Last Christmas, I gave you my heart we finally made it back to Christmas Island after way too long and this was one of the things sitting under the tree for me from sibling dearest who loves buying Christmas presents. The gift tag reads:

Last week was “interesting”. I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I’d suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn’t have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she’d had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don’t know what the actual cause of death was.

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before). This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn’t decided that it wasn’t going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

New hardware! I finally got a new cpu and logic board…and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had. The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

As requested by @dreemit who assures me that WednesdayWalk just has to be posted on Wednesday and doesn’t necessarily have to occur on Wednesday. As luck would have it, we actually went on a nice walkies on the correct day. And I’m a day late for me because shenanigans happened but I have the advantage of being on the side of the world where a day late makes it on time for the other side of the world? Aargh shenanigans. It didn’t start out that way. I had taken Little Miss Puppy to my aunty’s place (having not been to see my aunty and grandmother for a couple of months because covid and colds and grandmother gets pneumonia so we don’t go there if anyone is sick just in case) and she had played forever with my aunty’s dog and been pretty knackered when we got back, so J had decided maybe we should just take her for a short stroll around the block (he also wanted his walkies).

I wonder if my hive crew have been missing my incessantly nonsensical comments or if they’re enjoying the serenity. As I mentioned at the end of the last progblog I wrote two weeks ago (x_x), I finally managed to pick up a cute laptop (I’m so used to getting the highest spec’d things that getting something practically off the shelf and only upgrading storage feels so weird and wrong) and get back into the overpriced (I’m now broke for the next 6 years) and very…um…“special” Apple ecosystem that I have this love/hate relationship with (love it because it’s the one that gives me the least problems and I find their devices fun to use, and hate it because it is so very overpriced and some things make me -_-).

After an epic two day battle with my phone and my computer, I am now able to show off my new shinies. What you’re seeing here are the purple flower that I bought from @bearone for 200 hive, an owl that she said I could have because she loves me (awww _ I did tell her I wanted to buy one when she was ready to sell them) and a candle that made me really glad I was extremely careful about unpacking the box because I had no idea it was in there. It has a really nice smell that was slightly overwhelming when I first opened the box (it was a small box and I thought she just sprayed essential oil into the box to make it nice for the recipient when they received their goods but nope bonus scented candle XD).

And by “gotten away with it” I mean “finished” and by “dog” I mean “dogs and cats” XD I’ve spent this entire week ironing the tail. Also found this helpful setting and turned it on after actually reading the tooltip while wondering what it did. I’d been thinking it would be helpful in high poly situations like this if stuff could just be rendered when it was actually in the viewport and smarter people than me obviously thought it would be a good idea too XD

See what I have to put up with? See what my poor family have to put up with? XD I’m having scale issues in both senses of the word. For whatever reason, when importing a model from Blender, it’s microscopic in 3dC. What I did with Red was to just enlarge the model til it was big enough to work on, then send it back, where it was (strangely) way, way, way too big in Blender (I think he was close to 1km high before I resized him). Then it didn’t help that the vertices were apparently somehow too close together for the auto weight mapping so I had to enlarge it again just enough for that to work (because manually weight mapping rigs from the outset is the definition of tedious) and then shrink it agan.

Happy 100th birthday, Nanny. Hope you’re having a great celebration up there and heard us singing to you from all the way down here. (The pictured cake I think was meant to be the actual birthday cake, and we ate it at the wake, we’ve been back in Perth for a week now and had a small dinner party at Aunty L’s with Perth Nanny, my parents, Sprat, and Dad’s youngest brother and his family and a sujee cake with 10 big candles on it and sent photos to Uncle C in Melbourne)