating too much chocolate and tremendous amounts of cheer and smiles and mimosas.

Tango at The Metronome, Tango at Cell Space… Drove around including Fort Funston… umm, what else.

This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I showed up at The Box Shop (the home studio of the Flaming Lotus Girls and other groups). This was the first Wednesday I got around to showing up since Jessica Rabbit had invited me at Decompression last year. Wednesday was mostly talk about what’s going to happen and how work is being divvied up. I showed up Thursday because a team was meeting to make the flaming teeth of this 170′ serpent thing they’re making. Fire, fire, heh heh, fire! We played with propane and plasma cutting but didn’t get too far. I showed up Friday because that’s when the spine crew was meeting. Turned out that… umm, I think I was the only newbie that showed up. And after some time helping out I (foolishly?) committed to becoming a good enough MIG weldor to help put together the 116 or so 24 gauge sheet steel formed pieces into vertebrae!

Saturday I went to a Giants vs Diamondbacks game at Telephone Company Park with Barry and… oh my, I don’t know the relation… brother-in-law? and brother-in-law? It was a whole day and evening affair :-)

Sunday morning I went back to The Box Shop for MIG welding lessons but I could only stay til 2. I had an Improv class at BATS in Fort Mason. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon on the phone and catching up with little details like writing blog entries.

(via my good friend Eric’s TGIF Humor list)

Sandia’s Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

Sweet. But doesn’t.. err that imply that larger fusion plants already exist?

(check out the associated photo. It’s hella-cool.)

I present this to you without comment

—-/ The Tentacle List /———————————————–

Power Tool Drag Races Wants YOU!

Have an idea in the back of your brain? Do you go into shiny-thing vapor-lock at the hardware store? Do you have niggling fears that the truth about the relative size and capacity of your reproductive organs will come out in a sordid manner if you do not prove their worthiness?

Well friends, worry no more, because do *I* ever have an outlet for *you*!!!

Build a Power Tool Drag Racer!

Increase your mojo! Impress the opposite sex! Get smelly, sunburnt people to buy you beer! Yes, building a power tool racer will provide you with all of these things and MORE!!

What’s a power tool drag racer, I hear you cry? My goodness people, crawl out from under the rock and visit http://
www.powertooldragraces.com! See the legacy of stunning and
wonderous creations from the finest in redneck engineering! Watch them career down our patented* 75-foot track to the applause and screams of children and adults scattering to get out of harm’s way!

It all happens SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY May 7th, 2006, from high noon til we’re done!

Details on tickets, and Most Importantly, on HOW TO REGISTER YOUR RACER are at http://www.powertooldragraces.com

Have you built a racer before? Have you ever complained that you didn’t know who was racing next? Could you not hear the pit runner over the screamingly loud noises emanating from the end of the track? Did you piss and moan because we forfeited you because you were out back getting wasted with Ed because you had given up on ever knowing what was going on, race-wise, ever again?

Well my friends, this is our solution. Our registration software,
Buildersdb, is run by a punk kid in his bedroom out in New Orleans, and it pretty much makes all the pain of race day go away.
YES! Not only will you ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN YOU ARE RACING, but you will even know WHO WON and WHAT THEIR TIME WAS. As an added bonus, Simone gets to skip her yearly aneurysm, you won’t get yelled at by Dave if you breathe wrong and the announcers will actually know what to say next. Hell, they might even be accurate.

And ALL THIS from ONE five-minute session of tippy-tappying away on your little keyboard.

So, ALL of you enthusiastic builders out there, REGISTER FOR THE RACES.

Seriously, it takes five minutes and it’s super easy. If you Don’t Register, you don’t get to complain, so here’s your opportunity!

Visit http://www.powertooldragraces.com to get started! ]

Visit http://www.powertooldragraces.com/rules for all the rules for building a racer you’ll ever need in your life.

Holy smokes kids, sometimes it’s *almost* like we know what we are doing.

“Time is short so get to building….. I can build a Power Tool Drag Racing machine in one day….. Can you?”
–Steven Nelson, Seventeen-time PTDR participant and Token Redneck

Once more, questions, complaints, love letters and small bills can be directed to simone at qbox dot org.

*not really

—-/ Contact Info /—————————————————-

Simone Davalos
simone@qbox.org
415 307 3482
www.powertooldragraces.com

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Everything happens on Wednesday!

Tonight I have

The Be Nice Party
cleanup apartment for Frau’s visit
Building Big Art at The Box Shop
Tango Class at Vima
Cell Space Alternitive Milonga
Writing a biz plan for a solar rebates program
Write up and send some stuff to Crism

I think I’m only going to get to #2 and #6 and hopefully #7.

Sunday night I saw White Comanche at The Dark Room at Bad Movie Night. I laughed so hard, I walked out with a limp.

Ask A Ninja

I tried out to be one of four Rod Serlings in The Twilight Zone at The Dark Room next month. Though it wasn’t side splitting like the stuff above, I really enjoyed the lesson/audition that Jim Fourniadis gave. I was reminded that acting is a very precise art. I was turned down for the part (phew! I was really concerned about playing such a key, tempo-setting role my first time out!) but the audition was great fun and rewarding!

I have a role onstage for the first week’s episodes of Twilight Zone in May! This is the first time I’ve been onstage since… well, there was the final project in front of my Drama 010 class as a junior in college. I did a Cyrano de Bergerac monologue that I deftly turned into a dialogue because I couldn’t remember all the lines after 3 full nights of rehearsing at home. :-(

Before that, in high school, I played Dan in Cheaper by the Dozen. I had 4 lines and a gaff with a toga. I fondly recall the horror of changing into my toga one scene too soon on the second night of the show. That caused me to miss my cue by about 15 seconds and the gaff was ruined. But the lead, played by Kevin Someoneoranother was excellent. He stalled perfectly and then played right through it, finishing smoothly with, “And excellent, you’re already wearing the right outfit. I’ll see you [in two scenes].”

Another year in high school I played Dr. Fasbender in Revenge of the Pink Panther played with, if I remember correctly, some horrid German-ish accent. But it was mercifully only like 2 lines.

And before that… ummm… oh yes, I oiled the Tin Man in a grade school production of The Wizard of Oz. My one line was something like, “We’ll lube you up real nice” while I oiled his joints.

And there was a magic and talent show in Lynn Briggs garage performed for a rapt audience of parents when I was 9 or so. Unless I’m forgetting something, that’s about it, you have read my entire acting resume. But now……

Now, coming back from a long hiatus, I’ll be onstage May 4, 5 & 6 doing a “commercial” during the Twilight Zone show. I’ll be performing a dramatic reading of the back of a moist towelette package!

Seriously.