My Sister in Law went back home on the boat tonight so we decided to take her and my mother in law to the Smugglers Cave, the same one we found a year ago.

I was really proud of my eldest who overcame her fear to come down into the cave.

As can be seen from the photos below there was a bit of a swell.

It was a great morning’s stroll out.

The last photo above shows the power of the sea. Those boulders (roughly the size of a fridge) were put up there by the waves. The top photo of the two shows the extent of the boulder fields.

As it was such a good evening we actually had an impromptu barbecue.

I also managed some hobby time…

More work on my cultist and robots and a start on my teddy bear trooper…all 3D Printed again 😂

Firstly look what came in the post today!

This thing is huge, I can’t wait to get it painted.

Secondly I resprayed the crashed drop ship as the paint that had gone onto it had gone all shiny and horrible. So a quick drop into the car place and voila…white…or rather white-ish. It really does need another coat.

I also sprayed the intact vessel too.

Third on my busy schedule were the two combat robots from Ill Gotten Games. I am considering using them a CHAS units for Starship Troopers.

These came in bits. Legs and torso printed with the two separate arms next to them. To make sure these were secure I printed them on a raft, I should have got them off straight away but forgot! By time I got to them they had decided that they wanted to stay attached 🤬.

As the white spray can was out then I gave the Elves a blast too. They had gone all horrible and shiny too.

Yesterday I went over to my mates and we played UBoot. We sank 10,000 tons of merchantmen, locked horns with some rather nasty corvettes. Survived two depth charge attacks, with various leaks and a major fire we ended up with an exhausted crew and errrr… ran aground in Norway.

The highlight of the game was passing within 750m of a convoy in a massive storm at 01.00. We thought we would risk it and it worked.

One final thing… some of you may remember my gallivanting around the WW2 defences of Lerwick.

I eventually got a copy of one of the original maps ….

Interestingly the map was drawn to allow certain land owners to have evidence of what was on their land, these are denoted by the various letters inside the circles. My wife added the red to make it easier to see. It doesn’t show any of the seaboard defences apart from the tubular scaffolding round the coast at Brei Wick.

In my pictures I showed a trench system that didn’t face the front, it can be clearly seen in this map. The Germans were to be funnelled into a killing zone near to where it says South Staney Hill.

The other thing that it shows is my offices when it was an HQ building as well as a dotted circular shape between two HQ’s this was where a battery of howitzers were sited. These were to be used for fire support on the far side of Staney Hill.

I will try and get to the battery some time soon and get some pictures of that.

I wanted to get something done, but too tired. The reason is that I have sat in a digger for the last two days.

We had to dig a 220m trench to put a fibre cable in. The first bit see below was a nightmare as it was all rock from when the track was put in.

Most of the digging was yesterday, today was back filling. We then cut towards the house across the track…

I armoured the armoured cable a bit more by running it through a 25mm water pipe. This had to go under a wall and into the garden.

Things worked quite well apart from some nightmare rocks that were filling a gate opening, they were massive. The other slight problem I had was when I was backfilling the track. I might have inadvertently smacked the caravan with the digger…

It was already buggered and is held together by the straps. A storm tried blowing the roof off last year (luckily I had a digger then and managed to hold the roof on until we could get it strapped down).We were waiting until May to make sure the winds don’t blow up before I cut it up.

We got it finished by teatime tonight…

Well I have been promising my eldest a game of Scrabble for the last couple of days…

Not exactly the newest edition, I did manage to beat her even though I had a slow start.

I was quite proud of my personal best score of 75 and just now I realised I only got 45 points…. I had better tell her tomorrow. We were feeling quite proud until we realised we just scraped into the Good score.

I also managed a little more on the weird hand monsters…

Tonight was a totally can’t be arsed kind of an evening. I went off to paint a couple of my dwarves in the big shed. Outside temperature has dropped below minus so it was a little chilly. I put on my down riding jacket and the heater and waited until things warmed up. Whilst waiting for the paint to unfreeze (a slight exaggeration there). I played on the console and as you might have guessed, I achieved nothing.

Off into the bath and to while away the time, I watched the following

A channel called building Middle Earth. As I am into Tolkien I have been watching this channel for a little while, I do like his builds.

In this one he was building a Minis Tirith dwelling out of Hirst Blocks.

This was something I did about 10 years ago (by did read stopped doing). By the end I had around 20 Plus moulds, all imported from the states, I used to get a good deal… buy 4 get 1 free, plus he helped out on the taxes too. When I became rather skint I sold pretty much all of them on EBay and weirdly made more money than I paid for them. My eldest when she was a tot used to help me. She loved measuring out the spoonfuls of plaster. We got pretty slick at it by the end… if I left things for a while I would forget the ratio, so to remind me I stuck a label on the bottom of the cupboard shelf…

Yep it’s still there, in case I ever feel the urge to purchase Keramin again. The ratio above is not the recommended one from the package, but rather a trial and error system of getting the best results.

Anyway the moulds are long gone but the bricks remain. I must have thousands of the things, even after I gave a kilo or two away to the gaming club.

This is only one such box/bag/sweetie tin that contains various bits and bobs.

Although I don’t make things out of them any more, why?quite simply the weight – oh and time to cast enough blocks and then actually build something. Don’t get my wrong these are awesome, but I think I just ran out of steam. It didn’t help that the cost of getting the hard plaster up here was getting silly. A bag of Keramin cost £6 …postage to the uk was somewhere near £3 with an extra £6 to get to me.

They are handy for bits and pieces of ruins though…

I really should just bin them as in those 10 years I haven’t really used anything apart from some Egyptian statues. And truth be told I now have the printer. Okay it isn’t the same as building it yourself one brick at a time but the printed stuff does tend to bounce a bit easier and furthermore it is a twentieth of the weight.

When I say the moulds have all gone, that is not exactly right. I have one left… #75 the ruined Fieldstone mould. The other piece of Trivia is some of my moulded pieces supported my Wife in one of her International conferences. They made a pathway for people to follow (on a table – I didn’t make that many 😉). It went down quite well from what I remember.

Even though the Temperature here is chilly – spring is definitely on the way as the Oyster catchers are back and making a massive racket.

These are sooooo forgotten they don’t even make them any more!

I don’t actually know how long I have had them…. at least 40 years. I got them as a child. Still in their box and on their sprue.

Just look at the awesome detailing on these miniatures. Not exactly the most dynamic set Airfix ever made. I still have the Tarzan set and covered wagons somewhere.

I still think my most favourite set was this one…

I saved up my pocket money and went to the Toy Shop and bought it when I was around 8 years old.

The thing I remember from the boxes was the amazing artwork

I had the B17 amongst others…