Labor Of Love

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, then you know I am a proud history nerd. My Netflix queue consists of "Lost" (even though I own the entire series on DVD) and a million history themed specials. My bookcase is full of huge history books, all of which I've read cover to cover. However I'm only interested in certain eras of history. In elementary school, we had to perform the process of mummification on a chicken wing as part of our studies on Ancient Egypt and I loved it. In high school I had to take an American History class and was bored to tears. But there is one historical subject I can never get enough of. Titanic. When it comes to that subject, I've read and seen just about everything (not including the new books released this year, but I'll get to those). I've even read the transcripts of  the investigations into the sinking. That's how obsessed and/or pathetic I am.
When I was a kid, I had a plastic model kit of the Titanic and I rushed through it in a few weeks. It came out decent but not great. Still, I was upset when it was destroyed during a move. The remnants of it are in my mom's garage somewhere. I reverted to my childhood self last Christmas when I got a new Titanic model as a gift. The model itself was about $40 and I've spent another $40 (at least) on materials to complete it. I've built a few model cars in my time and they were pretty easy because they're made out of metal and the ones I did never had a lot of smaller parts. But a model ship is a whole other animal. We're talking millions of tiny parts, all of them plastic. And the instructions were terrible, and also written in Chinese. My excitement about that there model took a dive once I saw how poorly the instructions were written and I didn't start construction of the thing for about a month. But slowly I started to work on it, mostly late at night when I couldn't sleep (because the perfect time to work on something that requires extreme attention to detail is when you're half-awake). Being that I am a perfectionist, building this thing was a much more laborious process than I had anticipated. I whipped out books with pictures and drawings of the ship. I Googled for better views of certain areas. I even referred to certain parts of the movie on one occasion. I wanted it to be as true to the real thing as possible. The diagram that came with the model was very poorly done. The colors didn't match the actual ship so I had to find my own paint colors that did match. I don't even want to know how many hours it took. But it came out pretty great. It didn't occur to me to document the process until a friend asked to see my progress so I don't have any pictures of the million, unassembled pieces. It may be further proof of my obsession that my first thought after finishing this was that I want to do another one and apply what I learned from building this one. I think I have a problem...and "Intervention" just went off the air. So I guess the answer is to give in to the sickness!