Mostly Worth The Lack Of Sleep

You may remember that a while back I mentioned that I had ordered a new desk, one meant to eventually become my daughter's homework desk. Well, it arrived some time last week, but unfortunately the perils of shipping had caught up with me (I order so much freaking stuff online it really isn't a wonder), and when I opened up the box and started pulling out the pieces to make sure they were all there and intact, well...yeah, not so much.

Everything was there, certainly. The problem was the top of the desk, the big huge massive piece that everything else attaches to. It was cracked in multiple places, including one very large line right down the middle. Sigh. Thankfully the company that made the desk gets that damage does occur during shipping and has a really efficient (and free) parts replacement department. So I went online to tell them I needed a new top as mine arrived mangled and the next day they shipped it out. Of course, now I have a big broken plank taking up space in my garage until the start of next month, but there are worse problems, I will grant you.

The replacement piece arrived on Tuesday and I decided to put the desk together that night once my daughter had gone to bed. Normally I don't mind, and even often enjoy, when she "helps" me, but I get, um, cranky sometimes when doing things like assembling my furniture, so I figured it would be best for both of us if I did that while she wasn't around. My poor husband wasn't so fortunate. He was gracious enough to allow me to totally disrupt his evening by making him help me by holding up various pieces as I put them together (and reattaching the feet after I put them on the wrong end of the legs). Once we had the basic desk put together and upright, I let him loose and he called it a night. I stayed up for another hour and a half or so getting the various drawers and sliding bits assembled. Was up until two-thirty in the morning getting it done, but I've got to say, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I even managed to pick one that doesn't cover the
oversized vent on the wall, go me!

Let's see, we've got an alien from Toy Story, a Lego alien from
Toy Story, Zeke from Ctrl+Alt+Del, Lego Indiana Jones,
coloring supplies, a box of notecards...

...a Lego TIE Fighter complete with Darth Vader, R2-D2,
and my daughter's Spongebob Squarepants coloring books.

The kiddo checks out her new domain.

Now it just needs a chair. Speaking of which...

My updated to-do list for around the house is now as follows:

• Figure out how to refinish a wooden item.
• Refinish the chair that will go at this desk.
• Frame the various maps and convention art that needs to go on the walls (frames already purchased).
• Hang up said maps and art.
• Hang up the awesome Firefly, Star Trek, and Wheel of Time stuff we had professionally framed once it is ready to be picked up.
• Hang up that blasted sconce my husband randomly brought home from the office.
• Convert my daughter's crib to a toddler bed.

...and I think that's it. Refinishing the chair should be extra awesome, as I discovered when I finally got it down from the shelf in the garage where it has been living. I had forgotten that when my brother-in-law and his wife repainted some of our house's exterior while I was pregnant, I had let one of them stand on the chair, knowing I was going to be overhauling it anyway. So now there's big blotches of blue paint all over it that I get to sand off. Whee.

Oh, for those wondering, I know I mentioned that I was going to try to revamp a lamp that had belonged to my grandparents, but the lamp on the desk is not that lamp. I tried taking apart the old lamp and realized that I would need to tinker with the wiring to actually get all of the pieces separate, so I eighty-sixed that idea and just caved in and bought a new base. I will just tuck the old lamp in a corner in my closet for now until I either decide to send it to Goodwill or find a use for it elsewhere. 

I wish you all a fantabulous weekend! If you'll excuse me, I'm off to do some research on wood refinishing...

My Desk Just Got A Little Bit More Awesome

Some time last frickin' year I found out that two series of collector figures had been announced for the video game Mass Effect 2. The second series, set to come out sometime around December I think, I can't even remember now, was going to feature everyone's favorite Turian, Garrus Vakarian. Garrus!!!

That'd be Garrus there on the left.

You may recall that Garrus was the NPC I romanced in my playthrough of the game. Because he is awesome. Also, because as it turns out, that romance was hilarious. So, naturally you can imagine my delight to learn I could soon have my very own action figure to play with adorn my desk. You can bet I preordered that sucker right away. I also preordered the Krogan companion from the second game, Grunt, which was to be released as part of the first action figure series. That group was supposed to come out sometime around August or September I believe.

Then things got hinky. I don't know if the hold up was on DC Unlimited's end or on Bioware's, but release of Grunt and Garrus got pushed back to January and May of this year, respectively. January came and went with no sign of my Grunt action figure and at some point I received a notification that my Garrus order had been canceled because that item was no longer going to be available. Grr. Contacting the seller from which I had ordered Grunt, I learned that it was still scheduled to be released but there was no telling when exactly. I ended up canceling that order, because, well, like I said, things were hinky.

But some time in the last few months, DC Unlimited finally released the first series of Mass Effect 2 figures. My husband is playing through the game at the moment, and it has been getting me excited about Mass Effect all over again. So I finally caved in and went ahead and ordered my Grunt from Amazon last week.

He came yesterday.

He is AWESOME.

Here he is, in all of his packaged glory.

Behold Grunt! Mighty Krogan warrior. Don't piss him off.

No, seriously, don't piss him off, the safety
is most definitely not on.

So now I have a new guardian for my mishmash of a desk. He goes nicely with the random assorted Lego sets (an Indiana Jones minifig courtesy of my nephew and Darth Vader on a T.I.E. fighter), several Wall-E toys, an R2-D2, and a plastic stegosaurus.

I mean, Wrex, the Krogan from the first game, was pretty awesome. But he had nothing on his younger counterpart who, as the back of the packaging says, lacks the bitterness of other members of his species.

Speaking of the packaging. That was kind of amusing in a WTF sort of way all on its own.

I know it is hard to make out, but those little blurbs in the middle are descriptions of each character available in the first series. The descriptions for Thane and Grunt are hard to argue with, but the one for Tali starts off, "Petite, almost perky...." as if that has anything to do whatsoever with her character. Well, maybe the perky thing, but, I don't think that actually applies to Tali. I guess if we're judging by the standards of other Quarians? Also, don't get me started on the fact that they released a figure for the stock male Shepard only. I guess the vast majority of people who play these games don't bother to mess with the character creator and are therefore satisfied with a figure of the most boring version of Shepard possible. Whatever. (I also assume that this confirms Canon!Shepard as male. Also boring.)

Also, you can just barely see it in the photo, but at the bottom right corner is an add for the 2011 Mass Effect 2 calendar, due out "this September," presumably indicating that all of the packaging for this series was printed up well before September 2010, and yet, the figures weren't released until when? I don't get the comic book industry folks. I really don't. If the rest of the world (even the creative parts--think television productions) ran on the kind of schedule the comics industry did...man, we would be screwed.

Sadly, it appears that the second series of figures has been permanently canceled, which is a complete bummer. But I'll satisfy myself hanging out with Grunt and keep my fingers crossed that maybe someone can be more on the ball when Mass Effect 3 comes out, and that maybe, just maybe, I can still get my Garrus after all...