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After Splashy Introduction, Airtime Seems to Deflate

Yesterday I dove in and did an AMA (Ask me Anything) Q&A session on Reddit.  I stuck around for several hours and tried to honestly answer everything. There was lots of really nice ego stroking and thanks, and some legit questions.  A number of lovely memories brought back up.  Some sore spots too.  And the trolls showed up to shower me with their special brand of whatever it is they do.

Thanks to everyone who participated.  It was a pleasant experience.  And since I’ve more or less abandoned CmdrTaco.net since starting full time work again last winter, I’ll just say for the record: things are going great.  Thanks for caring.

6 months ago I walked away from what might be the greatest job ever. I had meaningful work at a place i truly called home. It was a scary decision, but the right one: 14 years had managed to grind me down.  I needed to shake things up, but thats easier typed than done with a wife and two kids.

I took the time to play with legos, go swimming and watch cartoons (mostly with my kids… mostly).  I wrote.  I read.  I took naps.  It was awesome.

But 3 months later, almost to the day, I knew it was time.  Maybe it was my wife telling me that it was time to get out of her house, or maybe it was just reading the news every day and feeling like a lazy on-looker.  But I knew it was time to start doing something again.   Life is to short to watch it go by.

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Cre Fuller is a talented local (to me) artist who works with found bits of scrap metal to create whimsical robots.  Many of his pieces are based on coffee pots and other objects found in the kitchen, but the source material can come from pretty much anything made of metal.

While I chatted with him in his Ypsilanti, MI studio he was not so carefully disassembling an ancient mechanical typewriter.  He wasn’t sure what he would find inside, but hopefully it would be inspiration in the form of some hunk of machined metal ready to be re-purposed as an eyebrow or ear or neck. He was getting increasingly frustrated that the old machine wasn’t coming apart, and it became clear that if he didn’t get inside soon with the screwdriver, a nearby dremel sat waiting to lend a hand to the process.

He has a number of nice pictures of his work at Tin Angry Men but he also let me take some pictures of him, his studio, and some of his robots, which I’ve posted in my Google Plus Photo Gallery.  The picture that I linked above turned out really nice, and is pretty indicative of some of his larger pieces.

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