technonaturalist

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.

And if I don’t do it tonight it will be late again as busy weekend is busy!

The process video wasn’t done in time so it may make the next week’s progblog or alternately it may never see the light of day, depending entirely on whether or not I finish Embers over the next week. I did finish frame 3:

and started on the last…er…frame I guess even though there’s no border. It feels a lot harder I guess because I can’t remember ever doing a coloured piece with more than two characters (hell I think last year was the first time I ever did a piece with more than two characters and this one beats that one by one). I also realised I forgot Zara and Dak’s tattoos so will have to remedy that before proceeding too much further.

Because I was struggling with editing the video and the spacebar on my keyboard has decided to play silly buggers, something has come loose on the right side so when I hit it on that side it doesn’t always bother to do its job and is depressing unevenly. I have had to switch to using my left hand to do space and am finding it awkward and infuriating. So I’m going to try one of those clackety mechanical monstrosities and give this one to 13yo as he has a really ancient keyboard that we had lying around and it’s a bit more worn out than this one is.

This weekend was busier than usual with 13yo and 11yo having states. Both of them did pretty well, 11yo got a silver on beam (level 5 is tough!) and 13yo got silver on pommel and rings and gold on floor and parallel bars as well as second in All Around.

Now there’s just end of year stuff to go! 11yo has been busy at fornightly dance rehearsals as she’s in the opening performance for the end of year concert. Now I just hope it doesn’t clash with the gymnastics end of year display!