Starting 2024 With…

Some painting! Yes indeed first day of new year and I painted. Okay totally forgot today was 1st January… so while I remember… I want to wish everyone health, wealth and happiness for the years ahead.

Here are the fruits of my labour so to speak…

I hadn’t really made many hobby plans for 2023, well apart from getting stuff painted and built. The one thing I did decide on was to give up printing for a bit, this is one thing I pretty much kept to. My new resin printer is still in the box and the only reason the FDM one was opened was to print my son a replica pipe pistol from Fallout.

So do I have any actual plans… not really. Try and people more should be a major one… hopefully that will come about.

Another Rabbit Hole

As if I havent got enough to do! 😂

So after getting the Fallot RPG for Christmas I decided to dust off the game on the console… you know, for research purposes. I decided I didn’t want to just recreate the commonwealth around Boston in my games. Instead I decided to head North… Round about Chicago I thought…. so there I was following roads out of there and came across the town of Marengo… for some reason it is classed as a city, but with just over 7500 people, to me that is the same population as Lerwick.

Why Marengo… well it has a park, that has my surname. So many hours later I stopped ‘driving’ around on Google Maps.

Soo with a bit of Internet searching…. said family arrived I 1838, three years after the town was formed…. I fully intended to get some ideas down on paper…sadly never happened, I did however print off a few maps to help with the planning stage. Oh yeah… some of the houses would fit right into the Fallout aesthetic!

A Bit Windy… An Update

To be honest this morning was a bit like ‘wind… what wind?’ Yesterday I could hardly stand and today I couldn’t have flown a kite. My good lady took this photo when she was out with the dog.

We got off easy.

Power kept on, but the other side of the hill was off. Funnily enough anywhere that had their power poles replaced due to being destroyed last winter were fine this time.

To our knowledge the worst that happened to our place was that the bin lid fell off and we lost a strip of felt off the pony shed.

My colleague lost their hen house and pigsty roof, oh and this was the Shetland hotel!

The road on the other side was closed for ages as the fire brigade had to assess the building to ensure it wasn’t going to fall down.

From what I remember strongest gust was 89 mph yesterday.

A Bit Blowy

Well it is decidedly windy this evening coming from the South East which is unusual. From the outskirts of Lerwick and Scalloway southward lost power earlier. Thankfully we don’t have too many trees to cause further chaos.

All I can hear is the wind outside. Brrrr! Ferries, flights and buses all cancelled earlier or even yesterday.

So far we seem to have a pond where my porch floor seems to be. The wind is driving the rain under the bottom of the door. It already need the roof replacing due to a leak. Typically the wind direction is not the way I want the wind to be blowing!

Tomorrow we will check everywhere for damage!

So wind speed is about 65 -70 mph gusting up to 85.

Poor buggers on the mainland are getting similar and have woodlands to deal with too.

Respect to the Electricity dudes up poles on a night like this!

Merry Christmas

I hope you had, are having or are going to have an awesome Christmas.

We have had a good one here…sadly all the snow disappeared on Christmas Eve!

So this was my haul along with lots of sweeties, a new mug, some new Lego, oh and some nice cheese!

Flippin heck this thing is comprehensive! Only just really had a flick through as we were at my in-laws and then my body decided I needed a sleep!

Printers and Self Inflicted Wounds.

Today I set up the filament printer to print my son something for part of his Christmas present.

Self levelling bed and faster print speeds was a very nice bonus. Okay I printed at 0.2mm but instead of one bit and an IOU I got the whole thing done… even with a power outage and the aforementioned wound!

So I decided to use tree supports on my first attempt… one of them got knocked off somehow. So I stopped the print and foolishly decided to use a blade instead of a scraper to remove the supports that did adhere really well. Somehow my blade hand actually came back towards me, maybe a ricochet off a support, not actually sure… long story short…

What you can’t see in the photo is the fact it is straight across to the other side of my thumb too… I tried slicing that bit off!

So guess who felt like a right pillock!

A Bit More Done

This evening I managed to get some work done on the Flintloque miniatures. Basically from left to right is unfinished towards a more finished state.

Spot the odd one out!

As tomorrow is Christmas Eve it is unlikely that I will get any more done, but I may get lucky.

A Bit More Painting…

This evening I decided to try and get some painting done on the 28mm Flintloque miniatures. I got a bit further than I thought I would… a couple are close to finished…

I will try and get a bit more done tomorrow evening.

Yesterday we had gales, today we had snow and for some reason strong winds about half four. My daughter and I were trying to grit the hill out the valley and we had to fight the shovel constantly as the wind was taking it.

Luckily we had a mattock in the back of the car (like you do!) because the grit piles were frozen solid… oh yeah the only shovel I could find to put in the car was a plastic snow shovel!

So with the wind and snow the kids broke up early for Christmas! I managed to stay home too, which was a huge relief yesterday!

Dog Update – Sad News

Please be advised this hasn’t got a happy ending!

You have been warned.

A bit of a hard one to write. Sadly we had to let Bella go today. She bled 5 times since yesterday evening. The vet went to do the op on the teeth and sadly her blood tests showed that she was failing fast. She basically was losing platelets so her blood wouldn’t be able to clot.

They therefore couldn’t do the operation as she was also so anemic that caused a problem, dehydration was setting in, so they put her on a drip which thinned the platelets more. They had a blood transfusion set for tomorrow but they couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t delaying the inevitable. They also couldn’t be sure that if she started bleeding then she wouldn’t stop.

They think that she may have had some form of tumour causing the bleeding.

We therefore had to make the extremely hard decision… I am a firm believer of it’s better to be a day too soon than a day too late.

Some Painting and a Dog Update

This evening I managed to get some paint on the majority of my mates 28mm miniatures.

I also added some shading onto the blue flags I started a week ago … the following is the original photo… I forgot to do an update!

They now look a bit better. I have to sort out the highlights next.

With regards to the dog, she is bleeding again. About four or five times today. Not as bad as before, but enough to be worrying. Thankfully she is in the vets tomorrow. The drugs came today. There are no boats tomorrow so we were lucky there.

Come to think of it, there are no schools on tomorrow. We are expecting 80mph gusts so the powers that be pulled the plug on safety grounds.

Hopefully she will be sorted Soon!