Robot Ruckus 2019

It was quite the adventure going to Robot Ruckus at the Orlando Maker Faire and getting to meet so many of my favorite Battlebots teams and builders, including some I have been corresponding with for a while.

I had my RotatoR pants on!

Here I am with Victor Soto, the engineer and driver of RotatoR, the Tombstone slayer!

And then there's Witch Doctor, runner up for the Giant Nut in 2019!

I'm holding a piece of Whiplash that Witch Doctor removed!

Enter the Kraken!!

Mammoth... it is a monster of a robot for sure!

Let's get Bombshell to the bot-medic!

Can I drive Hypershock?

Killer Parakeet doesn't realize that Captain Shrederator makes for a poor merry-go-round substitute...

Killer Parakeet doesn't believe in voodoo even if he's from a magical world...

Killer Parakeet made a friend!

Spin it to win it with Captain Shrederator!

One of the guys from Deep Six who does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work...

It's Matt Spurk, the pirate behind Kraken!

Here I am with Arren Hill, the brains behind Tantrum and its unorthodox punching spinner.

End Game plus Bloodsport - It was a blast seeing them compete with something other than a high kinetic energy spinner. 

None other than.... Ray Billings... the man behind killer robots such as Tombstone and Last Rites.

Sub-Zero, the under-rated flipper!

Team Mammoth! One of the first teams I started corresponding with and I finally got to finally meet th em in person!

The very first builder I ever corresponded with - Earl Pancoast III of Bale Spear. While Bale Spear didn't show up on the Discovery series, he did show up in the Science series and in some of the un-aired fights last year. 

Another builder I corresponded with early on - Craig Danby, formerly of Predator, Foxic, and Foxtrot, but now with Slambot. 

And here I am playing with voodoo magic with none other than Andrea Gellatly of Witch Doctor!

And of course, I had to get a picture with Dustin Esswein, the brains behind Deep Six!

Killer Parakeet and I still had to get one with Axe Backwards, plow flavored!

CrossFit Open 20.5

Of course, more pictures will follow once I. Ramirez of Valkyrie Photography finishes compiling her collections of photographs!  Here's what I have thus far.

So 20.5 was basically a "pick your poison" type of workout where I had to accumulate 80 calories of rowing, 120x14 lb wall balls to 9', and 40 ring muscle ups for Rx.  No way in heck I was pulling off any gymnastics, even at scaled just yet, which included chin-to-bar pull-ups without jumping, so I ended up Rx'ing it just to see how fast I could get 120 wall balls at full weight plus 80 calories of rowing.  Did I mention I had 20 minutes to do so?

And then there was the inevitable playing around on the rings despite the fact that we didn't have the gymnastics skills...

And then there were the pictures my judge took during my 20 minutes after I used the first 15ish minutes to do what I could do...

And then there were the gratuitous pictures I took of my buddies who also suffered alongside with me during 20.5... well, more like afterwards.

Candle on the Water

Sometimes, I find random things while looking for other items.  This was one of them - piano sheet music for "Candle on the Water" from the original (1977?) Pete's Dragon. I think I took it slightly faster than I usually do, but overall, it seemed to come out about as good as it gets for this increasingly cantankerous keyboard.