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Moar laundry bags (2010)

Continuing the presentation of secretive summer sewing…

Twenty ten was a hard year for me in terms of getting these laundry bags out.  I was ridiculously late in doing so.  Only two of the five seniors got their bags before they left for school.  It was just a mess of things kept happening one after another.  Pipe burst and flooded a good portion of the house, insurance company took their sweet time getting people to fix things up so there was just no room to make this stuff, work was crazy, I ended up going to Egypt for about three weeks for work at one point…the list goes on.

When I got back from Egypt (it was in the summer, not a fun time to go to Egypt), it was abundantly clear to me that I would not be able to finish all of them before school started.  What’s more, is that four of them were going to semester based universities, instead of quarter, which meant they’d all be leaving in August.  Even less time for me to work on the bags.  So, I gave them out as I completed the bags and asked them to send pictures to me of them inside them.

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Cow!

First up was the cow.  I made this one for one of my girls whom I’d seen grow up from jr. high.  I made the cow first because the recipient was the last to leave of the semester people and I had a clear idea of how I wanted this bag to look.  This one was pretty easy to make and went pretty smoothly.  I rather liked it.  She got a cow because of her stuffed animal cow she brought with her to a few of the conferences we attended.

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Bashful turtle!

Second was the bashful turtle.  Only his tail stuck out.  I had a clear idea of how this one should look too, so I made this one next.  I had to mail it to the recipient though.  She very nicely obliged my request to send me pictures of her inside her laundry bag.  She got a turtle because she wanted turtles on the pillow that we were making one time as our Friday night craft.  We…never finished the pillows.

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Dignified camel.

Then came the camel.  The kid just reminded me of a camel.  So…I made him a camel.  He doesn’t understand why I think he looks like a camel.  Anyway, he was the only one going to a school on the quarter system, so I knew I could get this one out in time.  It was also the last one I had a really clear mental image of how it should look.  I had to revise the eyes a few times (it looked a bit like an alien at first) but overall, I was rather pleased with how it looked.  He was a good sport and even put the photo of him inside his laundry bag as his Facebook profile picture for awhile.  The comments it generated still make me laugh.  (=

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Then came the ill-fated whale.  This one was the first laundry bag I made that wasn’t a typical cylindrical bag.  It took two paper prototypes and a ruined cloth prototype before I got it right.  And then…it got lost in the mail, along with some other stuff I had sent her.  This made us both very sad.  I had sent her the bag just before Thanksgiving and it should have gotten there right after the holiday.  Never showed up.  I waited a few weeks and it didn’t come back to me either.  I figured it was just lost in the mail and I started another one.  The photo you see is the third attempt that was completed early January.  I gave it to her in person as she started school later than the rest.  Since I gave it to her in person, I also took the photo of her inside her bag.  Since it’s not a cylindrical bag, I figured it would be better to have her go in head first.  Hehe.  Incidentally, about a week after I finished the bag, the lost package came back to me.  She has two whale laundry bags now.  I think I have enough pictures of this one to do a tutorial too.  Maybe I’ll write one in the future.

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Propeller mushroom!

And finally, my brother’s.  I made my brother’s laundry bag last (not counting the third time I made the whale) because he’s my brother and it’s easier to get things to him, and also I figured he wouldn’t mind as much to get a really late grad present.  He got a propeller mushroom from Super Mario Wii.  It took some calculating to get the mushroomy look, the brim of the hat, and also the propellers.  They’re stiffened with some fusible interfacing, but without some wire the propellers won’t stand up on its own.  I don’t have a better picture of it where you can see the whole mushroom with propellers.  But still, I rather like it but I probably won’t do another one.  Mushrooms are hard to make in laundry bag form.

Final Boss Syndrome

Hi, my name is Moose and I have Final Boss Syndrome.

Hi Moose!

Erm, I thought about writing the rest of this post like a stereotypical *anonymous meeting, but I decided against it.

So, what is Final Boss Syndrome?  Is is a syndrome, probably a psychological disorder, in which you play a computer or video game all the way to the final boss and then suddenly lose interest and stop playing.  Symptoms are obviously more apparent with RPGs or games with something definite at the end.  It might also be the reason why I tend to play more puzzle games or open-ended games now.  It seems that I really like to play games, and I apparently don’t like to beat them.

Here is a very incomplete list of games where I’ve played up to the final boss and then stopped:

Anyway, it’s a pretty good list of games that I never end up completing.  It’s not for lack of trying on some of them.  Trying as in effort in psyching
myself up to play the final boss.  I just…lose interest.  Then I don’t like playing for awhile and by the time I manage to get around to it again, I’ve forgotten all the controls or something or my strategy I had built while playing the game originally and so I can’t beat the final boss.  This is  probably the most apparent with The World Ends with You.  That game has such a different battle system, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pick it up again.  I might have to play it through from the beginning again.  Which wouldn’t really be that bad.  Another game that would be really hard to pick up again is Trauma Center.  I really liked that game too, but I don’t think I can remember all that I need to do to heal wounds and whatnot.

In other news, I have beat some games.  Sometimes it’s just a fluke that I beat them, sometimes it’s not.  Here are some games I actually have beat:

So, PvZ is the really different one on the list because not only have I beaten it, I have beaten it several times.  I have beaten it so hard.  So hard to death.  Er…yes.  Anyway, not only have I beaten the game several times, I have also gone back and beaten all the mini-games, and survived over 30 onslaughts of zombies in endless survival mode.  I also have a pretty decent Zen garden.  So you see, this is quite an accomplishment.

But, that’s not all!  What I just described was on LeeEv, my main system.  I recently acquired an auxiliary system, Codename-Roodee, and I decided to install PvZ there as well.  What I hadn’t realized is that PopCap updated the game to include acheivements and the save files of the previous verison are not compatible with the new version.  That means…I get to play it all over again.  And I did.  I beat the game over Memorial weekend and it was completely unintentional, as I was doing a lot of other things that weekend that took precedence over beating a game I had already beaten.  But it was interesting, as I got to re-experience a bunch of things that I had completely forgotten about.  Like that magic taco.  Why did Crazy Dave just give me so much money for a taco the zombies dropped on my lawn?  Because he’s CRRRRAAAAAAAZY!!

So maybe…maybe this means my Final Boss Syndrome is going into remission and that one day, I will be able to beat the games I start playing, especially the games that I like.  Maybe one day I’ll be cured?