2024 Model Show

08.25.2024

Last year I found out about the Huntsville plastic model show the day after it ended, when I was looking at the website of one of the attending vendors. I thought that might have been fun, so I made a Google Calendar note when they announced the next show - Aug 24, 2024. That date was one I actually kept up with and would monitor the sponsoring group's Facebook page to make sure I both had the right date and that the date didn't change.

Saturday of the show came and I was ready to go. I had no idea what to really expect. I've seen videos of various model show/contests online and most have a section of models on display for judging, and then a section of vendor tables that pretty much reminds me of flea markets. My plan was to go and look at the models on display, then check out vendors to see if there was anything special enough that I didn't think I could get locally or online - and there, I wasn't really expecting anything or have a "must buy something before leaving" urge.

The show info had vendors showing up at 8:00 to start setup, model contest entries/admission starting at 9:00, contest judging starting at 1:00. 11:00 seemed like the right time for me to show up. Everyone setting up should be set, and the 1st wave of hardcore people would be done doing whatever people do. It was an oddly pleasant 83° when I arrived shortly after 11:00. I went in and to the left were models on display, to the right 4 rows of 10-12 tables per row of vendors.

The lines winding through the contest models were, for me, a little narrow and not moving in an easily navigable direction, so I opted to go right and browse vendor tables. Along the right-most wall I kind of scanned while walking by - old cars... old military planes.. old cars... old cars ... really old cars... random aircraft. This continued along the length of the wall, where I ran into why I don't go to conventions, shows - basically any large-group thing occupied by people interested in the subject/hobby a lot more than I am.

3 hrs from when people started coming in, 5 minutes after I entered, I walked into a wall that is best described as the odor of old man musk on a hot day plus onions. Once I smelled it, I had a hard time getting away from it. I continued walking the tables and almost speed-browsing as I continued to see car... car... Corsair... Apache... car.. It was here that I ran into a more random, but oft present, reason for not going to special-interest-group centered events.

The random person milling about is oblivious to anyone else, which generally steers them toward coming across as an asshole. I first noticed this when looking (from a couple of feet away) at 3ft high stacks of boxes filled with models atop a table. An old guy in blue shorts is suddenly standing in front of me. Ok, he's not moving. I move to the right to see the next stack. He soon moves to the right and is still right in front me. Even better - I swear he's an onion-smell source. I skip down to the end of the next table, skipping about 4 rows, and there's fewer people so I move in a little closer to the stacks. Maybe a minute later, blue shorts shows up beside me and is trying to wedge in as if I'm in his way. Deciding to go look at other tables, on a return pass I found out blue shorts was working and moving models around/filling empty slots as they were being sold. Had there been any empty spots where I was looking before, I might have given him a pass here.

But in general, people just weren't paying attention to other people moving about. Maybe I'm more cognizant of this as I can inadvertently mow somebody down with my mass if I'm not paying attention, but fully 1/4 of the men there - and let's face it, there's maybe 4 women at this thing - these are dudes close to my size. It was here I thought back to my string of 1-and-done events: Star Trek convention, Wrestlemania, comic/gaming things I can't remember any details of right now. It looked like "model show" was going to enter that list.

I went and looked at some of the model contest entries. I started on the side that had naval ships and sci fi - the combo of which took up 1 row of tables. The other 5 or 6 rows were cars and aircraft/military, and still seem to have the awkward path to view. Along the back wall were some dioramas, which was a category I specifically wanted to see as that's a little more geared toward my game-painting mindset. I managed to look at some of the aircraft as I looped my way out, and all were good but they just seemed kind of generic-good. I say that as someone who hasn't been able to finish the last 4 model kits I started because I get frustrated with how badly things seem to fit together.

I had reached the point I wanted - browsed vendor wares, looked at some models. The odor had lessened so I went for another quick browse of vendor tables. One had a couple of Tamiya Porsche models that had caught my eye on the initial go around, which unfortunately was where the old man + onion had kicked in. While looking along tables as I walked by, it really was 90% cars/military that I've always seen. I reached the spot with the Tamiya models I'd seen from a distance and looked closer. One was still in the shrinkwrap. Another was open, so I checked to make sure it had everything since that's something you're supposed to do. Then I noticed sitting below the table was a Trek Enterprise with the Light & Sounds kit. I opened up the box to see what was inside, as the honestly friendly guy on the other side of the table said in his best faux-car-salesman voice "what's it going to take to take that home with you today" as he mentioned something about the rarity. There were no instructions for the kit, and it was marked at $50. Even missing instructions, that sounded like a good price for a kit that came out in 1991. We chatted and I added the 2 Porsche models to the Enterprise and managed a 10% discount.

With that, I was out the door and continued on to have lunch with my good close personal friend Charles G. Part of lunch was showing him the pics below. Most of the story time details while viewing pics were about the smell. I started out with no real expectations and a very low bar. I think that's where I left this adventure out. Would I go again? Not unless the vendor who's website I originally learned of this event attend again - as they tend to stock more than cars and military models. Of course, all of those are available for purchase online. If I modelled well enough to enter the contest, that might be interesting. Based on how my re-entry to model making has gone over the past couple of years, I don't think my skills will reach a level I'm comfortable being judge in public for quite some time.

Permalink models road trip

Birthday Week Recap

03.11.2019

My birthday week didn't exactly go off like I'd planned. I didn't do as much hobby-oriented what- not as I had planned, but I still marked some things off my list.

I wrapped up my Top 10 Movies viewing, which was truly a Top 10 I was In The Mood To Watch That I Hadn't Seen Recently. Wrapping up from the first 2 I listed last time:

• Green Mile (1999) - Favorite Tom Hanks Drama. It was close between this and Forrest Gump.
• Raid: Redemption (2011) - Favorite Jakartan Action Movie.
• Inception (2010) - Favorite Movie (and it hurts a little to admit that, but it's true).
• I Am Legend (2007) - Favorite Vampire (technically) Movie.
• Oblivion (2013) - Favorite Tom Cruise Movie, although Minority Report pairs well with I Robot, which sounds a little out of the blue but when the list is "in the mood to watch that I hadn't seen recently" some odd things do and don't make the cut, which can then influence other options.
• Desperado (1995) - Former Favorite Movie. I don't know what "favorite" category I'd put this in, but I still greatly enjoy this movie. And I quote it way too much, still.
• 2012 (2009) - Favorite Disaster Movie, because it's got all the disasters.
• About Time (2013) - This might be more of a chick flick than Some Kind of Beautiful, except there's no "lost love" act in the middle to overcome.

Kind of interesting that the newest movies on the list are from 2013. Maybe I need a new list - favorite movies from the past half-decade?

I finally made it to Gardendale to have lunch at the closest Shrimp Basket. Beach food not at the beach isn't as good as it is at the beach. A ~90 minute drive to find this out is a lot better than the 6 hrs it takes to reach the beach, though. On the way back, there was a wreck on 65 roughly 5 minutes after I got back on to the interstate. It was bad enough that the interstate became a parking lot for 90 minutes. This was the 2nd time I've been parked on an interstate, the first time being about 12 years ago - both times involved some type of wreck with a tractor trailer, but I've never known any other details for the cause of either. Interesting thing that's happened both times - somebody had a football and started tossing it around.

My old man moment of being stuck - I had to pee about 20 min into being parked, and didn't know how long I was going to be there. So I waved politely to the trucker behind me and aimed to the shoulder, after making sure no emergency vehicles were flying past, and I relaxed my bladder and for the first time ever I peed on an interstate. 50. Peeing on the road. That's me.

I wrapped up the week by getting sick. After catching Strep 3 weeks ago, I was paranoid when the same symptoms hit me Saturday. For someone who doesn't go to the doctor very often, I've now been twice inside a month. Good news though, I don't have Strep. Or the Flu. Just a really bad sinus infection, but without being stopped up like I am with every other sinus infection. A shot in the butt, various drugs, and I should hopefully be feeling fine in a few days. 50 year old me has different symptoms, this is going to take a little getting used to.

Permalink movies/tv/dvd rambling road trip

Nashville Trip

06.24.2018

Nashville has long been my close/weekend getaway spot, but last week said location became the target of a business trip. Is training business? It think it is.

Back in March I took a class in Nashville to become a Certified Scrum Master. This time I went back to become an Advanced Certified Scrum Master. Same venue. Same trainer. I even managed to stay in the same hotel room.

Advanced Scrum Mastering involves a lot of facilitation. Since March, I've learned that was a skill I was especially lacking. Besides being the second of three certifications on my current career track, learning how to (better) facilitate made me want to take the class RIGHT NOW. So I did.

I learned a lot in the 2 days of class. I learned things I was doing wrong. I learned I was just not doing some things that I thought I was - the difference between coaching and mentoring sneaks up on me faster and harder than I would have thought. I lucked out again with class and was with a good group of 20 people. Within that group I found that with any problem I thought I had coming into the class, at least one other people shared. It wasn't always the same person, and in a way that made me feel better.

As with any multi-day trip to Nashville, Dr Blondie is in charge of my evening meal selection as long as she's in town. Class was scheduled for the right week and she was, indeed, in town. I give Dr Blondie a very specific rule for dining selection: No nation-wide chains. The local joints ruled again as we went 3/3 on good eats!

• The Grilled Cheeserie - Sunday found us at a hipster grilled cheese based eatery. You can get a basic grilled cheese or have them add some oomph. I had a Buffalo Grilled Cheese. You can go look at the menu for what all was on it, but basically it was buffalo chicken/sauce in the grilled cheese. It was tasty, but the texture of buffalo sauce + grilled cheese was a little off. Not the toughness of chicken wings I'm used to with buffalo sauce. I'd go back, but get something different. Dr Blondie enjoyed a Spinach & Artichoke melt.
• Fogatas - Mexican food so authentic there's no website. So authentic I'm sure out waitress understood any English. I went out of my Mexican comfort zone and ordered pork carnitas. Tyler gets them all the time so I felt safe. I'm pretty sure these were better than what Tyler gets here in town. As a bonus, they served a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.
• 5 Points Pizza - After a bland and mediocre lunch at training, my final Nashville dinner of the trip was sharing a veggie pizza (with some added spinach) with Dr Blondie. Boonie me classifies this as hipster pizza based on the tattoos and hair color choices of the wait staff. I'm so old.

My personal side trip was to go to McKays to trade in some boardgames. Dr Blondie introduced me to this used Everything I'm Interested In store on my last trip. On the boardgame shelf at work (ie Overflow Storage), the top shelf is mostly taken up by Target/Clearance riff-raff that nobody is going to play, and is not worth the shipping cost for anyone I might be able to sell to online. Various versions of Scene-It, Trivial Pursuit, Jenga, and that damn Jeff Foxworthy Game that got about 3 rounds played. It was an opportunity to free up some shelf space and get some store credit, so I loaded up the car before I left with about 30 of those games. Oddly, it didn't seem to make that much of a difference when looking at the games I left in my office.

I wasn't expecting much for trading in the games, and Dr Blondie told me they likely wouldn't take everything. I bet they wouldn't take Mall World, near the top of my list on bad, uninvestigated impulse buys. But they did take Mall World. They took everything I brought. For the ~30 games I brought, which I admitted were crap (crap in great condition, but crap) I was hoping for $3, maybe $4 per game of credit. By the time they totaled up everything up, I had $212 in credit.

I was overjoyed with $212 in credit.

I didn't spend it all. I barely made a dent in it. Now I've started a list of things specifically to look for on my next McKays trip. DVDs over a year old. A couple of books that they might have that I'm in no hurry to read.

$212!

The day back was a long day. I gave Brenda a heads up that I was going to be in Nashville in case she was planning any trips to Florence. I'd hate for her to fly into Huntsville while I'm 2 hrs away in Nashville. She took this opportunity to find a great deal on flight into Nashville (on Tuesday), then back home on Saturday. I had 4 hours between the end of class and picking up Brenda at BNA. Pizza with Dr Blondie took up part of that, plus she let me use her home internet to take care of a little work that made Wednesday start off a little easier.

I forgot that BNA uses cell phone waiting instead of park & wait at the terminal, and the waiting area was pretty full. I ended up making 3 laps around the terminal when Brenda called to let me know where she was, which happened to be about 20 ft away. She got loaded up into the car, and we got to Florence about midnight. A little after 1 and I was home and in bed. While normally on End of Sprint Wednesday I go in about 6, I slept completely thorugh the alarm and didn't get out of bed until 7:15. Luckily, it didn't make a bit of difference.

Permalink mckays road trip work

My Tony Robbins Is Coming To Town

12.25.2017

Not the most traditional of any blog post made on Christmas day, but this morning I checked my email and saw an alert that good old Kev was coming to Huntsville in May. Every other time I've had a chance to see him I've either been too late to the ticket line or there's a late night trip to Nashville involved.

This time, I was early enough for the general admission ticket line and it's a 6:30 show in Huntsville which should get me home and likely in bed by 10:30. 10:30 is a respectable bedtime for an old fart like me.

After seeing Kevin in Nashville last time I had told myself it would likely be the last that I would try to see him in person as I'd heard a good 75% of what he talked about before. That thought passed through my head as I clicked the button to purchase my ticket, but come on, he's basically coming to my doorstep.

At the very least I won't hear the story again of how his father loved Nashville and their trip to the Ryman. I have to see if that sentence comes back to haunt me in May.

Permalink road trip

San Jose

07.01.2016

Last week I took my first Dealnews work trip to the Velocity conference in San Jose. I'd last visited California (San Francisco) around 2002 on a work trip to a biotech conference, which was really just an excuse to meet a bunch of people at Stanford that I'd been working with/doing their bidding. This time, I was actually going for the conference.

The conference was focused on Dev Ops. I know marginally more about Dev Ops than I did before the conference, but that's mainly because I don't know how to attend a conference. I've spent most of my career pigeonholed into making web pages/applications and I'm slow to learn. Delving into the world of Dev Ops with people that know Dev Ops didn't help me much.

This is the first conference I've been to that dealt with anything close to what I actually use. I actually learned a little - there was a panel on web browser debugging tools that I enjoyed - but my method of retention doesn't line up with conference presentations. But now I know that, and the next time a conference opportunity comes up I'll most likely opt for some online training instead.

The trip itself was nicer than I anticipated. I upgraded my flights to first class and got a good deal ($141 above what work paid for). The Santa Clara Hyatt, which is joined to the convention center that hosted the conference, was quite nice. The weather... ahh, it was great. Mid 60's in the morning, perfect for walking. There were a couple of sandwich places within ½ mile of the hotel (I didn't bother with a car while I was there). Traffic actually pays attention to pedestrian crosswalks, so it seems very pedestrian friendly. My flight anxiety was once again present for no reason - all my flights were fairly smooth and most arrived early.

Now for some obligatory pictures:

The Cali hat pic from the San Jose airport led me to create my first ever meme pic (or whatever the kids call them), as I had LL Cool J running through my head afterward.

Permalink road trip