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Looks like I’ll be attending a third funeral in as many months as I heard this evening that another fellow modeller died this morning after a short illness.
I propose we rewind 2007 and start again as the year’s clearly badly flawed.
Tunes you don’t want to hear while sitting in your dentist’s waiting area:
A most entertaining race on tonight’s Top Gear - across London by car (obviously) [May], bicycle [Hammond], public transport [The Stig] and powerboat [Clarkson]. To avoid spoiling the surprise for anyone who recorded the programme to view later, I’ll hide the result:
The bike won, followed by the powerboat and public transport.
I reached a motoring milestone of my own this weekend. For the first time, the figures on the currency display were higher than those on the volume display when I filled up the Sirion for my trip to Spalding. Yes, over £1.00 per litre of fuel. That’s £4.59 per gallon (or £3.82 - US$7.97 - per US gallon, where they can’t count). If I see one more complaint from Americans about the cost of their fuel … grrrrrrr.
Still, Spalding was great. Had the “client meeting” and got an agreement to spend money (hurrah!), got to play trains thanks to the chaps from Perth and got to collect the layout from M. Even those layouts on show were well worth seeing and I hardly made any impulse purchases at all.
Not a bad weekend, in fact, all in all. How was yours?
No, it wasn’t the floods. They passed largely uneventfully (although residents in a couple of Norfolk villages may disagree on that point).
I refer, rather, to my journey home tonight.
One thing you don’t want to see in your rear view mirror, having joined a line of stationary traffic is a Toyota Rav4, 75 feet and three inches behind but heading towards you at 30mph. Especially if you’re in an itty bitty Copen. I know the distance exactly because the thinking+stopping distance at 30mph is 75 feet and the car screeched to a stop no more than three inches from my bumper, its nose dipping sharply at the sudden braking.
Phew.
As I may get washed away tonight*, I thought I’d better post something here.
So what have I been up to? Hmmm … let’s think.
I’ve had a fun time getting reacquainted with the delights of HappyPillsTM and have been rather low ever after their having finally kicked in. Sleep pattern’s been shot to pieces but I’m not sure whether that’s a side effect or not.
On a brighter note, I enjoyed my visit to the wargames club and went again on Tuesday, where I bought an (unpainted) army from one of the members and had the chance to play in a 2v2 battle with them which was a lot of fun. It seems I have a previously unknown skill - estimating distance.
I’ll explain. Part of the rules involves estimating range for the artillery pieces. Each I gauged the distance from my cannon to the troops I had in my sights I announced my estimate - say, 32 inches - and when we measured to see where the cannonball would land I was absolutely spot on. Now if I could just find a real-life use for this skill …
I’d already bought a small number of figures (it was on my arrival home that the email offering me the army at a very attractive price arrived) but have forgotten on two subsequent visits to Norwhag city centre to buy a can or two of undercoat. There’s now a hell of a lot of figures for me to get painted and quite a few for me to build. Oh well - something to help the long winter nights pass.
As I mentioned elsewhere I’ve been thoroughly enjoying playing Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on my Nintendo DS handheld gaming console. In fact, it’s by far the best game I’ve played on the DS and is well worth buying for someone for Yule if you know a DS owner who hasn’t already bought it. On the Wii I’ve just started Resident Evil 4, which is rather unsettling and may well be contributing to the sleep pattern interruption, so I’m giving it a rest for a few days until things improve.
I’m off to sunny Spalding this weekend for a model railway show but have, in fact, four reasons for visiting. As well as just looking around at the layouts, I’m going to be able to meet former fellow club members from the Perth club as they’re exhibiting the US N gauge layout I helped build. They’ve even said I can take a shift as an operator which will be excellent. While I’m there, though, it’ll be time for my annual meeting with one of the traders whose website I’ve built and maintain, discussing plans for the future et cetera. Finally, I’ll also be meeting up with acquaintance M to exchange a railway layout.
As you may know, I have enjoyed a small degree of notoriety with some whimsical designs for railway layouts (longstanding readers may recall a particularly awkward meeting with an over-enthusiastic “fan” at a local show). Well, one of my plans was actually adopted by a modeller who had, in turn, passed it to M when he moved on to other projects. The layout had been sitting in M’s basement, untouched, and when M and I met at the original modeller’s funeral at the beginning of September, M mentioned this and I offered to take it off his hands if he had no plans for it. With M being in Mansfield and me in Norfolk, the Spalding show seemed a sensible place for the handover. It should be a fun day on Saturday, then, and I can’t help thinking I could do with that. Oh yes.
I think that covers the last couple of weeks. I’ll try to post a little more regularly in future, although doubt that I’ll return to the post-a-day frequency I used to manage - too much modelling to do!
* as long as the tidal surge has been underestimated by a factor of 10 and that it reaches over 30 miles inland