Thoramel

Regarding the heavy metal/elevator music/getting old discussion. I was at a hardcore show last month for a band celebrating 36 years of playing together. The guitarist had their teenage daughter on stage, there were several little kids running around the venue, one of the bands gave a speech about being tolerant and accepting as an example to kids, and they warned us old people not to feel like we had to get in the pit on their behalf because they know their fanbase is old and has to get up in the morning. Still rocked hard, just a little more family friendly version of hard than it was 30 years ago.

As ready as I'm going to be I suppose. The only big summer activities we are planning for this year is kayaking and volunteering at some festivals. We've got the kayaks broken in and have a few dates to meet with others for some river trips. I've also got my volunteer shifts scheduled and have taken those days off at work. No vacations this season. But summer is my busiest time of year so vacations usually take place in the fall.

I got rooked into coming into the office today to help some new interns get set up and started. I'm not sure having the guy who stands around in swamps looking for cool plants was the best choice for getting folks set up on their computers. So instead, I've got them reading a couple of books on plant identification. And later this afternoon they'll be scrubbing and organizing old gear. Someone else can figure their computers out for them later this week. Provided they stick around after today that is.

My taste in minis has expanded. But I still collect the same kinds of figures I started with, fantasy PC's. Now I paint all kinds of stuff in a range of sizes and genres. And even some stuff not related to games at all but just for display. I'm not sure my style has changed as much as it has improved over time and with lots of practice. I'm still just coloring in bits, kind of like a 3D coloring book. 3rd: No hurricanes in Ohio, Though they do burn themselves out here every once in a while. We're more of a flooding and tornado kind of place. 4th: I've got a bug out bag with some basic gear and I always keep a couple of five gallon containers of water on hand. But mostly I don't worry too much about it. We are five minutes from 3 emergency rooms, one of which is a trauma center. There are several emergency shelters within walking distance. And because any disaster we are likely to face here would be localized, I can always walk, bicycle, or drive out of the area of impact and find shelter with friends and family. One of the benefits of living in a densely populated urban environment is access to emergency services in the event of a crisis.

Yes, though I don't watch a lot of television Jeopardy is one of the shows I'll watch if I see it's on. I enjoy a game of Trivial Pursuit (as long as we're not playing with my wife's house rules which involves doing shots). I also like pub trivia though I rarely have time to participate. My niece has been trying to get me to join her pub trivia team recently, but it's in the middle of the week and doesn't start until late. So with early morning work schedules I haven't had a chance to get out to it yet.

I'm not disabling them. They are fully capable of disabling themselves. That comment was not in purple. But don't worry, all of the modern devices automatically shut off after a few seconds. Just long enough to immobilize big fish. That way if someone were to fall out of the boat while holding the shocking wand they won't just clamp down on it and keep delivering current.

For that you want the boat mounted model we use for large river and stream surveys. It's so strong you can disable an intern with it.

In case anyone was wondering (and I'm sure you all were just dying to know this), this is the latest in man portable fish shocking technology. You can electrocute so many fish with this bad boy. Don't worry though. That man is a professional and knows just how much juice to run through the water to stun the fish and not actually kill them. Pretty handy for taking fish counts in small streams. The old models had a small diesel generator on them and were loud, smelly and hot. These just beep a little bit when they're on. You don't want to get in the stream with this guy when he fires it up though. It's kind of like getting smacked in every part of your body at once. We bio-nerds get all the fun toys.

What are you talking about? That is a picture of me riding a giant opossum. Well a painting anyways. It was hard to get her to stay still for that long.

I'm not a big Ren Faire guy, but if I get to ride a giant opossum at the West Virginia Faire then it may be worth the drive...

I dropped this guy multiple times while painting him. No issues. Granted, it was from tabletop height onto a rug. So your results may vary. The material seemed durable and just slightly flexible. Not nearly as durable as bones and bones black, but not as prone to shattering as bones USA.

Buying a new fridge is at the top of the list. And immediately below that is hiring an electrician to do some work on the house I'm not comfortable doing. Signed up for a bunch of volunteer work for a community festival near the end of the month. Looking forward to that. Even though it's a decent amount of work, the festival is great fun and I always run into a bunch of folks I know but never seem to see during the rest of the year. For hobbying I'd like to get the kayaks out at least a couple more times, brew a batch of beer, and finish a mini I'm painting for the RCL. Fingers crossed that all happens. I'm currently handling the health care and housing for multiple seniors with developing mental issues. So all of the above could get thrown right out the window while I handle other folk's affairs.

This is the 3d printed mini Reaper was sending out with orders recently. I picked it up because I was genuinely curious about the quality of the new material. Especially given that some I've what I've ordered in the last Kickstarter is going to be manufactured in this medium. I've only ever painted a few printed minis and they were fickle, fragile, and not too great on details. Admittedly that was a while ago and I know the technology has improved greatly in recent years. Boy was I surprised. I figured Reaper would be delivering a quality print, but I have to say that the details on this guy are way better than their typical bones and bones black material. I gave it my normal tabletop quick paint job for a mini this size and I'm very pleased with the outcome. If you're one of the people on the fence about this manufacturing process like I was, I highly recommend checking it out, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Anyways, here's the mini in question... Cheers all and thanks for looking!

I got most all of my adulting goals done with the exception of getting a hood vent for the kitchen. But we changed our plans there and are going to be purchasing a new refrigerator first as our old one is on it's last legs. As for my hobbying goals I wanted to brew some beer and get my kegerator torn apart, cleaned and reassembled - that happened. I wanted to finish getting all the gear I'd need to start kayaking - that happened. And I wanted to finish the Bones V Cyclops from the Greek Odyssey expansion - almost done with that one. Just a few more days and it should be done. Life didn't necessarily throw us any roadblocks this month. A few family members tried to unload their constant drama on to us, but we managed to avoid the worst of it. So all in all, a pretty productive month!

26th: My city exists in some weird travel dimension where every place you need to go is only twenty minutes away - seriously, newcomers to town are always commenting on this. Anything longer than a twenty minute drive away seems like it takes forever. 27th: I like motorcycles. I grew up around them. My grandpa rode an Indian with a side car, my dad had Norton's and eventually switched to one of those big Kawasaki touring bikes, I had a few Kawasaki's when I was younger - a KZ440 and a KZ750. They're great fun, but stupidly dangerous even if you're a careful driver. My dad has steel pins in his legs from where he was run over as a teenager, a coworker was in a coma for a week after being rear ended on her bike, and on and on. Add to that the cost of insuring, storing, and maintaining something I don't use too often and I don't really have a desire to own another bike these days. That being said, I'm like a lot of folks here and cannot stand most bikers. The reckless ones, the loud ones, the criminal gangs, the idiots riding off roaders on the street, etc... Something about these machines just attracts dangerous fools. Kind of a shame. 28th: I've never been to Monaco and have a feeling I wouldn't fit in very well there. Looks pretty though and it would be kind of fun to go watch the big race there. As for Indianapolis, yes I've been there, and it is my firm belief that no one should ever have to go there willingly. Or to the rest of Indiana for that matter. It's been fairly mild around here the last few weeks with a series of pleasant temperature days and very little rainfall. Can't comment on whether or not this is unusual because May in Ohio can mean just about anything when it comes to the weather. It has been fairly dry though. Nothing of concern just yet. Though the Maumee River Valley up around Toledo, Ohio is already under a D0 drought. But the long term forecast for this summer is looking hot and dry. If that ends up being the case, then we could end up with mild to moderate drought conditions is several parts of the state. Which is never good for a state with so much agriculture.

We mentioned to a few friends we now have kayaks and I'm surprised how many folks I know who have them and want to get out on the water some time. Yeah, we learned pretty quick that these weren't great for open water. The reservoir we were on had a few decent sized waves (for a kayak anyways) and we realized that we were getting water in them. So we spent the majority of the day exploring little inlets and streams that fed into the reservoir that were much calmer and shallow enough to walk to shore if necessary. I do not relish the thought of having to pull a half sunk kayak to shore while swimming. Mainly we're planning on exploring some rivers and decent sized streams this summer so these should suit us just fine. If, after a year or so, we find we really like the hobby then we'll probably upgrade to something better suited for deeper water.

We've been slowly pulling together everything we'd need to go kayaking on regular basis for the last few months. And with the addition of a roof carrier for the car recently we now have all the required gear we need. So today was our first day of getting out and learning to kayak. We chose a decent sized reservoir north of town that has a 10HP limit on motor boats and is mostly used by canoers, kayakers and paddle boarders. We thought it would be a good place to get familiar with our boats and it was. It was great fun and surprisingly no one fell in. Seriously, I fall into water all the time and that's usually when I'm standing on my own two feet. So today felt like an accomplishment. I'm quite sore, but super excited to do it again. I spend a lot of time around the water, but only in depths that are easily wadeable. So this has been quite liberating. We are planning a little river jaunt in the next few weeks and will hopefully be getting out on a regular basis for the rest of the season. Anyways, here's a photo from today, cheers all!

Lots of different little hurts and pains here. Some of it depends on the time of year and what I'm doing. It's field season right now. Which involves a lot of high stepping through woods and wetlands. So my major complaints are my knees and one of my feet that had a botched surgery on it years ago. During the winter it's mostly my hands. I have hand hyper mobility, which basically means my fingers bend in odd ways (this unfortunately doesn't help with painting minis). This will eventually lead to some pretty bad arthritis. When it gets really cold out my finger joints swell up and get painful. And occasionally a finger will lock up and I'll be unable to bend it for a while. I figure I've got a bit over a decade left on my original knees and maybe twenty or so before the hands become a serious issue. Although these things suck (especially the knees these days) I don't take pain relievers, unless you count the occasional beer. I figure someday the pain will be so great that I'll need them to function. But for now I'm happy to just keep plodding through life, trying not to think about it too much. Also, I'm concerned about building up a tolerance to pain meds. And if that happens too early, then I can see a long road ahead where that stuff just doesn't work.

There's a new novel in Neal Asher's Polity universe coming out next month that I'm looking forward to. The last TV series I was excited about was the Muppets, Electric Mayhem show. But I binge watched that while my wife was out of town recently (totally awesome BTW). Nothing else comes to mind.

In my mind the appropriate time to play with new stuff is immediately after it arrives in the mail. I work mostly from home and don't have any set hours. So I have no problem signing off for a while and playing with anything new that arrives.

For the first time in a long time the kegerator is full of homebrewed beer. Unfortunately I'm too busy this week to enjoy more than a couple of these little five ounce tasting glasses. But it bodes well for the long weekend coming up...

If it's not storming and just raining I like to throw on the rain gear and go hiking. Even the most crowded trails around here are practically empty when it rains. And the only thing better than hanging out in the woods is hanging out in the woods when there is no one else to bother you. If it's storming out I'll just stay in and paint minis, or bake, or brew, or just nap if none of my other hobbies are calling to me. I prime everything black, then a heavy drybrush of grey followed by a light drybrushing of white. My eyes aren't the best anymore and this allows me to see all the details I wouldn't be able to see with just a single color, and it's kind of like zenithal priming in that I can see where the highlights should generally be painted. I'm not winning any awards with this method, but it lets me crank out the tabletop stuff at a pretty good rate. The only change to this is when I'm painting something that's going to be mostly metallic, then it's just black primer and nothing else.

I carry around a container of snack mix, usually nuts and some salty stuff, when I'm in the field at work because we don't always have time to take a lunch break. but otherwise I don't do a lot of snacking these days. When I was in college I used to "stress eat" whenever I was typing a paper up. Back then the preferred snack was M&M's, but as I get older my body just doesn't process sugary snacks that well and they leave me feeling bad. So now if I want something sweet I make it myself with ingredients that don't upset me, which cuts way down on impulse eating when you have to take the time to actually bake something. I kind of miss being able to eat whatever, whenever I want. That's probably a good thing though.

Yes, since 2022 my employer has had a hybrid work from home policy in place. We can work from home up to 24 hours a week, provided we have a position that allows for that. The other 16 hours has to be in the office, field, or a meeting somewhere. I'm working from home right now, but will be going into the office the last couple of hours of the day to pick up my work truck and some other gear and to make sure our interns have enough work to do. Other than the occasional couple of hours here and there I don't expect to be back in the office for a full day until the end of June. Longer if there are any problems at my restoration sites this year. I'd say the overlap with Pinot Grigio Day is a coincidence. But the former head of my division probably would have said every work from home day is also "drink wine all day" day. She messed up quite a few times early in the pandemic by grabbing a full wine glass and taking a sip while on conference calls. Thankfully she was transferred to a "research position" in the last few weeks. Which is what the administration does with people they no longer want in leadership positions but are worried about publicity associated with firing a public persona. Good riddance, place runs better without a lush running it.

I don't head over to the FLGS too often. So when I do I typically have a list of items I need/want. As such, there's always something going to be in stock on my shopping list. Even if they were out of everything I went there for I'm pretty certain something new would grab my attention and I'd be spending money regardless.