Eldrad's Livejournal

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Finally got to camp in front of the computer and figure out the interface for Yuletide 2009!
All my Yuletide recs can be found under the Yuletide2009 tag at my delicious!

(Also if one were looking for amazingly flooringly awesome cyberpunk!Watchmen fic then they'd find it under my Cyberpunk tag here.)

I dreamed that I was being chased by LRP monsters, so really just some guys with giant head piece things on to make them look like monsters. So I made OTHER LRP monsters for random passers by to wear and distract the other ones.

Merry Christmas all! I recieved tshirts and much fabric and ate much food. Sherlock Holmes I really enjoyed and then successfully drove in the correct lane at 110km for three hours and DID NOT DIE. Sometimes that's a more awesome fact than at other times.

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We all wandered off down to Bendigo for Christmas at my aunt Heather's house.

There was a mountain of cold meat: roast pork, ham, lamb and turkey, and the obligatory roast potato and pumpkin and steamed vegies, followed by a chocolate ripple cake. (My cousin Roxanne swears that people in New South Wales don't know what chocolate ripple cake is. Can this be true?) There was also a Christmas pudding but that was just forgotten about when my cousin broke out the Singstar.

(Incidentally, it is now a proven fact that, of the 18 people at Christmas, the only one who can say, sing in tune to Singstar is my ten year old cousin Alice and that, I am willing to believe, is because she spends 95% of her time in Shanghai, away from the Cannard clan's inability to sing. At all. Ever.)

I scored some cash and a tiny block of chocolate from my parents, which was hilarious because my sister scored a much larger box of mint chocolates and a Borders voucher from a cousin in the Kris Kringle.

I got my dad an mp3 player, which was hilarious because he got one of the same brand for my mum and Claire got them both travel towels, which were, coincidentally of the same brand and size as the ones they'd gotten a week earlier. And I got both Claire and the cousin I got in the Kris Kringle a manicure voucher.

Finally, the day was finished off with a trip via mc_shamo and mstakenidentity's for the MUCAAS Christmas debrief.

So, all in all, it was a lovely day.

Merry Christmas (or other appropriate seasonal greetings of your choice) to all!

I love you. Please marry me.

Havn't posted in a while..

Well, I'm back in Melbourne, and have had family Christmas.
Oddly enough, this season hasn't felt much like Christmas. All the stuff with Dad, stressing etc, just really hasn't felt like the Holidays (we didn't even have decorations up at home).
But oh well, I guess we all have a bung day every now and then =).

Today Mum, Dad, Laura & Myself went to "Yum Cha Dragon" at Docklands for Christmas lunch wasn't too bad, and it was something different to our usual Christmases.

Then I headed back here for a nap for a couple of hours, since the last few days have been rather high on the stress meter and I havn't had much in the way of sleep.

Oh well, I'll be catching up on sleep, and be catching up with people, and now that I'm no longer spending all my time in the arse end of nowhere things will pick up :)

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万国人物図/ People of the World(?)
Published 1645 in Nagasaki. Online at the Digital Archives of the Kyushu University Museum.
http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/bankoku/
Top row, third from the left are Koreans, it also seems there are Portuguese, Dutch, Germans, and other interesting woodcuts, too.

There is also the 世界人物図巻/ A Number of People of the World(?), from 1714(?).
http://record.museum.kyushu-u.ac.jp/sekaijinbutsu/

I won a turkey! So um, now I need to think about what to stuff up its butt and how to cook it. I know people out there have cooked turkey before... any suggestions?

Late-night shopping. Driving home, at the top of a hill, glanced in the rear-view mirror. The road sloped away into a triangle behind me, like a dark Christmas tree filled up with coloured lights.

I have one present left to get.

I worked a lot last week, and as a consequence have the two days before Christmas off!

I've done all my Christmas shopping already, but it will be good to have time to wrap and label properly and get a few other things done.

Plan for tomorrow:

Load car with stuff for charity bin
Drive to gym and dump stuff in their charity bin
Do some sort of gym thing, maybe swimming
Drive to Coles
Pick up the last of the shopping (forgot the kitty litter again!)
Do a tidy up upstairs and clean out the cat's tray
Do a rather more vigourous clean up downstairs
Possibly do some cooking for the next few days if it's not too hot.
Put feet up and read a book
Make a tasty and healthy dinner
Curl up with boy (and optional cats) on couch and have egg nog and mince pies

I am looking forward to this a LOT.

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Chapters for the Economics study guide are beginning to appear in my email account, which means that the time before and after Christmas will probably become a mad rush to get the book ready for printing on January 6th.

I've almost finished painting some Imperial Guard tanks for Dave T, which I've been enjoying so far: I'm using a bunch of new techniques from the Forgeworld Master Class book (thanks fetnas!), making them the most detailed vehicles that I've painted so far. The airbrush is a godsend for this sort of work, and hopefully it will help me to clear out a lot of my unpainted backlog next year.

Then, I have two figures to sculpt for lena_supercat and altheas's wedding cake. I'm planning to use Sculpey for these, over an aluminium wire armature. Sculpey is much easier to rework and add detail to, but it means I'll have to finish an entire figure in one go - once it's been baked, I can't readily add putty to it.

January's commission painting project is a Blood Bowl team for one of the guys playing at CanCon. I want to sculpt my own Blood Bowl figures one day (for the Nurgle's Rotters team), but I'm unlikely to get motivated any time soon... there are too many other games that I want to play first.

The rest of January will be occupied by writing a literature review, and a draft of my methodology chapter. There's a large shipment of qualitative methodology textbooks inbound, courtesy of the remainder of my 2009 research funds :)

I really want a holiday, but I think I'll have to wait until February as I seem to be working three jobs at the moment. At least the summer of commission work madness will help to pay for some of our furniture, and a new computer for aeliel...

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I one-up the muppets Bohemian Rhapsody with THIS!