bunn

Bits and pieces

2020-06-23T17:38:32Z

Yesterday I drove into Gunnislake to take my car in to have its various ailments fixed, then walked back home through the woods with the hounds. The foxgloves are coming to the end of their blooming, but wow, there are a lot of them.

When I got my car back, I was pleased. Grey door looks a little odd, but the window works again and I also have a new battery so it actually starts and can drive places! (My car standards are so low :-D )
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I also made an impulse buy of a new second hand camera on ebay that I can't really afford but what the hell. It's a Sony A6000. Am very excited!

Have a zeitgeisty moment I saw on Tumblr: 2,292 Plants Fill the Audience in Opening Performance at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu

The cinemas are due to re-open here in the UK. I wonder if enough people will want to go to them. I can't say I fancy it. Although the number of cases and deaths has dropped from the peaks of April and May, the last couple of weeks look more like 'numbers have stabilised' than 'continue to fall' to me.

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A walrus-post, filled with random bits.

2020-02-25T00:28:11Z

Um. Things that have happened. right then.

The car window that was fixed has broken again due to internal conflicts with the door opening mechanism whatsit. I did ask when I picked up the car from the garage and they told me the door and window had quarrelled, whether they were likely to do so again? They promised not. They were wrong.

Hmph. I now have a solid wooden wedge keeping the window up again while the garage scours ebay for a second set of window parts, and a new door-thingummy. I hope they can replace both together this time, and restore harmony to the Door.

I finally got around to assembling the Fidget Board I have been making. This was solicited by a local nursing home which cares for dementia patients: apparently a Thing now is to fix a bunch of knobs, switches, clips, hinges etc to a board, which is then left around in the lounges etc, and gives the residents something untaxing but occupying to do with their hands. I thought this seemed like a great use for some of the many 'That Will Come In Handy Some Day!' items I have piled in the utility room.

It was harder work than I had expected putting it all together though, because it seemed like I had 999 partial... things. Objects. Artifacts. Gadgets. Hardware. Wood... bits. Very few of which fitted neatly together. I ended up having to carve a plug-hole for my nice shiny metal plug on a chain, for example, because I assume that we either used the hole that the plug came with, or maybe there wasn't a hole? Who knows, that would have been years ago. YEARS I have been hoarding that plug on its shiny chain, and probably a year I have been hoarding the spare shelf that came with my Art Stuff shelves, that I used for the board bit. But now I have Done Something With It, and shortly I shall say farewell to it forever, which cannot be a bad thing.

I have photographed a lot of roleplaying games recently, which I rather enjoy. We seem to have moved now to a status where I am doing most of the shop photography and Pp is doing the data entry and stuff that requires Deep Lore about Roleplaying History. New (to us) roleplaying games are being added at a rate of knots and a goodly number of people are buying them. This is good.

The cats are very happy at the moment, and Gothmog and Fankil spend a lot of time wrestling and boxing and doing other cute things. Sometimes Theo joins in (Fankil really likes Theo, though I think he's wisely wary of Theo getting overexcited and hence too rough). I would take pictures of this, only the automatic lens on my camera has failed and taking photos of wrestling cats in poor light using a manual lens seems a bit fiddly. Maybe later in the year,

Although Theo failed his final exam at Dog School, because he absolutely would not lie down on command (he knows the command. He just didn't feel like doing it when there were puppies around to look at), I have none the less declared him done for now on the dog training front. We may start lessons again in September. But he does know all the basics, and I just need to practice practice practice on defeating distractions, and that will be easier if I just take him places to practice rather than to classes, I think. He is currently 8-9ish months, so he's really at maximum distractability at the moment. He is getting better at bringing me his squeaky walrus to throw instead of humping my leg, but there's still work to do there.

Let's have an art dump of recent arts. I seem to be painting quite a lot at the moment, which is partly because I'm feeling a bit tense and painting is a good release for that.

( Read more... )

And Finally! I am offering art in both the Fandom Trumps Hate and Fandom For Australia charity auctions, and to my extreme delight, someone has actually bid on my Fandom for Australia offer! Two people! Woohoo!

But I am suddenly exhausted from typing all that, so I shall simply link to this tumblr post about that rather than pasting it all in.

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Wandering the river

2019-04-20T10:43:45Z

Happy Easter!

I have taken about 999 photos of various expeditions I keep meaning to at least mention here but in the meanwhile, I shall just note that my sister has been visiting from Canada, and so yesterday we first went for a Rosie-Led Walk, in which Rosie led us Up and Up until there was no more Up available and then we had great difficulty persuading her to go back down again. But eventually we got her to go back to the river, which was much cooler and very pleasant, and while we were there, we saw some dippers and a pair of distant but definite kingfishers.

And then in the evening we went out on the river at Wacker Quay, since at long last the sun is not only shining but the wind has dropped too. Our canoe is not much fun in wind. We paddled up to St Germans, which has a handy little slipway where we were able to swap paddlers over so all three of us got a chance to paddle. Today my shoulders are a bit tired but it was fun. Very calm and quiet with huge reflecting hazy skies.

No photos of that because although I did remember my camera, I forgot it didn't have a card in it. Oh well. I snapped some pics on my sister's camera, anyway, which is one of those superzooms, though I imagine those will not come to light till she gets home and rummages through them. It was interesting to try out the amazing zoom, though I prefer to have a bit more control over what the camera does, it wasn't easy to work out even how to adjust white balance, since it's designed very much as a point-and-shoot.

Oh, and we saw a fox wandering through a field, from the canoe.

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