technonaturalist

We were still on Christmas Island for most of January so it was still mostly geared towards being with family.

We got to watch the derpy little thrushes fledging, slowly learn how to fly, hop around the garden still demanding food from and getting fed by their parent, and hopefully eventually soaring off to start their own lives.

The teenager made the decision some time this month that he needed to be more responsible and started voluntarily practising basic life skills. One involved cooking up a batch of sausages for lunch (plus both boys just felt like sausage sizzle apparently), and while he was about it he decided to experiment with steaming some of them.

The appearance of the steamed sausages wasn’t particularly well received by the 9yo, and it was noted that the flavours and textures differed with the different cooking methods. 13yo also decided he was going to start applying for jobs when we got back to Perth.

November had to be cruisy after the insanity of October, plus we usually start winding down about now anyway. We stayed home a lot.

We weren’t completely lazy. The boys played with the snap circuits, 13yo mostly building his own. 9yo experimenting with food (in the picture he was doing arty things with strawberries and cream before consuming them), and 11yo was mostly experimenting with and learning about makeup (and spending a lot of money on it).

October started out with 11yo’s bestie staying for the weekend and them asking if we could wander around Perth for a bit after visiting a store they wanted to browse. 9yo requested my phone to take a couple of photos of things that interested him:

The city has been trying to do more fun and interesting stuff so we tend to find random things whenever we go there. At the time they were celebrating the arrival of spring so there were these random bird cages there, which were apparently great for photoshoots.

Yeh yeh I’m late again. Much shenanigans happened on the weekend taking 11yo, a bunch of her giggly friends and 13yo to Bounce (9yo was meant to come to but he’d sliced his toe open on Thursday by deciding it was imperative that his iPad be unlocked on the way to the car rather than in the car after he’d clipped in and thus he didn’t notice the kerb I’d parked next to), and then one of the girls stayed over (which I found out was happening on the day, fortunately I’m cruisy).

I progressed!

Zara has been turned into a paint object and I really should have done her nails first but I got excited and launched straight into tattoos. They ended up looking slightly different from my reference pic (where everything was pretty much guesswork anyway).

I missed two aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway. I’m currently stuck with the dance animation because the characters didn’t end up where I wanted them to be due to a severely truncated tumble run.

I originally planned for Zara to do a proper diagonal with at least a slight run-up and 4-5 tricks. Then I had a problem of Rei’s tumble run being not nearly as long because she’s just learning and doesn’t know nearly as many tricks as Zara, plus she does a slower and more graceful one that doesn’t utilise a run up.

And that’s pretty much the extent of this progblog XD

This week has been pretty slow on all fronts. 9yo had a cold again so we couldn’t go out and do much, so we just chilled and reconnected, which of course meant not much work getting done. It also wasn’t helped by having to make a hundred million phone calls to government departments. I don’t do phones so it was exhausting and I had to go hide for a little while afterwards. I did get some villainous upgoats done, but even though I made some big swatches it didn’t occur to me that I’d end up with a foxgoat til after I’d done it. Sigh.

I did the other two progblogs pretty much back to back and managed to forget that and thought I was doing 2 now but apparently I’m up to 3, getting old in my old age and a bit more sleep wouldn’t be remiss either.

I still have a process/progress video for Embers but I’ve decided I’m way too lazy to edit it and just need to finish Embers because it’s already November next month and while I would love to make a tiny bit more steem for hayrunners I also want to progress all the other stuff (including the stuff I’m “supposed” to be doing! XD) and end of year stuff is ramping up so things are going to get busier soon. Fortunately the gymnastics end of year display didn’t clash with the dance end of year concert!

One of the things about not learning in an institution is accepting that the stuff taught and learned in institutions isn’t the grand authority on all that’s worth learning. I know this, but sometimes I don’t really know it. Like on her day, 11yo said she wanted to get her nails done.

My immediate response was “pick something educational”.

I’m not sure why mouths sometimes just randomly fire off before engaging the logic part first as not only would it make a lot of things so much easier, it would probably also make the world a better place in general. 11yo has spent a couple of years studying makeup artistry, nails were part of that, so we would learn how nails got done professionally. Also, I got her to research the nail places at the shopping centre we were going to in order to get some idea of prices. As it turned out none of them had prices on their websites (which is really annoying) so we had to do actual legwork.