Weekend fun...

so I had a busy weekend.

Very busy.

I did two events with the WamaLTC gang at DC - and both were really fun and strangely enough, relaxing.

It wasn't all that relaxed before, though.

The first event was on Saturday at Reston Town Center in Virginia, not far away from Tyson's Corner (a Very Important Reference Point since a LEGO Retail store is there), and lasted from noon to 4.

For me, though it started earler in teh week when I had to build something. Something that was different for me but tied in with the Autumn bit, sorta.

So I built a haunted house. While I wanted all sorts of moving things, I was frustrated by a couple of factors:

I procrastinated - so I had very little time, and I had no idea where my scary minifigs were. So I did a rush job over two long nights..

and ended up with this:



the eye moves from side to side, which I was pretty proud of. The back is  open (incomplete) as I thought that it would be cool for kids to put stuff in (and I wasn't ablet to finish it:-) ). That didin't work out, but the good thing about the openness ofthe back was that the interior was lit naturally, so people could see in the rooms, so that was pretty nice.

Other members of the club brought in stuff, including a maize maze, Bourbon Street on Halloween, a graveyard and a large pumpkin. And there was a freebuild area tha was constantly busy. I and another builder started building things like planes and bugs and frogs and robots.

It's always fun for me to be in these events to show people what we can do and play with them. It's outreach, and it's something that I think is very important for us to keep community growing. And we should be figuring ways to make our community a part of other people's lives in some way, by events, community service, or whatever else is thought of. I'll touch on that thought in a later note.

After that, I went with he gang to Tyson's Corner and shopped and relaxed....

and then on Sunday, I went to Westfield Mall to help out with a LEGO Building Blitz at the local mall. I was really surprised and impressed by the event, as it was a team competition build that was started by a young man - Habitat for Humanity helped out, but the idea came from a boy too young to volunteer with HfH.



The event was a timed build - each team of two or three boys and girls had 300 random parts and had an hour to build a house...and it was really cool to watch. Even though the sound system didn't work, it didn't matter. There were over 20 teams who took aprt in this event, and their registration fee went to HfH as well as donations. Bricks were also donated to go to the Building for Tomorrow brick campaign for Hurricane Katrina victims' schools.

The mall was supportive of this, and there were clowns painting faces and walking around. On top of that, there was a TV station taking footage of the event, and there was already a newspaper story in the local paper. And it was a fun event!

So why aren't there more events like this?