With Thoughts Like These – Page 21 – Greatwall Studios Graphic Design

Ooh they do take lovely photos though, don’t they.

June 16, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

I get subcontracted to produce marketing reports on the semi regular (when Covid isn’t being super shitty) and one of the external clients produces some of the most consistently amazing photos that I get to see. I don’t go to these events, but after reviewing the photo sets, oh boy, sometimes it feels like I went. The colours and composition is just fantastic. I tell you, paying a good photographer real money to capture your event is worth its weight in visual gold. You could live off of these photos for weeks if not months, building social media engagement, advertising, internal intranet posts, newsletters and what not. Don’t skimp. Just because most folks can afford an SLR now, doesn’t mean they know how to frame up a shot or get the best out of the available lighting. It makes a real difference when I get photography from a paid professional, vs a bunch of volunteers snapping random shots, that are blurry, poorly composed, or the lighting is flat, too dark, to bright. I can only do so much to remedy that on my end. But these bad mamma jammas are legit. Can’t show none of it to anybody but the client, but woah buddy, you’d like these pictures of the events.

The same thing applies to product photography. Get your shit infront of a professional, don’t try to do it yourself. Or failing a real photographer get the best 3D model/rendering you can afford. Will beat a cell phone image any day of the week. But I digress.

Hot one today. My friend who works in weather forecasting says we have potential for tornadoes in southern Ontario again, today. As well as a wind storm front passing through here tomorrow. Going to be a wild couple of days around here. Hopefully not another Derecho. Because that shit tore through our farm property and did six figures worth of damage is not more. Yikes.

Getting very close to final assembly and glue up of my small multi purpose table. I have a slight issue to fix with the shelf, but otherwise should be good to move forward and complete it sooner rather than later. I also stripped my ninja turtle sculpt back down to the armature. I hated the pose, and then a bunch of stuff was miss proportioned, so as I have no dead line nor client in mind, I took it back down to bare wire, and reposed the armature. Had to drill out new holes, but I’m ok with that. I may add water or sewer features to the base to hide the extra unused holes. A chance for some mixed media materials to be incorporated. Fun times!

I figure I will wait until my turtle is done before I do any painting. My Ogre is baked and based. Ready and waiting on my turtle to get done. Ciao Bella!

Attempting to fix the fridge freezer snafu.

June 14, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

The freezer works, now a little too well. Instead of reading zero, it’s at minus six, which means the vents have iced up all the way through, which makes the fridge portion hot as it has no cold air coming into it. I tried scraping the ice off, not very effective, as I can’t tell how deep the ice goes back into the vents. I tried hot water on the vents, but that made a mess. So next steps are to unplug the whole thing for forty five minutes to help the unit reset itself. Or I attempt to defrost the freezer portion, or… gulp. Hire a repairman to fix it for us if parts are readily available. Bah hum bug!

In other news the sculpture got a really solid head start yesterday. I have the torso, abdomen, legs and feet on, plus both arms down to the wrist. No head yet, or hands. I haven’t given much thought to the shell yet either. Or how I will get it to attach to the main body. The shell will be 75% tinfoil and masking tape, so I think I can reasonably contain the overall weight for that portion of the free standing sculpture. I don’t know if it will be any good, but why let fear of sucking stop me eh? Never has before. There is no confidence like that of a mediocre man! Give’r!

I have some finer hand cuts to make on my table build and that should mostly finish up the structural portion of the project. Then on to sanding for the foreseeable future. Top surface, four legs, three sides of the skirt/rails, drawer front, drawer panel, cross braces, inset slats, and the internal drawer dividers. Plus I need to stain the drawer panel, and then wax the panel edges, and the internal rails so it pulls in and out smoothly without catching, or snagging. I hope to avoid racking this way too, but I’m no craftsman. This way also meant I didn’t have to buy drawer slides, which are expensive. To have those on here, I’d need much wider skirting, which would reduce the space on the shelf, if I could even have one at that point. Maybe a larger Walnut drawer would have been a nice touch. Or if I’d cut more Hickory strips I could have glued up a wider panel to do the same floating drawer. Maybe when I build a waterfall edge coffee table I’ll add a deeper Walnut drawer to it for storage. If I can afford a darker hard wood to use that is.

My family is on day six of their journey out west. They are currently in Alberta where they will receive upwards of 100mm of rain today and tomorrow. Not a trip through the mountains that I’d want to do in such heavy rain. I don’t envy them much. Manitoba and Saskatchewan were less than impressive if I were to go by what my mother wrote. Flat & empty. Sounds like no fun at all.

I wonder if the fridge went bad after the 26 hrs power outage, because I’ve never had this particular issue before. Mind you the fridge is almost twelve years old now. Hopefully we can remedy it ourselves as inexpensively as possible. This is not my area of expertise. Down right terrifying.

Dreams are weird.

June 1, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

Last night I dreamt that I was composing this amazing blog post (of all things) and I was dictating it out loud and it was all very intense and exciting. But do you think I can recall even a sliver of what it was about? The lasting image was of having fun composing the post, not the actual content within it. Tells you something doesn’t it. Boring! It means it’s more important to me to write, than what I write about. How dull. But that fits me to a T. Pragmatic, robotic me. The act of doing is in itself the reward. How intrinsically valued can you be. Ugh.

Still haven’t found the time nor energy to go see Dr Strange 2, or Top Gun: Maverick yet. Perhaps after these family parties are done. Although, then I need to get on top of planning my youngest’s pool party at the end of the month. Seven confirmed guests so far. Three will be away and can’t come. So this time (with lessons learned) we go 10:00-12:00pm, and stick locally. Fewer guests, and a shorter period of time, earlier in the day. Pizza, drinks, pool, cake and home time! I’ll let my wife sort out the goody bags. The holy grail of childhood apparently. Which isn’t something I recall being a big deal in my childhood. Not sure if I just don’t remember, because I’m thirty five years plus out of that age bracket, or it wasn’t really a thing with the families of my childhood friends. Couldn’t tell you, if I’m being completely honest.

It is strange, what I can and can’t remember about being a kid. I still recollect my late teens years, fairly vividly (because I was sick, and depressed from being sick). But I couldn’t say much about being a little kid. I do know that I was pretty oblivious. It wasn’t until Facebook came around in the early 2000’s when I realized some of my friends had older siblings, or any siblings at all. Singularly focused on my friends or our activities. Didn’t much care for whatever else was going on. Still don’t.

Yeah, dreams are what’s weird.

RPA developer, you should hire one for your company asap.

May 29, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

Automate those mundane tasks asap, get your people focused on customer service or big picture thinking. Free yourselves from simple data entry, and hire an RPA Dev now! Do it. Get it done. Get your people focused on those money making tasks, not toiling away on invoices, amending contacts or mailing lists. Get you a BluePrism, or UIPath, or Microsoft Flow, now called Power Automate, dev tech to kick your business into high gear. Do it!

That’s my business oriented rant for today. I usually steer clear of tech trends, but it’s big over seas where your companies have been outsourcing to for decades. It’s making it’s way here, so get infront of it. See what RPA Developers can do for you and your businesses.

Automate the mundane, focus on the bigger picture.

I hate to say it, you hate to see it, but it’s probably true.

May 26, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

This will be controversial and unpleasant but it needs to be said. We do too good a job in north american society of shielding the average Joe in the population from the grisly truth behind what an AR-15 does to a human body. I think that lots of people believe that those kids from Uvalde in Texas from the other day are lying in a morgue with little round weeping bullet holes, and not the truth, that they were pulped and unrecognizable. So the ideal vision of our Angel’s asleep with tiny wounds let’s us walk away and forget about it. But if you plastered every newspaper with one savage, graphic, horrific view of the hideous truth, the gun lobby would struggle to maintain their vise grip on US politics.

It is horrific. It is happening. It’s happening to children, on what seems like every third day, just about. The movement to ban high capacity magazines and to reduce the availability of higher powered military grade weapons needs a new, upfront tack. Various media outlets hide the true nature of the details, because they are so horrific. So we can picture something less terrifying in our minds, and allow ourselves to just do nothing about it.

To make a real change, a few apple carts will need to be overturned. Why do people think there are so many vets with PTSD? They’ve seen the reality and it fundamentally changed their whole lives. But those of us shielded from the truth allow it to continue, until your asked to give a DNA sample to help find your kids remains because they’re just grisly matter now. Not an identifiable human being.

Guns have a place, and a use. Just not assault style rifles in average Joe’s hands.

I personally like to target shoot with a 30-06. I do so whenever I go to Las Vegas. It packs a punch, but can only hold five bullets at once before you have to reload it, and you have to manually pull back on the bolt to load it. Great fun. But that’s not when John Q Nutcase the caucasian killer has when he goes to a school to kick things off. That, while deadly, would give the majority a chance to flee, or to attack during reloading. Not that that is much better, but these fish in a barrel situations are untenable. It’s vile and cowardly. You wanna feel like a man, go start a fist fight with the person(s) you actually have beef with, not a grade school full of little kids.

Yeah so, in a few days time when this becomes relevant again, I’ll just relink to it, in perpetuity.

Phew! That was a mad scramble…

May 21, 2022May 21, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

But now it’s time for something a little different. I’ve been tasked with building two new replacement newel posts for my FIL. The current ones have rotten over the two decades since they were installed, so I’m hoping that the two new Cedar ones I’m making as replacements hold up just as long or longer. I will prime them in thick white oil based exterior paint, so I hope that helps.

My conundrum is that I have two slightly different pieces of trim, enough to do one newel post cap each. Do I do them in similar but not the same trim (which I have on hand, and is therefore free) or do I go buy a full length so they both match, but it’ll cost me money to do so. Hmm. The problem with being cheap/frugal is you gotta be ok with things being eclectic, or slightly off and not at all matchy-matchy. It’s for an exterior entrance that nobody ever uses, so I think I can get away with it. The Cedar I bought for a Christmas gift for my BIL where in I didn’t need all 8 lengths, just seven of them to complete my signage gifts. So the cost was sunk in another project. I think I have answered my own question.

My wrist is aflame from yesterdays mad rush of 182 images, with an additional 74 this morning. I am done on my end, awaiting review and any change orders or additional requests. Glad for the work. It made Friday fly by without any fuss. Our holiday plans changed on us by way of “The ‘Vid” so we are searching for a way to remedy that in the near future. Oh well.

Still no new progress on my childrens book. I might shelve it for the time being. Mind you, I still have five more weeks of school days in which to pick it back up before schools out for summer and my minions are home full time for 9 weeks. Then I will get very little done by way of hobbies. But I will accomplish paid work, don’t you worry about that. I think I have one or two reports coming for the summer and one more for the fall. Not terrible, not great. I hope for more than that. Or some extra can labels, t-shirts & apparel, retail signage, catalogue work or build from the ground up branding/packaging work in the alcoholic beverage space.

Though, maybe I should stop chasing the nostalgia of my alcoholic beverage packaging days. Rose coloured glasses and all that jazz. I once had the opportunity to build, from scratch a proprietary glass bottle, and it was looking amazing, but the job was put on hold during a personnel issue inside the brewery/distillery and I never got to see the design go to market. We had built a series of eight flavoured cans too for a Mimosa project, well ahead of the curve, but that got stopped too. Much to my chagrin. It was good work on my part, and that of the brand team. I was very upset to see it go nowhere.

I forgot to mention (not really) that today is Day 150!

May 13, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

Which I think is a pretty decent milestone to reach for having written something here on my blog every single day. Weekends, illness, good times and bad. I’m pretty happy with that. Not only that, but the discipline to keep writing has helped me develope a commitment to lifting weights and exercising again. Which my heart will thank me for in the long run. If I can psyche myself up to run or bike that would potentially go a long way to help reduce my waist line. It has made it easier to pick up something new and do a little of it more often than not. I switched to home reno projects, and away from my children’s book last week, and this one. But I did manage to get an awful lot of it onto paper, and I’m in a great spot when I go back to it. I’m reading proper books again, not just twitter and the news, which is great. I miss reading when all I do is scroll twitter and read about politics 280 characters at a time. I’m currently painting my screen door frame, waiting on primer to dry actually, if you must know. Then I need to cut down Cedar strips and keep this bad boy rolling. I want to have it hung up before June 1st, which is attainable, if I don’t all of a sudden become paralyzed by fear of fucking something up. I’ve even made plans on an interior window project next. So I need this one to go fairly smoothly, now that I am committed to finishing. The trim will have to be cut twice, into 8ft long strips from a 6x1x8, and then taken to a .75 down from an inch in width. My door, after sanding, planing and lots more sanding, is no longer two inches thick where the mesh screens will be inset. So slight tweak there, but nothing too awful. Maybe i don’t have to take it to .75, i could potentially go thicker. I need to double then triple check my measurements before I cut it down too far.

So Day 150 huh. Seems like a lot. But isn’t really all that much. Not even a full half a year yet. My “streak” began about two weeks prior to Christmas when I was panicking about how little I had written last year vs. The year before. Far more traffic with short/micro stories than my regular blog jabber. No surprise there. I’m not an interesting person, nor am I famous or grotesquely handsome. Just run of the mill me. Running my mouth and thinking thoughts like a person.

You know what I miss?

May 7, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

Playing catch with my brother in the street. Long bombs, pop ups, grounders we threw them all, on purpose and by accident. For hours, up and down the street, on the school fields and peoples houses. It was tiring and fun, and I miss that. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to play baseball or softball, 3 pitch, slow pitch, or T-ball. I just liked to throw and catch a ball. Cracking jokes, pretending to rob someone of their grand slam, world series winning homerun. I’m currently in the process of teaching my kids how to throw properly, and catch using a Mitt. The oldest is about 3-4 yrs in, and has gotten very consistent with catching, but the throws tend to go wild every so often. Lots going on around us, so can’t blame them for losing focus. The youngest started last year but fades quickly in the sun & heat. Hoping for a few top up lessons this year, and then get some real work done next summer. Every kid should learn to throw, catch, hit, run, swim and ride a bike. Just so they have options to move through as they get older and play with other kids more.

I do need to figure out a better way to work in new gloves, as mine is still stiff, and both of the kids gloves are less than ideal if you actually want to close your hand around a ball or manipulate the Mitt in any way shape or form.

We also practise with kicking and passing a soccer ball around. That’s a great lower cost sport in this neck of the woods. Fun to do on a beach, at home, or shallow water. Same with a frisbee.

My exercising is still moving along, but now I kind of want to move into weight loss too. Not so much I’d give up pizza and the occasional soda, but eh. Small active steps, and a new beneficial behavior take time to cultivate. I’m getting very close to 150 days of writing, so that’s pretty cool. That’ll be some time this coming week.

Took the kids out for mini putt today, my wife came too, which was really nice. Good weather, unruly kids and fun had by all involved. A great Saturday morning.

What a busy day it was, yesterday.

May 1, 2022May 1, 2022greatwallstudiosLeave a Comment

Took the kids for a two hour play at the Tree Top Trekking village, which they loved thoroughly, and I was able to participate and enjoy the obstacle course aswell, even masked up. Then we had a big group lunch where they played for another hour or so, all told it was four hours of fun from start to finish.

After a brief rest at home we finally got to meet our newest nephew outside, while masking up to protect the 7 day old newborn. Can’t be too careful! He’s a sleepy cutie pie, who didn’t make a sound. The kids were enthralled by him, though my youngest got bored of the baby lump action and went for an hour long trampoline jump-a-thon to stay busy in the warm and welcome sunshine.

I need to go do a smaller grocery shop in a few minutes, so I’ll cut this short. Much as I predicted, I have done nothing with my illustrated book this weekend. I did build an armature for my next sculpture. I finished off my other bust a day or two ago. Trying to bring the memory back to my hands. I think I’ll either do a ninja turtle in Super Sculpey or a Killer Croc bust. I have several clay ninja turtles, but nothing in ceramics, or polymer clay which you bake to harden. But I’ve never done a DC’s Killer Croc before. Might be fun to try something outside the usual for me.

I have made headway on my screen door build. I put the dado blades on my table saw for the first time, ever. And made the tenons for my three cross braces of the door. It’s a very tight press fit, so I’m shaving them down a touch so it won’t shatter or explode from the stress. I see a lot of wood filler, sanding, additional planing and painting in my future. I had hoped to stain the door, but my prowess with wood is low, so thick primer to cover my various failings it’ll be! Gotta love it. I’m glad I got over my fear of the dado blade set up. Cut like a hot knife through butter. Better than I’d have done with a hand saw or my tiny Skil bandsaw. Which is a glorified scroll saw at this point. Not good for anything more than .5″ thick hard woods. My doors are 2″ thick, and 4″ wide. So the Skil bandsaw isn’t really an option.

I will most likely need to mill up more thin strips to line the inside panels of the screen doors, so I can sandwich the stapled on mesh material. So I have a fair few steps left to go. Plus I still need to drill and chisel out the mortise for the center cross brace. But the tenons are shorter, so I don’t have as much to dig out, hopefully. I’m definitely going to need to pin the top and bottom braces in place with dowels to not have to rely solely on the press fit and glue holding. I have a handle, push plate, and hook latch to add after it’s all sanded & painted. Plus I’ll be cutting in the hinge plates to the side of the door, and the frame at the back out the house. Maybe a router jig would be better for that? Not too sure. I have weather stripping for the door to butt up against so it won’t swing inwards and get wedged in place. Good lord I hope this all works out. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this door these last few years! Bah! At least at this point I’m spending time and not money on the project. Happy Lazy Sunday to you all.

Hyperbole Testical Tuesday, BadMan!

April 26, 2022greatwallstudios1 Comment

That’s a whole lotta gloom hanging in those clouds there mister. You sure you want to commit to an outdoor activity today? No. And thank you for asking Jimmy “The Shoe” Shitknuckles. I’d rather stay indoors and watch tv.

Getting a little quiet around here today. The threat of rain, and lower temperatures has taken the wind out of my sails, for starting anything outside. Again. Guess I’ll have to wait for May to finish edging the curb line, and washing the exterior windows, driveway, and cars. Take a gander at the railing I worked on the year prior to the pandemic, see if that needs any touch ups or spot fixes. Perhaps I’ll attempt to stabilize our gloppy front fence this year, since the larger shrubs are starting to press on it, and it wiggles in the wind. Not a good look. Floppy posts that catch the wind and flip flop all day long.

Went down the list of domestic duties yesterday, and gave the main floor a once over. So we are back to no clutter, but not exactly cleaned up 100%. I need to either throw away or find a better solution to all of our collected kinetic sand, playdough & plasticine, or learn to live with a cloudy gritty sheen on a bunch of surfaces all of the time. I don’t have the heart to toss it all, as my kids enjoy those things a great deal. But, good lord do I hate the mess they leave behind. Residues and grit, a waxy fog on every single wood surface. Ugh. It’s a bit of a nightmare.

Laundry was done and sorted, hung up. Dishwasher is on its endless 2hr cycle as we speak. I have a grocery delivery set for the next hour or so. I think I might clean the ceiling fans, and light fixtures because they collect so much dust. It is kinda gross. Eew. There are some more in depth deeper cleaning projects I can tackle, but I need to plan out the execution, or I’ll get dug in, make a mess and get overwhelmed, stop, and have an even bigger problem to contend with, than if I just leave it alone until I have my plan of attack.

We also desperately need to have a massive clear out of junk and broken toys, ruined & unfixable clothes. Fix, wash and store winter garb, change out the cubbies for spring summer, and get rid of hats/mitts/gloves that don’t fit or can’t be repaired cheaply at home, by me. The kids get attached to weird items, so I have to do it while they are gone, but I also need to fit check everything, so I don’t keep useless items, or toss anything worth keeping for another year. It also looks as though I have several hours of hand stitching snow pants if we are going to keep them all for next year too. In seams and crotches go on all our stuff. Not sure how, but that’s where the wear and tear is, besides the knees and cuffs.

Last week I cleaned out jet tub with an old tooth brush, and it finally came out sparkling clean. The toilet and sink get cleaned every 3 days, because… yikes. Too much spit toothpaste, and back spray. You know what. I’m gonna wash the kids bed sheets while I think about the rest of my day. Have a good one y’all.

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