Shameless plug

While organizing all of the photos on our external hard drive I stumbled upon some pictures of the checker sets I did for my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. Enjoy

This one is blue and gold with Shiner Blonde and Shiner Heifeweizen caps

The next one is traditional black and red, with Shiner Smokhaus and Zeigenbock caps for playing pieces

Many thanks go to my awesome wife Ricci, who helped me with color schemes and touch up painting.  And she also gave me the idea to keep the caps in mason jars, but that's totally optional.  So if anybody thinks these are neat and wants one let me know what colors and what kind of caps.  If you provide the caps it will definitely be cheaper, but I can usually get some from friends, family, HEB or World Market if you have an idea of what you like. 

If you see me standing in the bottled soda aisle at HEB for 20 minutes, you know I'm checking out caps.  I'm working on some Mexican flavored water ones right now that have a lime on one cap and a cluster of grapes on the other.  Only the lime one tastes gross so it's taking a while to muster my strength.

Presents!

Hey kiddies!

In spite of all the recent chaos around here, some really cool stuff has happened. Even though it wasn't a surprise anymore, Ricci and my family threw me a really awesome birthday party last weekend. My cousin(in law?) Ryan and my cousin Jenny's boyfriend Derek built me a workbench for the garage and brought that down.

They even set up the peg board organizer and put in most of my tools for me which was really nice. As you can see, it's wired for electricity and has a fluorescent light. They even put a surge protector on it and hooked up my power-drill battery charger. Woo woo!

So that's neat. I also got a table, chairs and large umbrella for the back porch. Ricci and I had breakfast there this morning. So fun.

In other news, the AWANAs program at our church is starting a recycling drive to raise money and buy bicycles for GFA missionaries. So sitting next to my new work bench are all the cans mom and dad brought. If you're in the BCS area and want to donate your aluminum cans, please do!



Also, now that I have a workbench I'm kinda itchin' to do some more bottlecap checkerboards. If anybody is interested in having some made let me know what you want and I'll try to figure out an estimate. Although I guess I should wait a couple of weeks until I finish taking my MCAT. Anyway, that's it for now.

Long Overdue Facelift and Update

Wow. I took a look at my last post. September 29. Haha.

So much has happened since then. If you read this I assume you know me because this isn't that interesting of a read. Moving on, since September I got a job working at TVMDL (Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Labs) in the Serology department. We've also rearranged the house a bunch of times and I tried (and more or less failed) to convert some standard nerf guns into awesome looking and higher powered versions. I haven't given up completely, but I have put it away for now. The last time I tried I couldn't get the mechanism working when I put it back together so I rage quit.

If you didn't notice, Ricci made me a sweet header for the blog. It's actually blueprints from the Batmobile. How sweet is that?

From now on this blog will be more about actual projects and plans. It seems dumb to say that but it wasn't actually about that before. Right now I'm working on a couple of things. Ricci and I tried to set up an herb garden but Grimm decided that he thought it looked better when he dug up the mulch and tore apart the tarp underneath. So now I have to keep pulling out weeds. Eventually I'll get it put back in order and we'll plant some things. But there's no rush since he also managed to eat or destroy all of the seedlings Ricci was growing to plant out there. For a couple photos of the traumatic incident look here. Keep in mind the photos were taken the same day.

I also have the wood cut to make a 4 x 8 raised bed for veggies in the backyard, but after the last incident, I'm not sure I want to put anything back there until I have a shock wire or something to keep Grimmace the Menace out.

I did finish making bottle cap checker boards. One for myself and three that I made for Christmas presents. I like them but again, a lot of work so it might be a while, or at least a really special occasion before I make another.

I'm not sure when, but at some point we bought, and put together a cheap set of bookshelves to hold most of our books. That's all I can think of for now. I'll keep a list of my projects on the right so maybe I'll do a better job of keeping this updated. We'll see. I think I've used almost all of my tags in this post, haha.

Bottle Caps!

So I've been collected bottle caps for the past year or so. I started out just keeping a cap of everything I tried, which kinda led me to start trying more and more different things. But as with most people I have certain drinks that I prefer and I thought "What could I do with all these caps?" I remembered seeing a checkers set that my dad had made once out of epoxied pepsi and dr pepper bottle caps and figured I'd try my hand at it. So I've been collecting more and more over the past six months or so and filling certain ones with epoxy.

I'm proud to say that this past weekend (with lots of help from Ricci's Gramps and her dad, Bill) I made my first checker board. Gramps helped with the design and did most of the sawing with Bill. I actually only helped in that part. But I watched carefully so that now I can do it myself. Then I painted the squares and stained the whole thing to look old. I'll put pictures up later. Assuming that the last couple caps finish drying by this evening I will have a full set to play "Corona Extra" against "Corona Light".

Quick Disclaimer: I drink beer from time to time, but I don't get drunk. I think the Bible is pretty clear that being drunk is sinful, but drinking in itself is not. I don't hang out at bars either because of the associations people sometimes make. Nuff said.

Moving on, my general policy is to take the first bottle cap I get from a drink and add it to my collection. After that I just add duplicates to another jar/ziploc/whatever container I'm using. I hope to have some way to display them one day but for now they sit in a closet. As I was sorting out a batch of bottlecaps my in-laws had saved for me (yeah I sort them, order is a good thing) I was feeling pretty good about my collection. I knew it wasn't the biggest but I was kind of proud of my modest little collection.

Then I stumbled across Bottle Cap-O-Rama and was put to shame. I probably have between fifty and a hundred different bottle caps. Whoever runs this site (I would assume a guy, but there's a girl on the top banner so I'm not sure...) has nearly 2500! Wowsers! Looks like I have a ways to go.

Also he/she had links to John T. Unger's bottle cap mosaic fish site. Awesome. I watched the video of how he does it and it looks pretty tedious. It seems pretty steep to charge $500 for some wall art but as I learned this weekend making that checker board, hand made stuff is expensive and time consuming for the person making it. Granted, he doesn't buy all the beer himself, but the wood, metal, and nails plus the time and energy he puts in definitely make it worth more than you might think on first glance.

Back to Bottle Cap O Rama, I haven't quite finished absorbing all attainable knowledge from their "links" section so I may post more.

I also started my training class at work on Adobe Photoshop so look to better designs for this page in the future and less bleak cyber wastelands.

*update*
I just found a link from BCoR to bottlecaps.de and it made me slightly more depressed about my collection. hundreds of thousands.....