It's been a while...

...so I'll hit the highlights.

We replaced the smart with a 2009 Volkswagen Rabbit, which we both love. We got a good trade-in value on the smart, and I think it's found a new home, as it's not on the dealer's Web site anymore.

My tenants moved out. We need new ones. I'm considering hiring a property manager. Last weekend we stripped the wallpaper from the downstairs bedroom, and I'm going to go paint it this coming weekend. It looks better already.

We delivered the art car to my niece a couple weekends ago. I spent about three hours teaching her to drive a stick, and it went pretty well with the exception of the clutch lasting a mere three days. They got it fixed, and she's doing pretty well with it. The only places we didn't finish were the roof and the edges of the front bumper where it wraps around on the sides, and she's been working on it some with her friends.

I've been skating more now that the rink at the state fairgrounds (where my club is based) is open for the season. Tonight I centered a bunch of spins (usually they're not that consistent), and this week my waltz jump improved as well.

The beginning of the art car

This weekend I began to attach the bottle caps to the Honda. I started on the door with the dent in case my adhesive didn't work, but it seems to be holding up well. Before I stuck the caps to the car, I sprayed them inside and out with a clear gloss Rustoleum paint that will hopefully keep them from rusting. The adhesive is 100% silicone caulk, and it needs 24 hours at a temperature of 40F or above to cure. I'd planned to adhere one cap as a test, but once I got started I didn't want to stop, so I did 15 on Saturday and 55 more on Sunday. 70 down, 12733 to go...

Thanks to Steph and Douglas for the photos.

Bottle caps and more bottle caps

The art car project is moving along slowly. I currently have somewhere between 8000 and 9000 bottle caps, and I've sorted many of them. (Anyone who wants to come over for a bottle cap sorting party is welcome, by the way.) We're fashioning a bottle cap flattener to unbend the caps that didn't come off their bottles cleanly. I'm dying to attach a test cap to the car, but it needs to be dry and 40 degrees F outside for a 24-hour period afterwards, and that hasn't happened yet.

The distinctive smell of the bottle caps takes me back to when I was a kid. My family attended Labor Day pig roasts at the home of one of my dad's co-workers, and there were many kinds of soda and beer every year. I always got to keep the bottle caps. I especially like the stale beer smell for some reason, which is odd because I don't like beer.

Art car progress -- sort of

I further researched the decoupaged quotes art car idea and didn't find a good sealant that I thought would work, so we're on to Art Car v3 -- covering the car in bottle caps. When I was little, I collected bottle caps, and my dad found them in the garage attic this summer and brought them to me. I was very excited to sort through them and think about what I could make with them now, and we have plans for further bottle cap art after the car is complete.

A week and a half ago, Steph and I went to dinner at Ralph's Great Divide with Dan and Douglas. While we were there, we thought to ask them to save bottle caps for us. Our server gave us about 200 that were still in the cap catcher under their bottle opener, and I stopped in last night and picked up another 330. A box of 4000 caps from eBay should be arriving soon.

The bottle caps are sorted by color, although I haven't figured out yet what design I want to make on the car. The caps are divided into containers of blacks, golds, whites, greens, yellows, blues, silvers, and reds.

Art car v2.2

My first and second visions for turning my 1993 Honda Accord into an art car have proven to be unworkable, so I have a new implementation of an old idea: I'm going to decoupage quotes onto the car and seal it with some sort of acrylic or polyurethane sealer to make it waterproof.

My second plan was to use letters cut from bumper stickers to make the quotes, but there just aren't that many free bumper stickers out there, so it finally occurred to me to cut the letters out of magazines, ads, and other found objects and decoupage them onto the car. The background for each quote will be a different piece of colored or patterned paper so that observers can tell the quotes apart. Last night I bought some scrapbooking paper at Costco, and then I came home and started cutting out letters. I'm sorting and storing them in a many-sectioned tool organizer. I've been collecting quotes for some time, although I'll probably need more than I think I will. Feel free to suggest your favorite quotes in the comments.

VW ASCII art

On the New Beetle list, I've seen quite a few different pieces of VW-related ASCII art. However, someone on the Prius list owns a '65 Beetle, and I think his is my favorite so far:

Carl
Proud Owner of Stanley, a 1965 VW bug!
(O\|/O) (.\~/.)

I love the back of the Beetle. I would have used lowercase Os for the headlights, though -- I think it's more to scale:

(o\|/o)