Lazy weekend Saturday

After the past two weekends of running market stalls, this weekend my wife and I have relatively little we have to do. She went to yoga this morning, with Scully. Scully enjoys the yoga class, and lies down quietly next to my wife while she does the exercises. Apparently when my wife does the bits where you lie down flat on the floor, Scully gets up and lies on top of her! The other people in the class like Scully being there, and afterwards they all go for a coffee in a nearby cafe.

This gives me time to work on a few things. Today it was more of the secret project I’ve been working on all week. I’m so close to finishing this stage of it I can almost smell it. I really want to see if I can get it completed in the next couple of days. Then it’ll be handing over it to a friend to go over and give feedback.

I built some more of the Lego set I’ve been working on for a few weeks now, the Medieval Blacksmith. It’s a huge set and the pieces come in 14 bags separated by building sequence. I’m now 8 bags into the sequence, doing roughly two per week. I’m really stretching it out to enjoy the building experience.

For dinner tonight we went out to a French crepe place. We go there a few times a year, and it’s really nice. They have savoury galettes for meals, and sweet crepes for dessert, washed down by imported French cider, as is the traditional liquid accompaniment.

New content today:

Comic batching

I still had three or four strips to write in the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic!, so I started on those first thing this morning. I powered through writing them in about an hour or so, and it was still early enough to get to work on photographing, so I did. I had to run down to the garage to retrieve my Lego Jabba the Hutt for one new comic. It would have been ideal to have the Lego Boushh figure as well, but I don’t have that so I had to improvise:

... holding a thermal detonator!

Now that I look at it, I realise this scene shouldn’t have Leia in the slave outfit next to Jabba… but, oh well. Anyway, building sets and taking photos for the comics took several hours, and I didn’t finish until a late lunch time.

After lunch I took Scully for a walk and dropped in at the small nearby supermarket to pick up some fruit. And this afternoon I starting putting the finishing touches on the Magic: the Gathering thing I’m preparing for Friday night. It’s nearly finished – hopefully I’ll be able to finish it off tomorrow so I can work on some other things later in the week.

New content today:

Stranger Things!

Here are some photos as promised yesterday of the Stranger Things Lego set that I finished building.

Stranger Things: Where's Will?

Stranger Things: The Upside Down

Stranger Things: Byers House

Stranger Things: Christmas lights

It’s incredibly cool. The whole set can be turned upside down, to display either the real word or the Upside Down more prominently. And there’s a light that projects onto the Christmas Lights. There’s a whole lot of other wonderful detail that you probably can’t see very well in the photos. This is the definitely biggest and possibly the coolest Lego set that I’ve ever owned.

Today I spent most of the day writing another one of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe, this time about walking around the world in a straight line. And a bit of time doing more prep for my Very Special Magic Draft. Oh, and I decided to remove the “latest posts” thing in the sidebar of this blog and replace it with a tag cloud, now that I have an interesting number of tags that I use for posts.

New content today:

Magpie attack!

Monday! I spent much of today finishing off the build of the Lego Stranger Things set. It’s a big set and took several hours of building over the past couple of days to finish. I’ve only just finished it late this evening. I was planning to take a photo to show it off, but honestly I’m mentally exhausted and want to head to bed soon, so I’ll do it tomorrow.

I took a break at lunch time to walk up the street to get some fish & chips. I took them to my usual fish & chips eating spot, on a hill overlooking the harbour. It’s lovely eating outdoors with a view. But today a couple of magpies decided that they also liked the looks of my lunch, and came threateningly close – within striking distance to steal a chip or a chunk of fish if I wasn’t careful. At one point one tried to land right on my meal, and I barely managed to fend it off without letting it touch any of the food. And within a minute or so another two magpies arrived, looming ominously from the tree branches not far above me like something out of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

I didn’t fancy the sharp beaks on the birds and the fact that they looked keen to strike, so I packed up my lunch and walked to a different location to eat in peace. It’s a shame. I’ve had birds hover around me at that spot before, but never so aggressively or dangerously close. I fear that spot may be lost for good, because magpies are highly territorial and maintain their behaviour over several years.

New content today:

Sunday walking

Today was mostly a day spent with wife and Scully. We took a couple of long walks to exercise Scully, around the neighbourhood. The council has laid poison fox baits in one of the bushland areas that we like to walk through, so we gave that a wide berth, taking a detour up a very steep hill to avoid them. Here’s Scully at the marina this morning:

Scully at the marina

On the afternoon walk we want a different way. There’s a street lined with cherry blossom trees, and they’re all in flower at the moment, so it’s very pretty. It’s rather early in the year for this, but our winter has been so warm that the plants obviously think it’s spring already.

Cherry blossoms in August

At home in between and then this evening, I’ve been shuffling between two thing: building the Stranger Things Lego set that I got the other day, and working some more on my secret Magic: the Gathering project. The date for the Magic draft event with my friends is set for Friday 27 September – it’s the earliest date that we can all make. So we have a bit over a month of anticipation. When it happens I’ll definitely report on it!

New content today:

Geology

Today was dedicated to writing a new article for my science blog, 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe. I started working on something about earthquakes, but after getting a couple of paragraphs in I decided that it would be better to discuss plate tectonics first. So I switched tracks and worked on that. I started around 9am, and with various interruptions during the day, I just finished and posted the article now at 8:30pm. Phew! It’s about 2000 words, and writing that much researched material in one day is pretty good – writers often aim for a steady 1000 words a day, so it’s well above that.

One interruption was walking up the street to get some lunch, and also pick up a package that failed to be delivered yesterday. To spoil myself a bit, I ordered myself a new LEGO set: the Stranger Things set. The box is huge! It should be awesome. Maybe to be featured in a future Irregular Webcomic?

And that was my whole day really, apart from taking Scully to the dog park this afternoon. While there I chatted with another dog owner, Trevor, who has a golden coloured cavoodle named Ruffy. He’s a retired geologist, so I mentioned that I’d been working on an article about plate tectonics all day, and we had a bit of a discussion about that.

New content today: