This Spectrum Thing Can Be A Drag

Once in a while this autism thing decides I'm too comfortable and reaches out and bites me in the ass!

Yesterday, as part of an otherwise typical 70 mile round trip shopping thing to restock on tomatoes and cleaning chemicals (I don't know what's in the CLR we use for removing lime, calcium, and rust left behind by our hard well-water, but the person that brings it out to the curb-side has to verify you're old enough before handing it over.) we made a stop at Hobby Lobby for beads (The Wife)

and a few bits-n-bobs to finish up the Halloween vignette for the display case (me).

True, Hobby Lobby pretty much ignores Halloween because it doesn't align with their version of God, but they have loads of other things that, with some imagination, can be repurposed.

i.e. This little red Christmas tree truck which I can re-use later in the year. But for now I can bend the tree forward and use it as a support for a flying witch silhouette cut from black foam-board. (Yeah, I know, I need to scale that drawing down a bit to make it work.)

Hobby Lobby has a decent web-front store but that doesn't always work when you're trying to be creative. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, go inside, and browse the shelves and aisles to find things that you didn't know you need but are perfect for the project. (Turns out Poly-Fill teases out into spooky puffs of creaping mist much more effectively, and way more cost friendly, than cotton batting. Something I would never have figured out at a keyboard.)

But that doesn't change the fact that the place is inevitably full of people. Many of them, like me, old and blocking the aisles right where I want to go. Too many of them over-active, and loud, kids (Why do people keep having those annoying little rug-rats?!).

So that’s how I came to be standing in the too-long, too-slow checkout line while the really inefficient checker (I mean how many times do you have to look at the lable on each item? Once damnit! Pick it up, check the lable, key it in, put it in the bag. Stop fiddling around with the damn thing and get on with it! And by the way, this is a retail checkout line, not a craft seminar, so this long-winded exchange between customer and checker about the finer points of quilting technique is totally inappropriate!) plods agonizingly slowly through a simple task, while I'm getting more jittery by the second, when The Wife casually, innocently, wonders if a local restaurant we haven't been to since before the COVID lockdown started still has the pick-three appetizer we used to get.

A simple enough question, but it raised the possibility of an unexpected deviation from our normal routine, and that was enough to plunge my brain over the edge towards a full-blown meltdown. Between over-activated sensory systems and trying to mask - you know, so people wouldn't know I'm slightly wierd - I could barely function by the time it was my turn to be the served customer. And it wasn't untill we were back inside the safety of the truck that my brain backed far enough out of fight-or-flight (or curl up into a little ball and whimper untill the world goes away) mode to allow me to look up the restaurant's menu on line and confirm the pick-three appetizer was still there. (After all The Wife deserves her little pleasures too and my issues shouldn't interfere with that.)

Remember the robot from Lost in Space? The one that was constantly saying "danger Will Robinson"? Well I think my brain is a blood relative of that robot, like a direct decendant. All too often it's waving its arms around spasticly while seeing horrible things behind every rock, most of which were never there in the first place, and trying to convince me to fight dragons that were never there.

Autism isn't all bad. It's what keeps the two of us from attending events that are potential mass-shooting venues, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be 'normal'.

I Raided My Own Drug Lab!

 

Y'all may remember that recently I inadvertently built a mobile drug-lab.

Well, to atone for that transgression

I called in some reinforcements in the form of a Lego City Cop

and since I wasn't sure he was up to the job all on his own I called in a swat team as well,

complete with their own swat jeep.

The cop stuff was easy enough to assemble once I figured out, via Youtube since there were no instructions on how to assemble the many fierce-looking swat-team members included in the box, how to put the utility belt on these guys. (Being a Lego neophyte at first I thought it was some sort of shoulder pads or chest harness but just couldn't make it fit.)

Now the real work started!

I had to create a base for everything to sit on.

In this case, 1/2 inch foam board cut into two sections so the whole thing would fit into one of my 

hanging-file storage boxes when not actually on display in our display box.

I added a few extra scraps of foam on top of the table-flat bits and carved some contours and wheel-ruts into the whole thing to give the terrain some variety, then taped off where the drug-lab assembly would sit before starting the next phase.

Which begain by toning down the pink of the foam with a couple rattle-cans of earth-tones lightly applied so the solvent didn't melt the foam too much,

before moving on to dirt.

Now in the modeling world you can pay good money to buy various colors of pre-cleaned and sifted dirt from several different sources,

or you can grab a soft brush, a scrap of paper to brush onto, and any handy container, then go out in the yard and collect your own.

By moving around to different parts of the property I was able to come up with a variety of colors

I then sifted them into a brushed-on layer of thinned white-glue through a spare tea-ball, dropped additional, watery-thinned glue on the sifted dirt, and 'settled' it all with a misting of isopropyl alcohol, (breaks surface tension and lets the watery glue flow and seep into all the nooks and crannies.) working on a small area at a time and giving it plenty of time to cure before going back and messing with it.

I recorded quite a bit of the work on the base with my new thumb-camera clipped to a headband, but most of those recordings are unusable. I have to figure out how to get the camera to point down at what I'm working on and not out across the shop - - -

At this point I decided to add some additional texture in a few spots by collecting the shavings from rasping a bit of scrap foam and gluing them down using the same glue/alcohol processes.

This is clearly something I should have done before painting with earth-tones and not after, but it is a fantasy scene, I mean it's Legos for cryin' out loud!, so I'll live with the pink sparklies. But next time I'll get it right - maybe.

Because most deserts are not all dirt I added a few judicious patches of ground cover

and some bushes using the same glue/alcohol process.

To help blend the harsh black-plastic edge of the drug lab assembly into the rest of the scene I 'dirted' around the edge of it a little.

If I was using expensive commercial dirts I would have done this over a tray so the leftovers could be collected and returned to the bag, but since I can just step outside and sweep up some more I didn't bother.

Now I could set the major components

into the scene,

but before making that permanent, lights

had to be added,

and grime

dusted on.

I don't think I was entirely successful at capturing the wiper-marks on the windshield, but you get the idea.

The 'grime' is a variety of pan pastels painted on with foam brushes and fine-tuned by smudging with a fingertip.

Another marginal attempt at videoing what I was doing.

Finally the vehicles could be permanently fixed in place, wiring secured,

 and supporting characters dropped into the scene.

This included drilling a tiny hole in the bottom of the swat drone so I could insert a bit of wire

and 'fly' the drone over the scene.

The resulting raid was so fierce (notice the bullet holes in the RV's door) that even the headless torsos surrendered!

And in the mayhem of bullets, flash-bangs, and teargas, the swat robot got confused and ended up dropping its weapon and surrendering too.

There was one casualty, but the balistic vest took the hit and she just had the air knocked out of her. She's fine now.

Well, two casualties if you count the fire, friendly or hostile - that hasn't been determined yet - that took out the red roof-light on the swat jeep.

Clearly something went wrong with this particular light between testing and final assembly. The lights I used for that are very small and delicate so are easily damaged and not easily replaced so I'll just have to live with it

The only way I've been successful at stripping the insulation off the very fine wires of these lights is with a judicious application of direct flame. Just enough to melt the plastic but not enough to vaporize the very thin wire underneath.

And here's 

a couple videos

of the completed project.

Finally it was time to remove the Viking Fishing Village scene from the display case and tuck it away in a storage box,

so the drug-raid could be put on display.

Now I guess I better get to work turning the 

haunted house into a proper Halloween display.

And after that?

Well last night Fedex dropped a box off up at the gate.

The Wife needed a $3 bobble from Hobby Lobby ($1.50 with the perpetual 50% discount) and we ended up padding out the order to reach the free-shipping threashold. (To be honest we got caught up in the frenzy of catalog shopping exceeded that threshold by quite a bit!)

Now we have more than enough stuff to build a number of Christmas scenes!

Then this arrived today after months of waiting (many model railroad bits like this don't actually go into their limited-run production untill a pre-order threshold has been reached).

It's going to be an element in a Maritime Heritage Museum scene inspired be a screenshot from a  window-swap video.

And then there's  also - - -

Crap! Clearly the therapy isn't working!

Edit: After living with the new scene for a couple days I decided it needed more overall lighting. Something like a floodlight to give the scene a little more definition.

I've got a mess of these 12v lights. They're designed to be snapped apart and used individually but I left them as a string of five

and created a little mount for them out of a tongue-depressor, a few dabs of glue, a bit of paperclip, and some left over granite rattle-can paint.

With the strip of lights glued to the mount, plugged into a 12v power source already permanently mounted to the bottom of the display case, and the paperclip hanger hooked over the edge of the case, we have flood lights.

From the 'viewing side' of the case its not too obtrusive, but now I'm wondering if I should have just left the mount its natural wood color.

Before

and after.

I may have to use the current-limiter pot on the power supply to tone down the light a little. We'll see tonight.

I was sitting minding my own business while making that last edit to this post and a couple of Guinea Hens came wandering by, ignoring me like I don't count!

That was hurtful!