Our annual South Dakota puzzle:

Our hotel is at the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial Site, and this is the view from the 20th floor restaurant. The memorial site looks beautiful from up there, and we’re going to walk around the site tomorrow evening. There are 2 large reflection pools with waterfalls around the edges (built where the original WTC tower footprints were located), an open park area, and a museum building.

So, the idea behind the Master Build at the annual Lego convention (BrickCon) is that each participant (50 total people competed) is given a Lego set to work with (this year it was a medium sized “Space Police” set) and then you are tasked with creating something unique according to a theme that has nothing to do with the set, and you’re time-limited. Everyone sits in a big room together an works for 45min (I think that was how much time we had). This year’s theme was “Building A Community” and my creation you can see in the pictures. I titled it “The New McMansion in the Neighborhood” and it had 8 micro-scale (small) houses with a little arbor entrance at one end, and the giant new neighbor’s house being built at the other end, complete with crane and safety barriers.
It was really fun to participate, and I had no idea I would even be in contention to win, but apparently “it was by quite a significant margin” according to one of the judges who was sitting near us when I was announced as the winner! How cool!!

The Rat Lab group really represented at our Rat City exhibition booth at Emerald City Comicon this year! It was really fun to interact with everyone… taking photos, talking about derby, encouraging people to come out and see us at Key Arena… it was lots of fun!!