Friday morning: day 3a

The last day. :(  We had tour stuff for the first half of the day and then the tour officially ended.

We started out with a tour of Lego House.  This place is amazing.  (I think the only not amazing thing was how busy it was on Saturday.)  Stuart, one of the tour leaders, is one of the main model builders and gave half the tour.

We started out at the tree.

There are several branches that can hold scenes.  I missed the space one, but the astronaut from "The Martian".  They put some messages in it and my favorite was "we come in pieces."

Then we saw the dinosaurs in the top portion.  They were awesome, and we found out that on Easter one of each egg had hatched.  (If you look at the dinosaur lego set, there are still two eggs.)

There is the Duplo dino, who is the most fun.  There are animals making up a lot of his detail.

There is the normal Lego dino, who has a lot of color texture and much smoother lines than many Lego sculptures.  But at the end of the day, we saw so many cool things out of Lego that he was just normal.  The baby was pretty cute though!

All the adults are also stepping on a Lego block, like all poor parents.

The last one is Technic Dino.

The room that the dinosaurs are in is a giant brick.  The skylights are the studs and the lights are the inside cylinders.  This was a change suggested by the Lego community so that if aliens come they will know what the building is.

The whole building is centered around play, and does a great job of combining learning with play (a core value, that we heard several times.)  I forget what the red competency is, but it is basically free play.  There are three different areas.  An area by the waterfall with all sorts of bricks  and this produces very detailed designs.  There is an area with only 2x4 bricks, and this starts to make more pixelated, less detailed designs.  The last area is one that only has yellow 2x4 bricks and this makes very large, abstract designs.  The other thing to note is that they never take down all of the creations.  That leaves the slate too blank and kids don't know what to do.  Also, if they leave some up they often find that other people will make another creation that goes with it.

The blue area had a test track, a city builder, and a robot game (not shown yet).  The test track was what is found in many Lego areas.

The city builder was super cool.  You get a little square, you make the type of building on it (i.e., if you have a green square you make a park, if you have a red square you make an apartment) and then you put it on a light table.  There are little people running around, looking for different things, and if you put it near them you get a star and all the people come to use it.

Green area: an amazing miniland and  a stop motion video maker

(This is a robot tearing down a building.)

The yellow section (emotions) had a flower making area and a fish making area.

The fish area you would make a fish, scan it, and then it would swim in the tank.  Every two or three minutes there would be an animation, and you would empathize with your fish.  The first animation said it was feeding time and all the little fish we had made circled up and wiggled excitedly.  Then the big manta ray came and ate all the food and now I might be scarred for life I was so sad for our little fish.

Back to the room for the unveiling of this years special insider tour set (that most people knew about.)

But first!  A quick presentation about building instructions (which I found very interesting) and sustainability (which I also found very interesting).  They are looking at ways to move away from the poly-bags that are in all the boxes.  We got to see some of the things they've tried; it's mostly paper.  But with paper you need to worry about the bricks poking holes in the bag.  Put on a plastic coating?  Well, that seems to defeat the point.  How many holes are ok?  They are also looking at ways to make more environmentally friendly Lego bricks.

They then talked a lot about the making of our Lego set.  Stuart was the designer, but there was a lot of history involved in it too.  There used to be a page about the history, but now the only thing I can find is the original picture. (From https://www.lego.com/r/www/r/catalogs/-/media/catalogs/articles/lego%20history/article%20photos/company/8%20early%20expansion/systemhouse_inauguration_1958-original.jpg)

The coolest parts of the set are 1) They are very limited editions.  2) There is a unique to this set part.  It was made using 3D printing as they wanted to see if a different technique for making the element could be used.  Since it was a low volume run, it was a good time to try it out.  3) Our picture is on the back.  This means that we'll be in the Lego archives!  I apparently didn't take a picture at the time, so here are some more recent ones.

(And so that I can remember who signed where...)

Then farewell to the leaders.

A few more photos, a survey, getting the boxes signed, and such.  

We met a bunch of lovely people, but the ones that we seemed to click the most with were Alice (US) and Birgit (Austria)...

...and Emma and Mark (Australia).  

Well, this is turning into a long post.  I just decided to turn it into two.

Monday: stuff is getting done

Well, since I got up way to early this morning I was able to get quite a few things done before the boys got up.  Ben woke up not much after me and went into work super early, as he knew he'd need a nap in the afternoon too.

After we dropped off Isaac we made a quick run to the grocery store.  It felt a bit weird not having a large list, but since we weren't here last week we didn't have much we needed to get.  Once we got home I remembered that our tree had fallen down while we were gone.  It needed to be dealt with, especially since the top was in the neighbor's lawn.  So Joshua and I got to work.  (Luckily, my triangle made it fall exactly where I wanted it to fall.)

Joshua did a variety of things.  He did some clipping, some sawing, a lot of sawdust blowing, and some stacking.

We found two birds' nests.

This is his leaf wall.  When he was done sawing and clipping he started making this wall.  It had a whole story about how mice would be able to get in but not get out because he was closing all the holes.  I wasn't sure how to tell him that wouldn't work (for so many reasons), so I just went with it.

We surprised the boys with the Legos we brought home.  (Yes, there are a lot.)  They had to turn around while we put them on the bed, so the pictures are from them turning around.  Which reminds me, a few people asked why a person would want more than one of a set.  There are multiple reasons, but there seem to be two main ones.  1) They want one set to build and one set to keep unopened as a collector's item.  2) They are building something that requires a specific piece(s) from a set and the easiest way to get the pieces is to buy multiple of the set.

Obviously, it was then time to build some sets!  Ben and Isaac started the train set.  (We're missing bag 1...it's probably in a different box due to packing methods.  Luckily, it was just a forklift so they could go onto the next bag.)

Joshua elected to start his Ninjago set and he was excited about every single aspect of it.  The stickers, the wing-things, the trans orange rock, the second trans orange rock, how it went together, the pictures on the box, etc. etc.  It was awesome.

I started the Lego House tree.  But there are no pictures.  Also, I'm getting tired.  I took one short nap this morning; Joshua and I played the Sleeping Game.  I played worse than normal though, because I fell asleep too quickly.  Then I had a nice nap in the afternoon with only a few interruptions.  But at the same time, I haven't slept all that much the last few nights, so it's catching up with me.

Sunday: travel

After traveling for about 20 hours, we were home.  There were no issues with anything, it was just long.

We had a very small amount of room left, but it was just enough to actually be able to find things in back packs.  It's probably good that we didn't get any more Legos, as sad as that statement is.

We got home and the boys had been allowed to stay up, with screens, waiting for us.  Isaac gave lots of hugs; he missed us a lot.  (He also had a lot of fun, especially tubing up at the cottage.)  Joshua gave some hugs, and said he only missed us a little because he had so much fun with the grandparents.  This is pretty normal of both their personalities and both are cute.

After getting home I had about an hour of things I had to take care of and so got to bed around 10pm, exhausted.  And now it's 3am in the morning and apparently jet lag is real...going both ways.  I'll be able to take a nap today though, so I'm not too worried.

Thursday: Day 2

Today started with a short talk from the guy that used to be the CEO of Lego and is credited with turning the company around when it was about to fail in the early 2000s.  He looked really familiar, but I couldn't place him until we were told who he was at the end.  He didn't give us his name.

It continued with a quick overview on molds (again), although this time it was a bit more of the technical side and not the history side.  What I didn't realize is that your basic Lego block is sloped in order to come out of the mold and if you stack them up you actually can tell that.

Next we went on a factory tour.  Factory tours are fun, and this one was no exception.  We saw how robots and machines make the pieces and how robots pick up the full bins.  We learned that there are not many colored granules added to the clear ones in order to get the correct color.  We also learned that the first person's hands to touch the Lego blocks are the owners when they open the bags.  We stopped at the warehouse.  It was amazing.  It is only about 1/7 the size of the biggest one that they have, but it was still amazing.  There were buckets and buckets and buckets and you just imagined all the bricks that those buckets had and what you could do with them.

(This is the outside of the factory.  On the right you can see the warehouse.  Lego buckets go all the way to the top.)

Then we went to ...I'm not sure what the building was.  It seemed to house a lot of the customer care stuff.  It was the smaller warehouse were all missing/broken/buy a brick come from.  The customer service for Lego has been excellent in the past, and so now we know where the bricks come from.  Just a few people pushing around carts getting the pieces.  We also got to pick-a-brick.  It wasn't from a wall like normal, but it was a bunch of odd pieces that aren't around a lot.  Some animals, some people, and some miscellaneous items.

After lunch it was the speed build challenge!  We got one of the City sets and, in groups of four, had to build all of it and set it up just like the front of the box.  Exactly like the front of the box.  I thought we were doing really well, but we got beat by quite a bit.  It was a pretty fun challenge though; it'd be interesting to do something similar with the boys.  The couple we were working with already has four of the set, so they kindly gave it to us after the challenge was complete.  (It turns out that while we may be crazy Lego people at home, we are only average users here.)

Then it was time to go to the employee store.  Ben and I got the stuff that we really wanted and found that we only partially filled up the two boxes that Lego ships back home for us.  Score!  We went around again, getting the stuff we wanted.  This pretty much filled up the boxes plus a bit more.  So we went around a third time, getting some small stuff and stuff we remembered that we really would like.  This got us to a nice amount to bring back on the plane.  We both felt like we ended up with a nice amount of sets...I had been a bit scared that the boxes would fill up before we got halfway through our list.  Going out the door we guessed how much we spent.  It really had been like a shopping spree in that there was a lot of "this looks nice, put it in the bag."  (Although we still said no to a lot of items.)  Anyway, we both guessed over the amount that we had actually spent, so it was a nice feeling to leave on.

After a break there was another dinner with the designers.  This designer was much more positive about everything and made me feel like I could work at Lego again.  He was on the Mixel team as was so surprised to hear how hard they are to get anymore.  He sent me a picture of mixels on display at his house.  Joshua would be so jealous.

Then we had awards for the creations that we made last night.  While Ben and I weren't feeling very good about our odds, there's always that little part of you that wonders.  Anyway, we didn't win any of the awards (which were custom made by Lego designers and were awesome), but we did both make the runners up.  So still pretty impressive.  Ben's category was basically "things that move" and mine as "has a story."  They made Ben's rocket blast off and noted that my mine had 100 gems.  (Which it doesn't.  It only has like 15.  But kids love the gems!)

Oh, I forgot a picture!  Alice Finch is in our group.  Her Hogwarts and Rivendale builds made her famous within the Lego community.

Wednesday: day 1 of the tour

Today went by so quickly.

We started out with some welcome speeches.  Interesting, but not super profound.  They handed out their business cards, which are little mini-figures with their information printed on the shirts.  (Note: not all employees get such business cards, just the special ones.)

Then we went to the employee museum.  We had a tour of the history of how Lego started and got to see select sets.  There wasn't really enough time to do this properly, but we did get a pretty good idea of everything.

Then we went into the vault, where they have one copy of every set that has been made (with a few exceptions).  It was rather tight.

People were going a bit crazy over sets from their childhood.  However, I don't remember having any real sets per se, just a bucket or two of creative and a bunch that we had found at a garage sale.  I found them.

Ben was very excited to find the monorail.

We also found set #1.

Then we had a traditional Danish lunch.  Dark bread with fixings on top.  We later learned that there are five varieties and only five.  They do not experiment or change things up.

After a short session on molds, especially the ones that they recently found in the ground, it was time to go to the developer's building.  No pictures were allowed in there.  We had a presentation on the Saturn V rocket, the Boost Droids, Steamboat Mickey, and creation of new pieces.  At the beginning of several of the sub-presentations we were asked how many people had at least two copies of it...because if they had just asked how many people had it everyone would have raised their hands.

We decided to go to the Lego House store after that.  We picked up the unique-to-Billund sets but are waiting until tomorrow to get anything else.

After a short break we had dinner with the designers.  The designer at our table has been working on the hidden figures sets.  He was nice, but a bit of a downer.  He enjoys his job here, but doesn't like putting Legos together any more.  The town is safe and education is good, but there's not much to do.  Hidden Figures stuff is good, but the app development is missing some components that just got left out due to time.  Anyway, he was interesting to talk to but also did not make me want to come work for Lego.

These were the guys from the first two designer presentations.  They're quite hilarious.

Then we got to the last event of the night: design something.  I tried designed a gem mine, Ben tried designing a spinner.  Neither of us were very happy with the results, but we only had two hours.  All the pieces were divided up into bins that took up most of the room.