I celebrated my birthday on Monday, but it's not my birthday that occupies my mind nowadays, but rather the upcoming one in June heralded by the above picture.
We sent a copy of that picture in a frame to the soon-to-be-first-time grandparents for Christmas and received delighted, excited, even emotional reactions across the board. It was fun to finally be able to share our little secret and get that reception both in person and over the phone.
Thankfully, I have had an uneventful first trimester. No morning sickness - yay for me! Even so, the routine medical appointments are annoyingly frequent. I understand it gets even worse in the third trimester. Blessedly, the prenatal tests are all coming out normal and quite average. I'm not showing yet, I can still wear my regular pants and so far no one has been guessing that I'm pregnant. Perhaps they're just assuming that I simply ate heartily over the holidays. I certainly feel full - full of baby. It's starting to be a little extra effort to pull my socks on. I noticed that my balance isn't quite what it used to be at karate practice. Sensei has banned me from sparring but I hope to keep going to practice up until I have to go to the hospital. We'll see.
We felt the baby kicking two nights ago. My doctor described it to me as feeling like gas bubbles. Once I recognized the sensation, it felt more like someone was poking me from the inside. Lee got to feel it too. That moment, every time I get an ultrasound or I hear/feel the baby's heartbeat makes all this seem real. Without that, I just feel like I'm getting extra round in the middle.
Not that I don't have moments that come up short of wonder and joy. Mourning for my rapidly fading figure - and to think I only recently started to like my figure in the past year (I had a waist! My body will never be the same again!). Pre-mourning for having the time to sleep, go out to movies, dinner, outings, video games, having the time to make elaborate Halloween costumes. I've been reading a bunch of books on pregnancy and preparing for the whole labor and delivery process. Scary! My dad is OB/GYN - I grew up listening to painful sounding experiences of delivery. There were many dinners growing up where I vowed to myself that I'd rather adopt than put myself through that. Guess I lied. And let's not even get into the worries of complications and issues with the baby or the extent of psychological damage I would inflict on another human being throughout its life. Deep breath.
Meanwhile, there's birth classes and hospital tours to schedule, names to ponder, decisions like disposables vs. cloth and what would make a good family car to replace the Saturn (thanks Consumer Reports), what color to paint the nursery. Every time I find a new website or talk to someone new about my delicate condition, there are more considerations to take into account and decide on. I suppose I don't have to figure it all out now. Suffice to say that this June birthday (or May) takes a whole lot more energy than all my January ones combined.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Birthday 2011
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Garrus: The Making Of
Chris posted his making-of-video a few days ago. He's made some minor improvements to Garrus, primarily in the comfort of his shoes.
I made a cleaner set of Tali belt buckles, which sadly didn't make it into any decent full body picture shots from Halloween so I'll post them on their own. I also tried to improve the shape of my boots by caving in the calf portion to try and streamline them a bit more. Not so sure I was totally successful.
I'll post Chris' Tali props video when he has it up.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Halloween Costume #2: Ninjette
Happy Halloween!
I've been reading Adam Warren's Empowered comic series and two weeks before Halloween, decided to make the costume for Empowered's best gal pal, Ninjette.
She's a beer-drinking ninja princess from New Jersey, hiding out from her clan. Aside from the beer drinking and actual ninja skills, I thought it would be a straight-forward costume for me to make and wear in two weeks.
It turns out that I only had one week to actually complete the costume since work sent me to China the week before Halloween. Compared to my Tali costume, Ninjette was almost a sleepwalk. The patterns were based off of a mish-mash of various pieces of clothing I owned. I did have to make my shorts twice because I assumed a stretch factor on the stretch vinyl that wasn't quite true. Thankfully, I was only off by a seam allowance width. I used the same kind of fabric paint for Tali's hexagons to make the Ninjette logo.
The arm and leg wraps were just long strips of the stretch vinyl. After this photo shoot, I ended up getting some black gloves and thigh-high socks to put on underneath the wraps so that when they slipped, it wouldn't look so obvious. There's still some refinement to do with that process, but when I went out to the club, I carried black electric tape for emergency repairs. I wore black toe shoes (not shown here) to complete the outfit.
The long ponytail is not mine, it's a wig from the Halloween store. I bought some nail polish pens and painted my nails while I was hanging out and waiting during my China trip.
I'm a bit bummed I ended up assembling the necklace in reverse order. But the comic rearranges the order frequently enough that maybe it's not that big a deal (except to my sense of detail). I also should have taken some darting into account for my halter top, but I didn't have time to adjust it. It still works but isn't as correctly fitted as I would like.
While Tali was showcased at work during the day Friday, I ended up wearing Ninjette to both parties we went to for Halloween. No costume contest for me. I figured anyone who didn't recognize the Ninjette character would just assume I'm wearing a generic ninja girl costume which isn't remarkable enough to warrant a stage performance. It was still a fun costume to make and wear. I especially liked the fact that 1) I could see clearly, 2) I wore the most comfy shoes I remember wearing for a costume and 3) I could dance.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Post PAX + Press
We're back from PAX and still absorbing all the awesomeness of the experience. Friday was our Normandy crew day when we got a taste of traffic-stopping fame. We didn't get to the convention center until 4pm after getting ourselves outfitted up. We deliberately got a late start to the day because Chris and I didn't know how long we would last in our costumes and we knew we wanted to catch up with fellow Mass Effect cosplayer and awesome all-around girl, Holly Conrad at her evening PAX panel, From CG to Reality.
Little did we realize that as soon as we rounded the corner towards the last two blocks on the approach to PAX that our progress would be severely impeded by picture posing. Every few feet or so, we would be stopped by people wanting to take pictures of us or with us. Luckily, it was pretty easy to just ask the people asking for our pictures where Holly was and where the Bioware booth was. It just took a really long time to get there. We could only really move forward when security would tell us that we would need to keep moving to prevent blocking up the aisles. Then we would move another few steps and start it all over again.
The picture above was taken at the Bioware booth. We were a bit anachronistic standing in front of a huge poster of their fantasy game rather than Mass Effect, but we were loved up with flash photography all the same.
I didn't actually see much of PAX until Saturday when I had no helmet on my head. Chris switched to his Daft Punk (below) costume where he was wearing a helmet. He got stopped for plenty of pictures and interviews but we could still walk around and see the booths we wanted to see.
We're still looking for pictures and Chris' aforementioned interviews so if anyone's got links, please let me know!
Now for the pictures that we did find. I think my favorite mention of us came from Joystiq.com where they used our picture to lead the article and wrote that we were "quite possibly the best Tali and Garrus we've ever seen". Yay us!
We were included in Kotaku's gallery (picture 17).
Game Informer also had us in their gallery of PAX
About 56s into this video Daft Punk makes an appearance.
And then a random video where I desperately dodge the camera.
Saturday night, we had a blast attending the Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton concert. On Sunday we unexpectedly ran into them at their merchandise booth so I got Jonathan Coulton to sign my pass.
We had so much fun! I have some repairs to make on the costume and perhaps some redesign, but I'll give myself a week or so of down time before I tackle those so long as they're in time for Halloween.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Full Mass Effect
Did a full dress rehearsal yesterday and recruited our friends Kati and Eric as our photographers. I jammed out some pretty late nights this past week trying to get all the accessories I needed, but failed to get the boot knife in before our photo shoot.
Of course, there's lights on everyone's costumes and we had to defend a dark lab from danger just to see it.
I have some fixes to do to the various attachments: hood keeps falling off from the wind, my leg and arm bands don't stay where I want them to. Nothing a liberal use of velcro can't fix. Chris and Lee have various cracks in their armor that needs patching up, but overall I think we're ready to hit the road with this Normandy crew.
I'll leave you with some photoshopping in honor of the Penny Arcade Expo we're going to. The original comic was from Penny Arcade.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Head, Hand, Legs and Feet
Shepard first: Lee is almost done with his costume. Had a mild setback on schedule due to some mysterious illness, but he's feeling better now (and playing Borderlands) so he'll be back to finishing up the arm stripe tomorrow. His costume saga hasn't changed from the dremel and paint routine for a bit, but the details are really coming out nicely.
Chris is a genius. He finished my Tali helmet and the Omni-tool. It looks like I'm wearing a hologram in that shot. The helmet is the aforementioned vacuum-formed dome with purple tint and Nite Shades black spray to pull it darker. The frame is made of some more bent plastic (PET-G), EVA foam. We put a brimless baseball cap inside so that I can actually wear the thing. He's also built in a voice-activated mouth light and some UV LEDs in the hopes that the UV contacts I bought will glow inside the helmet.
The Omni-tool is a thing of beauty made of the same plastic, some mylar sheeting, rivets, bits of a keyboard's circuitry pattern and a bunch of tiny amber LEDs meticulously wired together.
Lest it sound like I'm not doing any work on my own costume, I've finished my Tali jacket and hood with the exception of a couple of snaps to attach the body scarves to my leg bands and belt attachment points. And the thing the holds my hood closed. The Tali boots above are made of shoes (they're in there, I promise) that aren't terribly comfortable, some upholstery foam to shape the toes, black Duck tape, and EVA foam. Ahh foam, is there anything you can't do?
I'm almost done with sewing. Just some gloves and a neck bib for the hood I'm wearing under the helmet. Then it's belts, arm packs and boot knife.