Andrew R Gross

In preparation for Civil War, I pushed hard to finish the Arc Reactor prop I described in Part I .  Afterwards, I posted it to Reddit on the DIY forum .  It got a total of 3599 'upvotes' and 207 comments.  The next day, Jack told me that a coworker asked if his brother was Andrew, because she'd stumbled across the post, which had been reposted to another site entirely.  F' yeah. The finished product The inspiration Wearable Arc reactor prosthetic DIY

It has been a wild month.  On the 13th of April, Julie SMASHED her leg.  Totally f'd it all to h.  Then on May 6, we went to see Captain America: Civil War in theaters, in costume.  I was Captain America. This is the third time we've dressed up (cosplayed, it's called) for a movie.  My mom asked, "Is that something people do?"  Kinda, Mom.  Kinda.  People do it occasionally, although for a movie this size it's not quite as common.  Still, the reaction is fantastic.  People take pictures with you and geek out.  It's a lot of fun.  It's better with more people, and this time we rolled deep: eleven people were in our group, five in costume. This costume was a real milestone for me.  I've always enjoyed making costumes for Halloween and such.  Usually, I've relied on resourcefulness and lucky finds at Goodwill.  Often, the key is distilling a character's look into a few key items/colors/shapes/icons etc to make i...

Julie broke her leg when she got hit while riding her motorcycle.  This happened two weeks ago, so anyone reading this probably already heard.  She'll be fine, but for now her left leg is in an external fixator, which is a bunch of rods and pins holding her bones in place though her skin. While I'm on the subject, though, I'm going to describe my observations while Julie was recuperating at Dignity Health -- formally California Hospital -- in down town LA. The short version is that Dignity Health is a bad hospital.