Let The Good Times Roll!
One of the traditional events is the Shoebox Float contest. I made one the first year we had the party and it was a Ken Doll in a sea scene. Of course, he was wearing Parrot Head gear: swimsuit, coconut bra, decorated hat and a gold glitter mask. He's still sitting on the shelf in my bathroom and The Rocket Scientist thinks it's sick and wrong. Apparently, he's got a thing against men in women's apparel.
Anywhoo, I decided to rope The Rocket Scientist into helping me build a float this year. I thought the theme Beach House On The Moon was a good idea for us. I figured I got the Buffett stuff covered and I knew TRS would be all over the moon piece.
Boy, was he ever!
Forming a moon crater.
I thought I was going to be the creative force and he would be my construction crew. Turns out that he's quite creative and most of the ideas were his. He was the primary construction person, too. I did the beach house, the sea scape and he did all the rest.
I learned a lot about the mind of the engineer during this project. First, they're obsessed by scale. We bought a set of space toys and our Saturn V was barely taller than our astronauts. Clearly, that was wrong since the Saturn V is 110 meters long. Also, our LEM didn't have a steering wheel. Jeesh. Shoddy toy making there. They're big on building protoypes, too.
There's an episode of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise gets taken over my an android named Norman (it was one of the Harry Mudd shows). Norman just shut himself down on the bridge and wouldn't respond to anyone. That's exactly how TRS looked several times during building. I would say, "What?" and he'd reply, "I'm just thinking." A few moments later, he'd start in on building something.
We worked on the float over a couple of weeks. While it was fun, I did not enjoy the fact that my dining room was a frakking disaster. I was soooooo happy to be able to clean it up on Sunday morning.
We put a lot of small touches on it. The windows had Jimmy and various Coral Reefers in them and we thought the beer cases and the satellite dish were nice additions. There were also lights over the front door and in a little beach fire. And, of course, a fantastic palm tree. The palapa roof was version 2.0. I hated 1.0 so TRS configured a new one for me.
Notice Earth rise in the back with the space shuttle in front of it. It was supposed to fly back and forth but we had a polarity/torque conflict so the Lego gears didn't work the way we wanted. And by we, I mean TRS. I wouldn't have known where to begin on that one.
Winners!
There were some awesome entries in the float contest but we won! I don't know the judging criteria but I'm thinking we got bonus points for the Buffett theme. I told TRS to keep the trophy until next year's event (it's a travelling prize) since he did the vast majority of the work. Next year, we're building it at his house. I love having a clean dining room table again!
