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Feb. 28th, 2023 02:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyMore papercraft kits! These are surprisingly fun. They're easy enough to be encouraging, and challenging enough to be stimulating. The first one I did was in 2020, which was the Rabbit House from the anime "Is the Order a Rabbit?". The next ones I did were a small building (looks like a tombstone seller) and a small guest house. I have a few more that just arrived, one of which looks like a traditional Japanese house.
Nozomi's car battery failed somewhat early. It lasted 4 years, which isn't great. For the past few weeks, she was getting really hard to start. Then she wouldn't start at all. I opened the hood and there was a light blue golf ball on the positive terminal. I had to use baking soda to clear it off enough to disconnect it and remove the battery. Fortunately she was parked inside the garage when all this happened. I had the battery tested, it's supposed to be able to generate 500 cold-cranking amps, the one that failed was tested at only 5. The nuts and bolts for said terminals seem to have taken some corrosion damage from this and are missing from auto parts suppliers for no good reason, so I had to order them online. Oh well. Ai uses the same ones so I bought enough for everyone.
Model train show finds:
-Brass locomotive. Externally, it looks great. Functionally, it's a basketcase. But they tend to cost much more than the $70 I spent for it, so I was expecting it to be a project.
-Plastic container of engine parts. These types of finds tend to be the gift that keeps on giving.
-Spare motor for a Kumata brass engine. Not that I need it yet, but it was cheap.
-Assorted rolling stock.
-Undecorated engine. I have Some Ideas, as I always do.
-Half-finished kit of a coal car rotary dumper, marked down drastically. See, there are two ways that they empty coal cars: Either opening the hatches on the bottom over a pit, or locking the car in place and flipping it over. For those interested, there are youtube videos of both methods.
Tickets to Japan are still almost $1800 for either BWI or IAD, depending on which days I leave and return. However! If I fly out of MDT, it's a few hundred bucks less. MDT is a decent airport too. Easy to get in and out of. I'll have a better idea of how feasible it'll be around summertime and make a choice then, to either go for it or push it into next year. Given that by then it'll have been 5 years since I was in Japan, it's more than a 50% chance I'll go.
This winter has been mild so far. A few cold spots but next to nothing for snow/ice. The only snow removal item I had to touch was the brush/ice scraper, and whatever snow was on my car was already melting off on its own. What will probably happen is it'll be mild all the way into mid-March and then suddenly we'll get dumped on with over a foot of snow. As though winter will get almost to the end and be like "oh yeah, almost forgot about the snow, here it is, all at once".
Katsucon came and went, as it does. I somehow ended up going on all 3 days, primarily to load up on doujinshi and anime (including a few Laserdiscs). I do have a few duplicates of doujinshi, out of well over a thousand.
I'd have fewer duplicates if it wasn't for doujinshi.org being down for over 6 months. It's suspected the owner of the site just didn't want to do it anymore and walked away from it. Funny thing is, about a year before the site went down, someone did a scrape of the site and database, which then takes up almost 100GB, most of that in the images. The images, those are easy to scrape. The database and xml files, well those probably require more intimate access to the site. Perhaps the owner did the full site dump ahead of time, knowing what would eventually happen? Nevertheless, people who know more than I do about running complex websites now have the data and the intention of using it.
Also at Katsucon: I was finally introduced to Filomena's Restaurant in DC. Three days worth of food put onto one plate. Similarly, I was also introduced to the Finnish Long Drink, which is grapefruit soda with gin. Someone once said "those who limit their interests, limit their life". I kind of agree with that, but I found too many interests makes things more complicated than needed. If the saying were changed to "those who limit their experiences, limit their life", then I could get behind that more readily.
Nozomi's car battery failed somewhat early. It lasted 4 years, which isn't great. For the past few weeks, she was getting really hard to start. Then she wouldn't start at all. I opened the hood and there was a light blue golf ball on the positive terminal. I had to use baking soda to clear it off enough to disconnect it and remove the battery. Fortunately she was parked inside the garage when all this happened. I had the battery tested, it's supposed to be able to generate 500 cold-cranking amps, the one that failed was tested at only 5. The nuts and bolts for said terminals seem to have taken some corrosion damage from this and are missing from auto parts suppliers for no good reason, so I had to order them online. Oh well. Ai uses the same ones so I bought enough for everyone.
Model train show finds:
-Brass locomotive. Externally, it looks great. Functionally, it's a basketcase. But they tend to cost much more than the $70 I spent for it, so I was expecting it to be a project.
-Plastic container of engine parts. These types of finds tend to be the gift that keeps on giving.
-Spare motor for a Kumata brass engine. Not that I need it yet, but it was cheap.
-Assorted rolling stock.
-Undecorated engine. I have Some Ideas, as I always do.
-Half-finished kit of a coal car rotary dumper, marked down drastically. See, there are two ways that they empty coal cars: Either opening the hatches on the bottom over a pit, or locking the car in place and flipping it over. For those interested, there are youtube videos of both methods.
Tickets to Japan are still almost $1800 for either BWI or IAD, depending on which days I leave and return. However! If I fly out of MDT, it's a few hundred bucks less. MDT is a decent airport too. Easy to get in and out of. I'll have a better idea of how feasible it'll be around summertime and make a choice then, to either go for it or push it into next year. Given that by then it'll have been 5 years since I was in Japan, it's more than a 50% chance I'll go.
This winter has been mild so far. A few cold spots but next to nothing for snow/ice. The only snow removal item I had to touch was the brush/ice scraper, and whatever snow was on my car was already melting off on its own. What will probably happen is it'll be mild all the way into mid-March and then suddenly we'll get dumped on with over a foot of snow. As though winter will get almost to the end and be like "oh yeah, almost forgot about the snow, here it is, all at once".
Katsucon came and went, as it does. I somehow ended up going on all 3 days, primarily to load up on doujinshi and anime (including a few Laserdiscs). I do have a few duplicates of doujinshi, out of well over a thousand.
I'd have fewer duplicates if it wasn't for doujinshi.org being down for over 6 months. It's suspected the owner of the site just didn't want to do it anymore and walked away from it. Funny thing is, about a year before the site went down, someone did a scrape of the site and database, which then takes up almost 100GB, most of that in the images. The images, those are easy to scrape. The database and xml files, well those probably require more intimate access to the site. Perhaps the owner did the full site dump ahead of time, knowing what would eventually happen? Nevertheless, people who know more than I do about running complex websites now have the data and the intention of using it.
Also at Katsucon: I was finally introduced to Filomena's Restaurant in DC. Three days worth of food put onto one plate. Similarly, I was also introduced to the Finnish Long Drink, which is grapefruit soda with gin. Someone once said "those who limit their interests, limit their life". I kind of agree with that, but I found too many interests makes things more complicated than needed. If the saying were changed to "those who limit their experiences, limit their life", then I could get behind that more readily.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-28 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-06 10:25 am (UTC)