Powderpuff Results

Last night was the first Riverside Girl Scout Powderpuff Pinewood Derby. After a long design process for both girls, we managed to settle on the car style, color, and adornments. What a hassle! I think next time if we do it I’ll present (2) or (3) choices and that’ll be it.

Once I had the cars painted and assembled, wheels and all, it was time to add the weights. We took the cars to the hobby store to be weighed and figure out how much weight to add. Ali’s car weighed in at 3.7 oz. and Sarah’s was an even 4.0. We got 1 oz. of weight for each car. The weight limit was 5.0 oz. so Sarah wanted to go just under that since we didn’t want to get DQ’d for being too heavy. Ali’s we didn’t have to worry about since we were more than an ounce off. Sarah’s car went pretty good, though I messed up the clear coat (it was still a little soft) when I was holding it to drill the holes for the weights. On Alison’s, I ended up drilling THROUGH the car and messing up the paint and stickers. I WAS MAD! Luckily the damage wasn’t too bad and I was able to repair it and get it pretty close to the original condition. Can you see the repair?

In the end, both cars worked pretty well. They both averaged in the neighborhood of 2.380 seconds per run. Awards were given for first through 10th place. Alison took 10th place and Sarah took 4th. Both girls received medals. Sarah was .007 seconds away from getting a trophy. While they were happy (relatively speaking) with their awards, it was fun just making the cars with them and seeing how they reacted watching their cars race.

Powderpuff Derby

We finished up the Powderpuff Derby cars this weekend (pictures below). The clear coat made the color on the numbers run (bum deal, but nothing I could really do). The race is Tuesday night and all I need to do is adjust the weight. Hopefully they have a good time. I know Ali really wants to win, and Sarah wants an award, whether it is for one of the categories they are going to give out like Best Design, Most Original Design, etc. or an actual winning car. I did my best so we’ll see what happens. Keep your fingers crossed for them.

Busy Day Again

Today was another busy day. I went to work for a few hours and when I got home I spent two hours doing some outside Christmas decorations. We don’t do much, just some lights on our bushes in front of the house, a grapevine reindeer, and a snowman on the porch. We have some small, grapevine snowmen as well, but after taking them out I couldn’t put them out without a little bit of work. The metal frames are painted white and they have spots of rust bleeding thru the paint. Plus, the paint that was on the grapevines is chipped and peeling off all over. Maybe I’ll make a project out of it after Christmas and touch them up with some rust-o-leum so we can use them next year.

The one thing I don’t like is running cords all over the yard. My short extension cord is about 3 feet too short to use, and I’m not about to go buy a new cord just to be able to get the exact length I need, so I settle for a coiled, bunched up cord along the side of the house. The other problem is that I have to run a cord around the back of the house. When the new garage was built, I had an extra outdoor outlet installed so I wouldn’t have to do that, but I realized yesterday in order for the lights on each side of the house to go on and off at the same time, I needed them to be on the same light sensor. This was something I didn’t think of when I was planning out the lights this year. Maybe I can still see about doing something because I really don’t want to have a cord running around the porch where someone could potentially trip on it.

After that was finished, we piled into the car to see about getting some stickers for the girls’ powderpuff derby cars. We didn’t get real creative with the design, just a plain Mustang look. They thought they could customize it with paint and stickers so we hit Michael’s to see what kind of stickers they had in the scrapbooking aisle. When we got back home we primed and applied the base coats. They are drying right now. Hopefully I can finish the base coats today before we leave for the Christmas Parade.