I (stega) have been called stega for a long, long time. There’s a very long story regarding the early days of videoconferencing and male genitalia behind that nickname which I won’t go into here, but suffice to say, half the people who know me refer to me as Stega.
As such I have a small collection of interesting stegas…stegos…stegosauruses…stegi?–some I purchased, and some purchased or made by friends and given or sent to me. For example, the first pics here are two sent to me by a Warcraft guildmate from Texas. They were originally unpainted, but then when he visited us at Purgatory, the two of us sat down and each painted one. The same guildmate also found a laser-cut wood stegosaurus skeleton and sent it to me. It now sits on a super cute shelf I received via the Fluevog gift exchange this past December.
Another friend visited us from Belfast and brought a Lego constructor set. While here, he and I assembled it.
Other stegas that have arrived from friends include a giant eraser and a teeny-tiny figure from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, both from a friend in Canada. The latter usually gets to travel with me.
Then there are the stega handbags, each sent to me by fellow guildmates:
Not all the stegas have been gifts. Right when we bought this place, I found four wooden skeleton kits on clearance at Harbor Freight for just a dollar a pop. Eventually I assembled them and painted them and put them outside. They didn’t really like being outside as our high winds tended to move them about a lot, so they have been brought indoors, cleaned up, and now reside atop the bookcases in the north hallway.
In that hallway we also have cabinets (bought around 2004 from IKEA) that house all my tiny stegas and all the fossilized coral pairs I’ve accumulated (most were purchased from a place in Grandview, Ohio before I moved out to California). While most of the stegi in the cabinet are things I purchased–like when Coach did a bunch of dinosaur-themed items–some were gifts, like the game card from guildmates, tiny erasers from a friend in Scotland, the transformer stega an old housemate brought back from Japan, and the teeny-tiny handpainted one sent by one of my oldest and dearest friends. Plus, a pretty little carved one sent to me as a thank you when we went in as executive producers for a documentary about why people are so fascinated by dinosaurs.
Now this post originally was inspired a friend who made and sent me a cute little fridge magnet made with perler beads, but then it kind of mushroomed as I found myself going through my inventory of photos and of stegasauruses. (Still haven’t decided on the correct plural form.) So in addition to the aforementioned magnet, there’s a small collection of stuffed stegas, and a stega coin bank and suncatcher, both Etsy finds. And we have a few 3D printers now, one of which was used to print this wiggly blue stega, and then I found the wee yellow and blue one from a seller on Etsy.
Then there is this super cool light up sign made of letters I found on the clearance rack at Target, and Agent Smith printed up a stand on the 3D printer and modified the letters so they work off AC power instead of batteries.
That’s not the only stega sign! Hanging on the outer wall of my sound booth are these. I made the random sign from letters in the clearance bin at Michaels, and the Ohio license plate was on my very first new car that I drove out to California with the boys, some fish, doggies and a giant fern. The street sign was another Etsy find, and the pic of the car….well that’s my wee dork starting the cork screw at Laguna Seca.
And here’s a pic of my me and my wee dork (aka a 2002 M Coupe with its Cali license plate).
That, of course, brings up the fact that our logo is a blue stega on wheels. The logo was designed by a guy named John Groh, whom I found via Freelancer.com. It’s based partly on a Matchbox car and partly on the stega on me–the “original” stega–which is a recolor of a super-old QuickTimeVR stegosaurus. About ten years ago I updated the the image to deal with the wonky last plate.
