Projects Archives • Page 4 of 22 • Mellzah

I turned 33 yesterday, and had my most sacrelicious birthday celebration yet: Mellzah’s Last Supper. A group of us met up at the Lunchbox Lab and indulged in a stupidly decadent meal that may or may not have involved tater tot and milkshake communion. Yes, I’ve totally gone there for a different birthday and I don’t even care that I’m repeating myself, but I am a little bummed that The Last Supper Club couldn’t hang on juuuust a little longer because it would have been the perfect venue for this theme.

For her 31st birthday, my friend Boolia came up with a really impressive list of thirty-one things she wanted to do in her 31st year, and I watched in awe as she checked them all off–go skydiving, fly a helicopter, basically be a badass for an entire year. What I think makes it so much better than a bucket list is that you really have no idea when you’re going to die, so it’s easy to put off all of those experiences and goals with “someday,” “later,” “maybe next year,” whereas the one year deadline is hard and fast. Either you make it a priority and do it, or you don’t. Some of these things are big, and some are small–I can’t cram all of the huge experiences I want to have over the course of my life into the next year because there are always time and money constraints, but I can make sure this year is both exciting and fulfilling for myself instead of wondering where in the hell the last year went…which I’m kind of doing this year. I mean, when I really think about it, I did do a lot of stuff last year– I united some friends in mawwage, packed in a bunch of activities in Denver including the world’s most exciting restaurant, was miserably sick in and around NYC but still managed to have my mayoral photo taken, took SoCal by storm, took a day trip to Vancouver, went to some museums, checked out some festivals, read a bunch of books, wrote some stuff, cooked some stuff, did some house renos, made some stuff, and saw a hell of a lot of roadside attractions,while still leaving time for all-important puppy cuddles. But there’s always that drive to do more, that fear that I’m wasting what little time I have. I think I’d have that fear even if my consciousness was uploaded into an indestructible super-robot. “Why didn’t I go and see the Florida Keys before the ocean swallowed them?” I’ll moan on my 300th birthday. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

33 things I’d like to do in my 33rd year

~~Finish that app I’ve been working on~~ hahahaha no
Swim with sharks
Become confident using my camera in full manual and overall improve my photography These days I use manual more often than not, and I feel like I’ve improved but there’s always room for more improvement.
Go somewhere I’ve never been (city, state, country…I’m open! A new restaurant or grocery store does not count.) New Orleans. Iceland.
Become more comfortable with having my picture taken I’m getting there. Slowly.
Fill a sketchbook from front to back. Not necessarily good sketches or things I’d want to show people, but make the time to draw. I made good progress on this one but didn’t finish. I will, though!
Float in a sensory deprivation tank
Hike in the Olympic rainforest
Make myself and Jason an awesome Halloween costume I did this, eventually I’ll post about it. Who doesn’t like really out of date Halloween posts?
Feast at Camlann Medieval Village
~~Have a lifecast made of my face so I can…~~
~~Learn to make foam appliances~~ FAILED I waited too long to get started on these two, I wanted to mostly lose the weight first so I’d have a better cast to work from (if I’m doing it, I want the stuff I make to work with my face for more than ten minutes) and since I’m still losing, it’s not yet time.
Visit the dinosaur town with volcano toilets
Go to Diablo Lake
Check out an actual ghost town
~~Run a 5k~~ FAILED
Plant a tree
Try an average of one new recipe a week to avoid boredom and advance my cooking skills. I had a huge success with this, I tried so many new things and techniques, and I feel like my cooking has improved a lot and I’m not as reliant on the same couple of tricks.
~~Achieve my ideal weight~~ FAILED This one is not going to happen–while I’ve lost in the neighborhood of 70 pounds this year, I still have more to go. I did well, but some things just take a little longer.
~~Fly in a hot air balloon~~ FAILED. I booked a trip to fly over the tulip fields, and two weekends in a row, I woke up at the asscrack of dawn, only to have the weather shut the operation down…and then tulip season was over. I am hopeful that this is something I can do next March–if I’m going to spend the money to do it, I want it to be special.
~~Learn a new language or take my Chinese or Spanish from utterly pathetic from disuse to closer to fluency~~. FAILED. I worked on both Spanish and Chinese this year but neither are close to fluency. I will keep plugging away.
Take a hike before dawn that ends with a spectacular viewpoint for the sunrise
~~Dye my hair a fun color~~ FAILED. I wanted to wait until I was less fat and then time got away from me. It’s still going to happen, it just didn’t happen this year.
~~Indoor skydiving (baby steps!)~~ FAILED. I bought the pass but I just did not get it scheduled before my birthday. Soon, though!
~~Go river tubing~~ With the drought this year, this one is not going to happen. Instead, my goal is to fix the back deck so I can have parties out there without fearing that it’s going to crumble right off the house and kill everyone. Hey, not all of them can be exciting. DONE! And holy balls, it was expensive. But worth it.
~~Get to the point where I can hold a freestanding handstand.~~ FAILED. That’s another thing that I wanted to wait to do until I got thinner so it would be easier and as it turns out, I still have more weight to lose.
Throw a party that doesn’t revolve around movie-watching (I love B&G&P&P but it’s a very passive kind of party and it feels like the only kind I’ve had recently)Done, I had a good Halloween party. It *did* feature a power hour, but the point of the gathering was not to watch TV.
Go to Tillicum Village
Go to Cape Disappointment
Go horseback riding on Orcas Island
Have afternoon tea at the Fairmont Empress (Scheduled but past my birthday, the place is currently under renovations and if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right, by gum.)
Go on the Elk bugling tour at NW Trek Done, post coming eventually.
Go to Viking Fest

I’m already excited!

As I’ve mentioned before, Jason is the WORST to shop for, because everything he really wants, he buys for himself. This past Christmas, we’d already discussed that we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on gifts because it’s so easy to get caught up in an exponential increase in spending each year to try and top the previous year’s gifts. Let’s face it: we all have spending limits and less than an infinite amount of room for stuff.

I brainstormed for a while and decided that it would be really fun to make him a board game. We both have had a lot of fun playing board games together, but we’d had a bad string recently of games he bought that I hated. Mostly the sort with gigantic instruction manuals that you have to reference constantly throughout your turn, twelve different kinds of tokens to keep track of, and completely different rulesets for different players, so we’d be competing against one another and ultimately I’d lose because of something in the rulebook I hadn’t seen and then I’d be unreasonably pissed off for hours afterward. Ugh, kill me now. So I knew that I wanted to make a game with a simple ruleset where we worked cooperatively. Something fun, reminiscent of games we’d played as kids, easy to pick up and play, with a cute theme. We’d tried to go see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 on our honeymoon with disastrous results, but saw it later and loved it, so I decided to infringe the hell out of their copyright for my personal enjoyment and made Save The FLDSMDFR.

The object of the game is to reach the FLDSMDFR with one of the foodimals before Chester V arrives and takes it for himself. Players control their own foodimal and take turns moving Chester V, rolling a die and following the instructions on the board, having to land on the final rainbow space with an exact count. Should a foodimal and Chester V end up on the same square, there is a struggle determined by the roll of a die, the loser of which goes back to the starting square–in the event of a tie, both figures stay put. Between the struggle mechanism and various board features (which includes slides that move both ways), there’s a lot of back and forth in the game, and it’s generally anyone’s game up until the very end.

Jason and I have been enjoying playing so much that I ended up making him an expansion pack of foodimals for his birthday!

Category Projects

Happy 33rd Birthday to Me!

I guarantee it.

Makin Stuff: Save the FLDSMDFR