Month: July 2023

Whenever engagement drops way down I forget to check and see if my posts are going out to all of the available social sites, as usually a link has dropped, and that’s my root cause. Take, for instance that my JetPack/Wordpress blog seems to cut off LinkedIn every six to eight weeks for one reason or another and I overlook that as my views and engagements plummet. So back in I go to reset the link, and Poof, views immediately go up. I should put it on a post it note, or set a google alert for it. Easy enough to fix. Bothersome that it happens so frequently throughout the year. It also sucks that I have to manually copy over the post link to Twitter now too. But I don’t know whether or not I’ll bother to migrate elsewhere. I could do with being less terminally online. I don’t want to actively shut down, but if sites pass by then it’s out of my hands. A passive good bye.

Well, it’s monday. So that means grocery shopping, errands, and Domestic Duties around the house. Is it laundry, dishes, floors, sinks, bathrooms, the kitchen, or all of the above? Some combination of them for sure. I do have some work that I did before I left to run errands, so I’m not under a time crunch to clean. Kids and wife are out, so I can tidy up by myself, without interruptions. Just taking a break while my moped floors dry.

I finally shipped off the moose topper for my parents today. Not as bad as I thought it might be. Not great either, the price for shipping, but it could have been much, much worse. I had to pack it in foam, extra cardboard, bubble wrap & then a custom outer box. It wound it being fairly large, 23 x 19 x 7 inches, and just over seven pounds. Glad to see the back of it. I can think about other projects for the fall now that that is out of my hair. So in 8 to 10 days it should show up in BC. Fingers crossed!

I have some tidying up left to do once the floors dry. So I’m going to put a game plan together to be more efficient. Maybe start lunch for the kids once they return from their outing with their mum. Take care. Ciao Bella!

Time for our annual Family Photo Day. Best to refrain from getting injured or bruised, scratched, and scraped in a very visible location. Hair sessions are set for a few hours each, of dethatching, detangling, and knot cutting so that the hair-dos look appropriate on camera. Sun tans and tan lines abound! Happy lazy Sunday.

Just got the word I’ll be doing more retail packaging projects this summer! Excellent news. I’m always happy when I get to see the fruits of my labour out in the wild. Or, more aptly put, on store shelves. Which reminds me of a short story I’m going to share with you now.

A few years ago I had a massive project that came in that looked so good, and was destined to be in beer stores and LCBO’s all over the province, and I was so proud of it, and after we developed a proprietary bottle for their spirits line up, they took the project back to formula, and then shut it all down. I was bummed out. I had been telling people to look for this line of products coming to stores for a while, and then had to admit defeat. We’d have been first to market, but too late now. Just another entry in yet another bloated field of RTD’s.

So it’s Friday, apparently. I have work on my plate, and obligations to attend to over the weekend. Otherwise week 1 of summer holidays has been pretty smooth. Eight more to go! Woot-woot!

Grass is still green and growing. Bit of an anomaly around these parts for July. But I’ll take that rain if it means I don’t have to lug water around the farm. Yeah buddy!

Right on the ankle by a mosquito and good god does it ever itch. 95% of the time bug bites don’t seem to register with all this itch! And it isn’t even all the time either. At the end of the day it’ll drive me nuts until I put benadryl or after bite on it to draw out the itch. Still a red lump after a number of days too. Ugh! Dastardly little beasties.

I also need to run a few errands today which are business related. I need a new day planner, a desk calendar, printer ink, a desk chair. Pay some last minute tax fees, and try to pack & ship a wooden moose for my parents.

Now that the holiday weekend is over things will start to pick up again. So I best eat and be about my business! Ciao Bella!

Some of my most popular posts that continue to get views are about building miniature war gaming terrain, and now all I want to do is go and build more war gaming, D&D terrain pieces. Unfortunately I don’t have the room to build any more of the ultra fun 2ft by 2ft tiles. I’ll need to scale it back, and build something like a bridge, or a wall section, or a single town house of some sort. During the winter I bought some texture rollers from green stuff world off of Etsy. I have not yet had a chance to use them. So maybe a much smaller set piece will get my creative passions flowing, and satisfy that itch.

What I really want to do is build a 4ft by 8ft multilayered environment with water effects, a wharf, a fishing village, and a castle on a hill, and a river running through it all. But who has the time, money, and space dedicated to such an endeavour? Not me. Maybe I’ll prime and paint some left over minis I have and that will remind me how much work is involved in war gaming.

I have yet to give resin water effects a go yet. I really, really want to at some point. I’d like a hot foam wire cutter, and a static grass applicator to use on a big project or two, but those are expensive(ish) if they are left to sit for years at a time inbetween uses. I’d like to use rock moulds, and higher quality 3d printer dwellings that I can paint up. So many different possibilities. Argh! I have too many hobbies! Not enough time or resources to follow them all at once. I still haven’t done any sculpting this year, and six months of 2023 have all ready passed us by.

Summer is off to a very hot start. I think that today is Wednesday. I have some work to finish up for a client before end of day. So I best get cracking. Ciao Bella!

Lookit that water just a shimmering in the hot early morning sun. Whoo boy, gonna be a hot one, fer sure, fer sure it is bud. Roast the nuts off a squirrel if it sits too long on the car hood. Singed hairs and everything bud. Best to stay indoors with the ac, or go float around in the pool with a cold one.

Summer has arrived, and brought the wet bulb temps along with it, just about over night. The humidity done dropped down on us from out of the south, and slapped us all in the face with it. Hot, sticky, oppressive heat. Nasty stuff. Dehydration, sun burns, heat stroke, and overly hot heads abound. Hope you have a decent hat, because you don’t want to be straight heading this shit. No sir. Burned scalps, ear tips & noses for err’y body. Yuck.

At least at the lake you could just walk out into the water to cool off. Even at the farm you could go sit in the stream while it’s still flowing. Cool you right off. Might grow a sixth toe at some point from all the chemicals and shit people pump into the ground, but you’d be cooled off as you mutate. Going to be some long hard days spent weeding & watering over the next two months, that’s for damn sure.

I bruised my rib and arm yesterday doing someone a favour, and it hurts like the Dickens. Serves me right for leaving my whole body weight on a quarter inch thick piece of steel to extricate myself from a tight spot. I didn’t have the arm strength to just do a muscle up. My starting position was too low, with my arms too high above me. I don’t typically work out at those extreme positions. Serves me right for going easy with the weights I guess. Plus if I lost some weight it wouldn’t be as hard to move myself around either. I need to find a good place to go ride my bike. But without all the technical damage to my nether bits that usually accompanies such a hobby. Squashed urethra and all that.

Man I miss going out and doing crossfit. I was never in fantastic shape, but I didn’t have all this excess weight while I was doing all that cross training, running and Olympic lifting. I don’t miss the too tight ham strings or back pain though. Gotta find a reasonable inbetween. Happy Tuesday. Ciao Bella.

Took my oldest daughter to go see Elemental by Pixar yesterday. It looked lovely. Was touching and heart warming, if a tad long. My daughter cried. I’m glad I didn’t bring my youngest as she would have been bored to tears. The fart jokes were funny enough. I’m not certain there was enough meat on that bone to warrant nearly 2 hours of film. I think if they had whittled it down to 90 minutes that would have been their sweet spot. I did not pay attention to any of the marketing for this movie. I had heard a few people on twitter say it was good but the marketing focusing on Clod was weird, since the wee “boy” doesn’t really factor in for more than perhaps a minute of total screen time. If I hadn’t of heard about that, I would not have had any thoughts about it one way or another. I’d say wait for Disney+ to show it in October, if not sooner. I used my Scene Points, so technically I did not pay cash for us to see the film. Just opportunity cost for potential other uses for those 2400+ points from Scene. After driving, bathroom breaks, concession stand and the movie itself, it was a nice air conditioned way to occupy 3.25 hrs with my daughter.

The most striking thing about the Carl & Dug short at the start was how photorealistic the backgrounds were. The story itself was a waste of time. Though I like the dog. The squareheadedness of Carl is off putting, and he looks oddly out of place against such beautifully rendered backgrounds, objects, and environment. Pay those folks more. Their portion, or contribution was notably better in almost every aspect.

It began at 5:00am, and ended with the kids going to bed around 11:00pm after the town fireworks were delayed beginning until almost 10:00pm. It was hot, and sweaty, and expensive, and disjointed. A bit too hard going to be a manageable pace to maintain all summer long. It was Canada Day, so a bit of grace shall be given. Next up, after lazy sunday, is Domestic Duties Monday, with laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, sweeping, vacuuming & mopping the floors, cleaning the sink and kitchen counters, cleaning the bathrooms, and a general tidy up of our main living spaces (work schedule permitting). They can either help me, or go find something to do for 2-3 hours so as not to interfere with my progress.

Which reminds me, I need to run a few errands today. I think some places will make Monday a holiday since July 1st was a Saturday. Might have to bump some items to Tuesday if that is the case. Either way, I’m sure that today is Sunday. I was under the impression the weather was to turn stormy today, and I was going to kill some time this afternoon taking the kids to a movie. But if it’s not raining we can be outside instead.

The humidity settled in from out of nowhere yesterday. While we sat in the grass watching a formerly famous clown, the sweat was just rolling down my back, and soaking through my t-shirt. No shade was provided near the children’s programming section. Could have done with getting hosed down every do often. The grass made me itch, and the sticky heat didn’t make me very receptive to the comedy stylings of Doo-Doo the clown, “The clown from Billy Madison”. That’s his claim to fame apparently. He was ok. Needs a better sound tech, as his mic’s eq levels were ear splittingly loud.

Part of the errands I need to run are picking up a new desk calendar for 2023, and a new day planner, printer ink for my Canon, and possibly a new office chair, as my current one gives me leg cramps for some reason. I can’t blame it, the chair was free. I dug it out of the trash pile at the Guelph Mercury sometime around 2007/2008, so it doesn’t owe me anything. Except for the whole leg cramp thing, that sucks, and I hate sitting for long periods of time. Makes doing precision work that much more challenging. Would prefer to eliminate that particular obstacle. I guess it will depend on how expensive the office chairs are. I do tend towards cheapskatedness when confronted with spending more than I had been planning on. Is that a moral failing, or an adherence to my budget requirements? Hard to tell.