My plans rarely go according to plan.  They do usually result in a desirable (and sometimes even the desired) outcome though.

The latest one worked a charm, considering how many factors, unknowns and randoms got involved.

My parents are 60 this year.  When we were up for Christmas in December, I made some noises about attempting to come back for the big birthday bash they had planned in the middle of the year if I could scrape the money together.

As the party date drew closer, I realised I wasn't going to be able to scrape the money together.  When my mum asked about it during one of our phone conversations, I mentioned this.

"Where is the Green Sheep" is a picture book by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek.  It's been a favourite for all three kids and it's pretty easy (repetitive sentences with one-two word variations).  In the interests of LOTE I decided to translate it into lojban for them.

Unfortunately, I completely destroyed the lyrical rhyming thing while doing so.

Happily it seemed like a mostly straightforward task (which means I'm slowly getting better or conversely I fubared it and don't realise it yet).  I can't find a word for "clown" and I don't think {sakli} is the right thing to use when describing playground equipment.

And of course the Lojbanic Translator is being excruciatingly slow/non-responsive so I can't check my work.  Will just have to get the people that are actually fluent to shoot this thing down in flames help me out :) Here goes.

That would be Blender the open source 3d application not the kitchen appliance.

2012-06-22: I want to split out the Lightwave viewports and have one view on the big screen so I can see a big picture of what's going on and work on smaller zoomed in sections on my Cintiq.  Lightwave can't do that.  Wonder if Blender can because it's all open sourcey and whatnot and it's statistcally improbable that I'm the only person on the planet that would want to do such a ridiculous thing.  Find out it can, download.  Messed around a little with menus (most important thing was change the rotation thing from turntable to trackball so it would move in a way I was used to) and made a mutant cube.

Have coding to do.  Must.  Wait.  Til weekend.

Because my wonderful husband is an impatient git (whom I love very much by the way), the photos are unprocessed so may be a bit dark on some monitors.  These are WiP shots of the skate ramp that's being built in the front yard.  Not so many photos as I was kind of keeping an eye on 5 kids at the time and also I need to get a photo of the state the thing is in right now as I don't have one for some reason, thought I did.

My head.  It's so full of stuff that I have a very mild persistant headache.  The cold isn't helping either, it makes my shoulder hurt.  I'm glad I don't live somewhere that's actually cold.

Following is a thought dump so I can work out what I'm doing and so anyone that cares can now know why techno was gone for the last month and why I've been in such a ridiculous distracted foul mood.

<p>Fairly straightforward. Mostly here as a reminder for how to do <a href="http://drupal.org/project/webform">webforms</a&gt; (example has a theoretical nid of 1 and a theoretical form field called "message" and the "submitted" part stymied me for a bit).</p>

<h3>template.php</h3>
<blockquote><?php function mytheme_form_webform_client_form_1_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
$form['submitted']['message']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = t('Type your message here...');
} ?></blockquote>

Last night, I was on a roll.  I went to bed slightly later than intended.

This morning, Cub woke me up repeatedly.  First, sometime before the sun came up.  Then shortly after the sun came up and the blue light was caning my eyes.  Then after the sun came up.  And shortly after Josh staggered out of bed I did the same seeing as I couldn't sleep anyway.

I continued work on Red, and it occurred to me that I should do the laundry.  So I did.  It also occurred to me as I was headed outside from the laundry that I should also do the dishes.  I still have to do the dishes.  I also noticed that my husband was missing, he had crashed out in my room shortly after getting out of bed and had gone back to sleep.

Or not.  Short version, according to last night's bizarro dream, there's going to be a merger between "this" world and "some other dimension/universe" soon if it's not happening already.

Now that I'm awake I'm wondering if it was Yet Another Incarnation of the Crazy Dog House, though I don't recall seeing a cliff this time.  One day I should probably try to explain The Crazy Dog House, which appears to be a stupidly large mansion not a doghouse.

Me: Here Cub, a green nappy to go with your camo.

Cub: Camo! What's camo?

Josh: Camoflage.

Cub: Camel barge? What the?!

Business has been going pretty well.  This is great, and it also means I haven't had a chance to work much on AR.  I've been proofing and editing the scripts in between banging my head against code and deciphering client requests, and spent a whack of Sunday working on Red, but I'm pretty sure at this stage that I won't be ready to animate the first ep by the end of the year.  I am refusing to have panic attacks about it.

stop-panic-attacks (Photo credit: mia.gant)

I think it's slightly depressing that my current progress doesn't look a whole lot different from my last wip (last picture right at the bottom of the post) seeing as I spent so much time reducing polys inside the mouth (an activity that vacillates between therapeutic and tedious, depending on my mood, how long I've been working on it and whatever else is going on in my life at that point), and am currently working out the shape of the mouth and kind of expanding outward from there.