I had a couple days off around Christmas and New Years, so I spent one of those evenings with MJ de-soldering the SLT card I have. There’s still more work to be done on it, since the cards appear to have been assembled by hand and in addition to the solder, I have 50 year old bent wire to wrangle to get all the little the resistors out.

It was fun getting some new toys (de-soldering tool!) and working on a project together. So much of our lives revolve around the kids and the house, the ability carving out some hobby time together right now is rare. I managed to snag a couple more SLT cards from Etsy this week, along with some lamps from the IBM s/360 that I’ll work to incorporate into jewelry once we get our soldering iron (ordered! But supply chain issues…).

I spent a lot of time with the kids too. I’m definitely struggling to balance how much time I spend on the floor playing with them, and the time I spend on chores during the day. They’re aged one and three, and I know this time won’t last forever, but I’m definitely getting burnt out by pushing all chores to after they go to bed. Doing dishes, folding laundry, and other chores can be done while keeping an eye on the boys and I also know how important it is that they grow up knowing that chores get done, and sometimes helping with them.

Still, a strong focus on time with the boys meant that Adam and I could make a gingerbread house together!

And do some art!

And jump in puddles!

And make muffins!

And play with the train!

We also had a rough few days with baby Aaron as he worked his way through a reaction to his Measles vaccines. Due to the pandemic-driven isolation, neither of the boys have gotten sick lately. Aaron hasn’t had so much as a cold. I forgot how hard it is to watch your little one struggle, and how exhausting it is when it interrupts their sleep and a fever puts them in a bad mood. Still, he’s generally a cheerful boy, and that personality is always dominant, even when he’s a little grumpy for a few days.

He does mostly sleep through the night now, which was a whole struggle this year. The wake-ups he does have don’t require us to go in, and he solidly wakes up around 6AM, in spite of our attempts to shift this later by adjusting his bed time. I don’t love this development, Adam always slept until 7AM once he settled into a routine, and I do not enjoy mornings. Still, everything I’ve read says that 6AM is fair game for little ones, and I just need to focus on getting to sleep by 10PM.

Right before New Years I went for a long walk with a friend. It’s something I hadn’t done in almost two years because of the pandemic, but I realized that I could really use the company outside of our household. It did cause some self-reflection on how much trauma we’ve all had these past couple years. Before the walk I was worried a bit that I’d unload a lot of feelings onto this friend that had been pent up for a couple years and look like a total mess. It may have happened, but it was OK. I think we’re all in a similar place, especially those of us who were particularly cooped up with small children, as much as we love them.

The first step was creating a “cardboard doughnut” and that meant waiting for a box that had a flat space big enough to make a 14 inch circle. I ended up going with one with a flap, which worked out fine because it wasn’t very creased. I used a sharpie, tack, and string to make the circles and then scissors for the outer edge, and an exacto knife for the inside hole. It took a few minutes, but went well. I am not much of a crafter, so I take nothing for granted!

Then it took me a couple weeks to start the actual wreath. You see, I have two very small children, and not a lot of free time! I was able to create the 50 punch card petals required for this project during some meetings at work (don’t tell!). I did quickly discover that each petal only really takes half a card, so my 53 punch cards went twice as far as I expected! I still have plenty left for my next project.

The stapling and decorating really had to be done when I could focus on it, meaning carving time out of my precious evenings. I really wanted it to be done by Halloween, so I stepped things up last week and got 20 petals stapled around the edge.

And eventually another 20 petals….

And then I got there with the final 10 on the inside circle!

Toss some silver garland on there, and a store-bought Halloween accent, and voila! My office door was ready for Halloween!

I have another store-bought accent queued up for Thanksgiving, but I may need to make my own for Hanukkah. As someone who is not very crafty, it’s been really fun to have and share.

Plus, I had company! The Continuum Drag podcast was watching them too. A few days after each pair of episodes I watched, I would load up the next podcast on my walk or run, and voila! Some folks to enjoy the pain and laughs with. They were definitely harsher on it than I was, but I think I’ve come to be more comfortable with camp and older shows as I’ve gotten older. I also deeply appreciated how bad all the computer scenes were, so I had a fondness for the show that I think is hard for someone who doesn’t work full time in tech to appreciate.

But my favorite thing about the show? The Autocar. It’s instantly recognizable as a Lamborghini Countach LP400, the car that, to this day, I think of when I think of “the car of the future.” I don’t know why the Countach landed in my head like that, but it probably is the most iconic car of the 1980s.

The car graces the DVD cover:

And Shout! Factory (who was responsible for the DVD release) put a lovely clip up on YouTube:

Cool. But then, our friends at Continuum Drag tweeted about Automan merchandise and made me want an Autocar of my own! At first, I publicly mused about 3-D printing one, but after looking into designs and pricing, I started looking at toy cars that already exist and could be repurposed, so that’s what I decided to do.

First stop, eBay! I picked up a Matchbox 1982 Lamborghini Countach LP500 for about $10, shipped.

A few things about this model for this project:

• It’s green. Looking at the listing again, you can tell from the photos, but I guess I wasn’t looking that closely
• It has “Lamborghini” scrolled across the sides
• It has a spoiler
• Technically it’s the LP500 rather than the LP400, but I am pretty sure the exteriors are the same

My first decision had to be whether I wanted to repaint the whole thing black. I decided against it. I’m not very good at painting (as you will see), and I worried that I’d botch it, and it would just end up looking awful. Plus, this toy is the most fun when the lights are off anyway! And the spoiler? I’ll just have to live with it.

So, paint. I learned from my baby mainframes the best paints to use for this kind of work were acrylics, and I went with Golden Artist Colors.

In the baby mainframe project I learned that putting on a coat of white paint over the black did wonders for having the subsequent color put on. Now, this is also true of the glow-in-the-dark paint, but it turns out the Light Ultramarine Blue I was using doesn’t need a white base coat. I could have saved myself a lot of time and ugliness if I had skipped the white base coat. Oh, well.

But as I said, a base on the green was important for the Spacebeams Aquaris glow-in-the-dark paint. When I put the glowing paint on without a base, it barely showed up. So the good news is, if you could put the blue coat on nicely, you could afford to be a little sloppy with the glowing paint. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at any of it, so my Autocar is a cute hobby craft, rather than a work of art. The glowing paint also is mostly transparent over the blue, but not totally, so it did make for a slightly toned down blue in the light.

But once the lights were off, I was totally in love! The colors were perfect!

It’s my very own toy Autocar!

Oh, yeah, I also got a t-shirt.

Once this was all complete, I felt a bit silly about it all. I’m a 40 year old woman with two small kids, and very little time to myself. This is what I spend it on? But this project is so very me that I kept me entertained and grounded through a transformative time in my life. It’s silly, but it’s mine, and right now I need more that’s just mine.