March 16, 2014

Good grief, it is almost 2 months again since I updated my blog.  Life the past two months has been pretty monotonous.  Snowstorm...shovel...deep freeze....snowstorm...shovel.....deep freeze.  And that goes on and on.  One thing I can say about all of the snow and shoveling is that I have been getting a lot of great exercise.  We are finally seeing some temperatures that are a bit more moderate but I don't think that winter is quite done with us yet.  All of the snow almost melted because of a few warm days but then we got hit with another 6" snowfall this past Wednesday and it was some seriously wet snow. 


The other thing that I have been doing a LOT of is volunteer workdays for the Forest Preserve Dist. of Will County.  We volunteers have worked all winter before, during and after the many snowstorms.  Cutting and hauling brush is a difficult job even in good weather but with the deep snows, the task became pretty exhausting.  More good exercise!  Not only did we work with the snow, we also worked some days of extreme cold.  This certainly has been a character builder of a winter!

I also did quite a bit of sewing on some costume projects.  I made a new RFT vest for myself and did some alterations of my Hoth Commander that I have now passed along to someone else.  The truth is that I have plenty of costumes and I doubt that I would really ever get around to wearing the Hoth Commander.  The member who I passed the costume along to wore it yesterday and I must admit that the costume looks so much better on him than me and I know that costume went to a better place. I also finished my Y-Wing costume.  That one has been buzzing around my head for some time and had plenty of challenges.  I had a good many pieces of that costume already, it was just the belly pouch on the vest that was giving me fits.  I must have re-made that piece a half dozen times.  I also struggled with the greeblies on the vest.  As usual, there were no really good photos to try to figure out just what in the hell was on that vest...so...like any good Rebel costumer...I winged it.

I did no Star Wars costume events in February and now have done 2 in March.  On March 1st I headed to the Joliet Historical Museum for a taping of a video for the upcoming Joliet Library Star Wars Day.  It was unusual because we had to be fans and not costumers.  So generally we take great pains to not show behind the scenes images, this photoshoot was all about behind the scenes so that we could show that we are just fans.

Yesterday I went up to LEGOLAND in Schaumburg.  I was supposed to do the Southside Irish Parade today, but we could not get enough costumed volunteers to cover that event so I went to the event at LEGOLAND.  I have done that event many times in the past but this time was more to showcase our Nar Shaddaa Base Hoth team with Steve Mamman coming in his newly acquired Hoth Commander.  It was good to see everyone again, I haven't been out much lately.