How I spent my day off
I took the day off work today, allegedly to start ripping up parts of the concrete driveway (our house has had a chequered past; one previous owner thought it would be just grand to put in a deck, another one thought that structural integrity was overrated, so they cut the front out of the garage so they could have room to fit a tall truck in (the garage had a truss running across the front so it could fit two vehicle doors and a regular door into an ~7 meter wide building. This meant you couldn't fit cars taller than 2.5 meters into the garage. This, apparently, wasn't enough, and look! if you bundled three 2x4s together and wedged them between the two vehicle doors you could cut out the truss and fit your 3 meter high TRUCK into the now scarily sagging building. When we moved in, I was thinking of closing off the garage and making it into a workshop, but after I saw the, um, enhancements I retreated at a dead run from the poor building), and one (probably the one who modified the garage) decided that it would be grand to replace 3 square meters of our pathetic little backyard with a concrete slab.)
At least that was the plan, and I did get started. But the bears had different ideas for how to spend my time:
Sometime last fall we were in Finnegans looking for a present for one of Russell's friends, and I spotted one forlorn little Exo-force Uplink kit sitting tucked into a shelf among a pile of (horrid) Bionicle dolls. Now, I read too much manga (and I watch too much anime,) so the thought of rescuing this little mech and a lego guy with anime hair™ was too much to pass by, so I forked out the US$5.00 and took it home.
At which point the bears fell absolutely in love with anime hair guys and mechs (almost as much as the lego Star™ Wars© guys) and went into an (ongoing) obsession with mechs, killer robots, and trying to acquire as many lego mechs as possible (there are 3-4 of the anime hair guys that they really love, but the others, eh, they don't really care, and I keep tripping over loose pieces of anime hair scattered around the house.) But eventually they decided that they didn't like the stock mechs, so they started to customise them, and the day came when Russell dismantled his Go Big Red Mech and wanted me to build him one from scratch. Okay, no problem there (front row left; the one with the blue leggings and the radar dish.) I built it, he loved it (as klunky as it was), and he used it to kill Evil Robots™, Clone Troopers™, Anakin Skywalker, and the occasional skeleton guy with great glee (Silas was still happy with his *his* Go Big Red Mech, and didn't want me to build him one from scratch.)
Sometime last week, Russell decided he wanted me to build him another mech. I put it off, and he kept asking, until I finally snapped last night and built him a second one (front row center; the one with the Ghost of Tom standing in front of it) which I finished this morning.
Well, when Silas caught wind of this and realized that Russell had two big mechs while he only had one, there was wailing and rending of garments in Chateau Chaos until I promised to build him one as well. So, after demolishing half a square meter of concrete (and catching up on breadmaking), we proceeded into the library and spent about 4 hours building another mech (front row right.)
It's not what I'd call a particularly productive use of time, except that not having fighting children is generally a Good Thing here in Chateau Chaos, but it's kind of fun trying to fit something together and make it look interesting but not so laughably unrealistic that even the bears would notice.
If I'm lucky, I'll be able to remove the remaining chunk of concrete tomorrow.