I don't think I've ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time.

Pro-tip: it never works.

The end of year display was great, and I had the "brilliant" idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.

My camera work (the camera was my phone) was shaky and awful and the position I was in was the best I could do at the time but definitely was not the best.  But to get better I'd need a multiple camera setup in some interesting locations and I don't have multiple cameras.  The sound in the recording was also muddy so I had to overlay some tracks.

I got a little busy.

This month was just as action packed as the previous one. There was one more excursion with the parents, extended family and Up Close and Local Tours but minus 17yo (who was feeling a bit run down and decided to play it paranoid) to Bunbury, where we stopped by a little cafe with its own little adorably put together food garden.

After that it was off to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.

Title I should be using if I cared about SEO: one way to use Obsidian to manage creative writing projects.

Apologies in advance, I accidentally upsized some of the images in this because I forgot an important character in the mogrify command, and I am too lazy to redo those screenies.

A "short" history

Once upon a time, I used to be a total pantser.

And then I started this project.

_{in 2003 I believe}

And continued to try to pants because that's what I'd always done, until i realised that I actually needed to know everything that was going on.

August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September.

It started with the death of one of 13yo's fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush.

17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to "get his life together" and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own). He asked me for a corkboard (full corkboard as I'd bought them corkboard/whiteboard combos previously, apparently it wasn't big enough for what he wanted to do) so he could pin things he wanted to organise on it. 15yo overheard and said the same.

Not sure what has been going on with Manjaro or whether it's just my sense of time that's been warped, but there seems to have been a longer than usual period between updates. I've been waiting for Blender 3.3 for a while as that has the new hair system in it, but Manjaro refused to update.

_{I found out at some point during these shenanigans that the new hair system was actually in 3.2 which is the version the Manjaro repo is stuck on, but wasn't appearing for me}

I finally got it to do a system update by force-refreshing the mirrors, but still don't know if that did it or if an update was coming out then anyway.

Either way it didn't matter because the app that I desperately wanted to update didn't get updated. So I caved and got the snap version working.

The  completionist in me is somewhat annoyed that I didn't get the September Powerbee.  I must have done it too early in the morning or something stupid like that (I did it around the same time as I usually do but my "around" tends to be an hour or so).

Oh well.

My parents have been over and seem to have decided to do a lot of tours this time round (probably because an uncle and his family are also over), and invited us out on a number of them.  It's been great because it's stuff we either haven't done for a few years or may not have had an opportunity to do so, and hopefully we've crammed enough stuff in to make up for the last couple of months.

I think I've finished the first light and shadow layers for the Eladrin. 

It went pretty quick, I don't know how long it actually took as while Toolsday is the day for it, there was a bit going on.

I was talking to Sprat about having difficulty with feathers (because I'm trying to do Zara's head feathers better) and that I didn't have a feather generator. Then it occurred to me to see if one existed and apparently one does.

13yo's kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce.

Was delicious warm with ice cream.  He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason.  Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding.

I really should stop trying to push to finish things before going to bed because the times that it has worked is probably still in the single digits.

I decided to postpone the progblog because I've been so out of it I really hadn't gotten a lot of work done, partly because I just didn't look at my schedule and partly because I managed to simultaneously not know what day it was and know what day it was because of who had to be where by when.  All I had to show was stuff that has been seen before quite recently.

At least the reworks are getting faster? I might even finish this character this year, imagine that.