Hey! Listen!

I am not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination.  My first console was the NES, and was my only console for years.  About a decade, really.  Don't get me wrong - Super Marios 1, 2, and 3 were all choice, but when your friends all have games in glorious, boxy 3D, a girl gets a little jealous.

That edgily rendered coif...

It might have been a mix of things -- maybe my folks felt a little bad that I was a dinosaur, maybe no amount of cartridge-blowing would get a game to load correctly -- but when I was in my very early teens, my parents finally got me an N64.

Holy s***storm, folks.

As a start, I bought a few Mario games - Super Mario 64, Mario Golf, and Mario Kart - all of which, yes, were A-MAZ-ING.

However, real enlightenment arrived when I got my hands on this little piece:

So, you have to be aware of two things, dear readers.  #1 - I had never played a LoZ game before in my entire life, not even on the NES.  I wasn't even aware of the series until I was probably 11.  #2 - I had (have?) no nerve as a child.  Until I was possibly 8-years-old, dungeon levels of Super Mario 1 were often too scary for me.  So... the first time one of these popped out at me?

Yeah.  Nope.  I noped the f*** right out of there.

Needless to say, and as ridiculous as it sounds, Ocarina of Time was a real challenge for me.  For the first 3 dungeons, I had the handicap of running off-screen every time some remotely scary appeared.  I ultimately had to ask my sister's then-boyfriend to defeat the first two bosses for me, or I probably never would have touched that game again.

But by the time the 3rd or 4th dungeon rolled around, something had changed.  Rather unwittingly, I had defeated Barinade on my own and was feeling much more confident.  I was becoming a lot more invested in the story, and if I wanted to see the ending, I'd have to beat the game myself.  I didn't know about the history of Link and Zelda and the reoccurrences of Ganon.  Wikipedia didn't exist, and play-through videos weren't that common yet (and also, I still had dial-up).  I had to put on my big-girl-pants if I wanted my reward.  I flailed around and button-mashed a lot for the next couple of dungeons, but eventually, I started to play smart and use actual strategy when fighting.  Minus anything related to the Shadow Temple, the game became a lot more enjoyable all around.

Seriously - this was effed up.

To this day, Ocarina of Time remains one of my favorite games of all time.  I'll occasionally go to my parents and load a completely new game just for giggles (and because I've never properly 100-percented the game yet).

So why am I even bringing this up?  Why else?  Because I made a thing.

DG and I celebrated his birthday this weekend.  I had bought him a watch, but the box it came in was so... blah:

I could have easily just wrapped it and be done with it, but that just seemed boring.  I wanted to try something else.

I picked this up from AC Moore

After plugging the coin hole with hot glue and priming the wood, I decided on a simple shade of brown, mixing in an essentially imperceptible amount of gold paint for tinting:

Added some trim to represent brackets:

But, pro-tip:  Don't get impatient about putting down painter's tape.  If the paint is wet, it is wet, and the gentle peel of painter's tape means nothing:

Anyway, touched that up, added a little bedazzling, and...

I didn't have a lot of time to toy around with it, so no, it does not spontaneously play this theme when it opens:



But DG still liked it well enough.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Until the next.