Things I Think I Think: NASA 2016 Christmas Stocking Competition

I have mentioned (complained about) this before. My wife has a habit of agreeing to participate in various competitions at work and then somehow conning me into "helping". They have a Christmas stocking decorating contest every year and each organization has an entry. My wife works in the MER (Mission Evaluation Room) and last year she handed me a stocking the night before the judging and said "GO". I put something together over night and they ended up winning. I said "Never again"......for the 8th time.

This year she actually mentioned it to me weeks in advance....and then never brought it up again. She was busy at work and I had hoped that maybe someone else in the rather vast organization (maybe someone that at least actually works for NASA) might take the reigns this year for the MER. Nope.

She at least gave me about 36 hours this year. She told me on Tuesday and the judging was to be on Thursday. I was really struggling to come up with any clever ideas. They give you a standard stocking, but just decorating it isn't going to cut it. Since I had no clever ideas, I decided to just go with ridiculous!

I was in the garage looking for something to provide inspiration and I noticed our daughters' little Mercedes electric car. We had gotten it for her a couple months earlier and I wondered if I could turn it into some sort of stocking delivery system. We're doing some construction work at our house so I've got tons of materials just laying around. I took a bunch of PVC and constructed a frame for a sleigh that could sit on top of the car. I had plenty of PVC, but I did have to make a run for some connectors and glue.

On Tuesday night I painted the frame black with some cans I had sitting around. I didn't get very far on Tuesday, but I had a plan. Wednesday I went to work.

On Wednesday morning I was ready to start testing. The car was going to be running around inside NASA buildings so it needed to be clean. Unfortunately, my wife's sister and her boyfriend had been visiting the weekend prior and Kyle had decided to take our daughter mudding in her Mercedes while playing with her unsupervised. This actually turned out to be one of the most difficult and time consuming issues of the entire project. Dried mud did not want to come off this thing. I might have strangled Kyle if he wasn't back in Minnesota!

This is the frame sitting on the car. The Mercedes S63 is really quite a machine. Samantha can drive it but since she's a little too small to reach the pedals we got one that can be remote controlled. It works great and she loves it. It also has a functioning stereo and some really cool LED lighting. I used PVC for the frame to keep the weight down. I also used a little foam insulation to keep from scratching Sam's car (we never told her we were "borrowing" it).

I had the 'sleigh', and ideas for how to decorate it, but I decided that it needed to make a grand entrance. As it was said in the movie Megamind: What's the difference between a villain and a SUPER villain? "PRESENTATION!" I went to the store and bought some more PVC and built a large frame to act as a sort of box / garage. I originally started to build this out of some of the scrap wood you see in the background but realized quickly that it would be extremely heavy.

Frame built and glued....check! I made a slight miscalculation by forgetting to add the length of the connectors when computing dimensions. I was barely able to get this in the front door of our house. Uh-oh. It was too late for a redesign at this point though, so I just hoped the doors in whatever NASA building we needed to set this up in were at least as big.

My plan was to have the car staged as this "present" and when it was time to be judged it would drive out in a cloud of smoke, lights, and Christmas music. I knew that wrapping paper wasn't going to work so I went to the store and bought this fabric. I thought I had way too much, but I turned out to be about three yards short. My mother was kind enough to make a trip back out to get the last three yards that they had and I used safety pins to secure it around the frame.

I also bought a remote controlled smoke machine. The idea was that you would set it up in the box and turn it on a minute or so before you drove the car out. At the house it worked great! When the car burst through the fabric door it was followed by a fantastic cloud of smoke.

Branelle actually did help with the decorating. I cut out red foam board to make it look like a sleigh and attached some other fun items here and there for effect. I also painted some M E R letters white and attached them to the sides. We then wired it up with battery powered LED Christmas lights that would twinkle and poked them through the foam board. Nel made ornaments with every console and group in the organization and put them on. She also decorated the stocking.

When it was time to head up to NASA on Wednesday night to stage, it was quickly apparent that the box was never going to fit in the back of our truck. Our only option was a trailer we have but it was located in a storage place we have nearby. I went to get it and I could write a whole other post about that debacle. It was blocked in by my Trans Am that decided it didn't want to start. It wasn't a battery issue, it just wouldn't fire. I had to have the trailer, so I pushed the TA out the door and down a small incline knowing that there was no way I would be able to push it back up by myself. I was prepared to leave it until I was done with the trailer and come back in the middle of the night to figure it out but after I had the trailer hooked up and was ready to leave I gave it one more shot and The Bandit fired up.

We headed up to NASA at around midnight to set up, amusing the gate security on the way in with our idiocy. The conference room to be used was on the 4th floor of one of the buildings. The car was easy - we just drove it up.

The box was a different story. We got it to the conference room but it was too big to fit through the doors. I thought about taking the hinges off, but breaking government property seemed like a bad idea. We figured out that with the right angle and the right flex, and one joint disconnected, we could force it in.

We set up the box, the smoke machine, and the car and Nel posted a sign on it to discourage peeking and we headed home.

This is what we ended up with. I actually bought the sock monkey (because I couldn't find a Santa the right size) and I had the space helmet from a "Silly Hat Challenge" game in the NASA Kickball League last season. The monkey is holding the stocking. The little Christmas decorations including the reindeer on the front are all from Party City. I even got a blinking Rudolf nose for the lead reindeer.

I wasn't actually there for the competition, but you can see Branelle sitting in the corner as others present their stockings. The idea was that she would start the smoke machine a few minutes prior to her presentation and also turn on the lights and start the car. At that point you could drive it out of the box and around the room in a cloud of smoke with Christmas music blaring from the MP3 player.

Here is Nel taking it for a lap during judging. I've heard that it didn't quite go as planned. One issue is that apparently the smoke machine worked a little too well and there was so much that people started to look concerned. Another minor issue occurred with the music. Apparently, we hadn't tested the MP3 player aspect so when the music started up it was limited to the stored tunes - which are basically all Japanese Techno (Samantha loves it but it's not very Christmas-y). The rig was also about seven feet long and three feet wide and the conference room has way too many chairs in it. Nel doesn't have quite as much wheel time on the Merc as I do so the lap was a little challenging.