technonaturalist

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Right up at the beginning of the week we spent half a day out. Morning was pretty cruisy, and then fell over a bit as we ran late to get to Nanna’s and then slightly later again as the road I usually take was unexpectedly closed and I don’t know my way around the area well enough to reliably navigate around the roadblock (pulled in at a medical centre and utilised the trusty GPS). While I was in the meeting (which ran unexpectedly long) the kids played down by the river and made some new friends, 6yo with a pair of sisters aged 6.5yo and 4.5yo and 8yo with a gaggle of boys who were a few years older but they all played Minecraft so everything was cool (he apparently invited them over for a Minecraft party, I told him their parents would probably not want to drive out so far). Back at the grandparents’ they didn’t want to leave immediately so we waited out rush hour and Pop let them play with his walkie talkies for a bit.

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Had to temporarily drop theAbysmal dates as I got completely and utterly lost. Stupid Gregorian calendar and it’s shifting days ;) I’ll try to pick it up again next week.

Week before this one we trialled out the new weekly schedule. It went pretty well I think, and 6yo in particular has been enjoying checking it each day to find out what we’re up to that day, and to see what’s coming up. The new boxes have been working out quite well too, though after I’d sorted the books into the boxes I realised that there are only maths, English and science books (or more accurately 8yo has a science book, the other two don’t). I’m waiting on the two laptops to get here so I can set them up and I think the last two days will be Khan Academy (expanding and consolidating existing skills as well as learning new ones or just exploring random subject areas), Reading Eggs/Maths Seeds (mostly consolidation, only 4yo is really learning anything new from them) and general art shenanigans. I’m having a very hard time squeezing other languages in there, we’re still doing a very confusing and random mix of Lojban and Malay with no logic whatsoever behind it.

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And just as you’re enjoying the nice blissful month of no weekly posts from fyn, we’re starting again! Anyway we’re about midyear so this is part catch-up and part vague plan for the rest of the year.

We had one week of staggered flu (nothing too serious, just lots of sleeping, lethargy and general blarginess) followed by a week of gastro (again not too serious in the grand scheme, the kids were a bit lethargic but not listless, the biggest issue was the washing machine choosing to break down immediately before the gastro hit and it was out of action for a couple of weeks), followed by a short week (thanks to a public holiday) of me taking it easy because I was exhausted from the previous two, followed by a week of JJ catching a really bad flu and then a week of me catching a much milder version of that flu which technically only lasted a day, I just chose to take the rest of the week easy. We did have a few bouts of okay or mostly okay in that period fortunately.

[first scene - spy movie sendup]
8yo: how do they get all that stuff on the car? It’s not big enough.
[at some point during sweeping cinematographic scenes]
8yo: how do cars grow? How do cars make stuff anyway?
Husband: …you’re thinking too much into a movie that has talking cars.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

So I’m hideously slow on WiP shots. Part of it is because I’m feeling a distinct pointlessness in them (there are many characters and whatnot to come) and most of it is simply because I keep putting off taking the screenshot when I think about it, and then eventually forget.

Every now and again though I need to remind myself I’m making progress. Here I’ve hidden the wing membranes so I can see what I’m doing, and left a point highlighted so that the close up pane makes some semblance of sense. Done some work on the arms but not a lot, none on the legs, focusing on the torso and pretty much making up the anatomy where the wings are attached as I go.

This weekly stuff is tiring. Seriously who reads this anyway? May just start hiding them as I still kind of need to write them. Anyway.

Bit of a slow week this week as the kids all caught a cold and I spent a couple of days heroically fending it off.

The kids wanted me to teach them how to draw. Actually what they really wanted was for me to magically confer kickass drawing skills onto them. I told them they would need to practise a lot as most of drawing was getting your eyes, brain and hand to cooperate and the remainder was your imagination. I put out a few items on the table including a Duplo block which I deliberately angled towards them. They don’t like drawing things on angles, everything has to be STRAIGHT. Even 8yo who currently has slightly better spatial perception drew it straight, even though he drew all three corners that he could see (in a straight line rather than having the middle one come down slightly as it did in perspective). Almost forgot about maths bookwork. 8yo is at a stage in Dragonbox where it’s stopped pretending it’s a game and has presented him with actual maths, with cute graphics like it’s marker on nicely textured paper. 6yo is struggling with Dragonbox so opted for her book and is progressing extremely slowly with it (getting bored easily and I think it’s s getting a bit hard for her).

My loving husband has told me on many occasions that I’m certifiably insane. While not exclusively so a lot of it has to do with the whole trying to be a studio around homeschooling, webmonkeying, being the one at home so having to manage the house and all the associated miscellany.

Recently I decided to muck around with something or other (precisely what escapes me now) and while doing so I inadvertantly discovered that the rig I had built in Lightwave 8 or 9 and dragged through 10 to 11 had blown up. Not sure what happened but it’s no longer working. I was a little peeved, but happy to discover after a bit of mucking around to find out how it works, it should only take me a few hours or at least under a week with Genoma, hopefully (allowing for numerous crashes as Genoma on Mac is buggy or at least memory leaky).

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Our garlic bulb has grown quite large but is now looking a bit limp and sad. Got the kids to draw it again (still have to find where 8yo put his first diagram). 8yo’s writing is improving a lot. Got him to work out the perimeter and area (both of just the floor and the entire building) of a building he was making in Minecraft.

Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done.

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Monday: sick. Fortunately there was JJ to help with maths. JJ was making noises about wanting to do modular arithmetic. When I passed the kids were doing basic arithmetic on the whiteboard. JJ wasn’t quite sure who was where and thought 8yo knew how to carry 10s. I said we were working on carrying 10s, he hadn’t quite got it yet but could so multiple digit addition and subtraction in his head as long as the numbers were under 10.