40 days

It's hard to sleep well when the countdown is

running all the time. Sadie's been dreaming about

float deadlines all week!

Wow, tomorrow is in the 30's! I'd better write up

a bigger checklist! Twenty five floats due in 39

days. Time to zoom zoom zoom!

Our Queens float went from two floats to one this year. Today

we played with big building blocks to get "Da Look" for the

Queen and her court, which Dave is still not happy with. He's

talking about a new throne chair!

One of Dave's early projects the adorable "New Year Kids"

being placed on the Wu Yee float. Each statue has over 40

different colors. That's why a scraped artifact is a shop disaster.

One of our tricks is to paint the deck a bright color and then

varnish it. This ensures that it will wear well and stay good-as

-new after performers walk on the decks. I am pretty sure that

ninja is Elizabeth.

Right out of Dave's head: one of his famous doodles. Dave

does this kind of stuff all the time on napkins, paper bags,

scraps of wood (and sometimes even the occasional toilet

paper doodle). This is the start of a huge money pot for

Bank of the West.

Wells Fargo's cute little piggy bank is now 8 days old!

Tiger just got it's stripes today and is resting before

getting installed in a week or two on it's float. Good Job

Stephanie, what an animal painter you are!

I wish float building was all art, however we need

to have platforms! Here is Thunder Valley getting

new sides. Who would guess it would take five

hours per side to bolt hinges on. Maybe Monday we

will be able to start a float step on this deck.

Another day of carving and Yumi is guessing

that one of the blocks of Styrofoam is chemically

a bad batch. The individual beads are too big and

too loosely bonded to each other. That means it's

like carving dry sand. Detail on poor foam does not

hold up and can ruin a great statue. We are not sure

if we can get the detail we need, or if we will have

to remove the bad block. Too much love is going

into this unit to cut corners. (foam carving joke)