Category: Cool Stuff

Bookshelving: The Year in Reviewment

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Why, yes, “The Year in Reviewment” would normally suggest a December date of publication. But the hurricanes down South sucked the lumber away from the Woodland Mills, so the last of the shelves didn’t arrive until early February. And then, well… Yeah. (N.b.: This is currently the first stage of book-shelving, wherein each book gets cataloged, measured, mylared and/or DDC categorized as appropriate, and placed on a shelf in some reasonable semblance of order. Then comes building the long-term shelves.)

A quick tour of the library so far! First up, and first to be built, there are the under-eave shelves in the study. Yeah, the boards are cut for that fourth case, they just need to be, you know… attached to each other. And stained. (See, this, this right here, is why I relented and used pre-made shelves downstairs. Because I kinda wanted all of my books off of the floor within a decade of moving in, no joke.)

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Sized for standard hardcovers, made modular by the plinth underneath so they aren’t custom-cut for the baseboard (said modularity immediately nullified by angling the tops of the uprights to match the eaves), these have nonfiction, mostly biography and World War II history. 280 books shelved!

… out of 6,012, so ~4.66%.

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A (Marginally) Better Use of My Time Than Watching Television; or, Never Skimp on Luxury –

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– by which I don’t mean, ‘blow all your money on overpriced crap’. I mean, if you’re going to spend time and/or money on something for no other purpose than that you enjoy it, i.e., luxury, then you should spend as much time and money as you need to actually enjoy it (assuming, of course, that you can afford to). Stuff like, you know, gas, staple foods, office supplies, etc., I get them to accomplish a specific function. Assuming that they accomplish that function, the cheaper the better.

(Of course, this ignores the fact that things are not 100% necessity XOR luxury; my favorite brand of toothpaste (e.g., not that I actually have one) might be 90/10 necessity/luxury, whereas (depending on how much stock you put in studies that say writing longhand improves cognition) fountain pen ink would be 10/90 the other way around.)

Tl;dr, e.g., if you decide to ‘save’ and buy a $20 bottle of wine even though it’s not really all that good instead of your usual treat of a $50 bottle that you know you’d like, you didn’t save $30, you wasted $20.

… Which is all a long-winded way of saying that:

  • For the WH40k players, yes, I realize that conversions involving bits from five different companies (six, counting the eleven rare earth magnets of varying sizes), drilling and pinning, (minor) use of Green Stuff, and pre-assembly painting of almost all of the 23 individual pieces (not counting those magnets), per model, for a basic Troops choice is utterly ridiculous. (I also realize that grenades don’t have to be represented on the model.)
  • Of course, GW charging $80 for a squad of ten (10) metal (i.e., pretty much non-customizable) Sisters of Battle is also ridiculous. (I started this when 7th edition had recently been released, so by the time I finish it there’s a good chance that with 8th edition we’ll finally have nvrmnd we’ll probably be able to have the Emperor as our Warlord before we ever see plastic Sisters.)
  • Churchill himself adhered to a regimen of ‘2000 words and 200 bricks’ per day, or, to quote another great man, ‘the more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play‘. (Because, y’know, if you’re going to implicitly compare yourself to one of the greatest wartime leaders ever, why not throw in one of the greatest starship captains ever, too?)
  • For everyone else, add up how much time you spend staring at the television or flipping through YouTube videos or your Facebook feed. And keep in mind that this is, like, one or two relaxing hours per week every other month at this point, at most.

So, all that out of the way, here’s Part 1 of “Converting (Mostly) Plastic Sisters of Battle in Way Too Many Ridiculously [Unnecessarily] Complicated Steps”:

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‘MURICA!

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My boss’s son speaks I-don’t-know-how-many languages and is very much a world citizen, at home anywhere in Europe or the US, but is still very much an American kid. He also loves to draw, and one day left this lying around the office, much to the… consternation of his father, a naturalized US citizen with a decidedly European point of view:

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It was glorious, even in draft form – note how the slide has “LIBERTY” engraved on it.

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Challenge: Accepted

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I don’t run. At least, I didn’t run, apart from a few 5Ks here and there, the Charlottesville 10-Miler a couple of times because a bunch of people from morning workout were running in it, that sort of thing.

But, and this is important, I do stupid things. Admittedly, less “Of course I can chug that!” stupid and more “12 overnight hours and 20+ miles of cross-country log-carrying tactical-movement with a rucksack full of bricks? With another one the next afternoon? Why not!” stupid.

(In fairness, however, it was only a Challenge-Light, not a Challenge-Challenge or HCL. I may do stupid things, but I am not a moron.)

So I decided to run the Richmond Marathon last year on a whim. And I accepted my brother’s challenge that if I could get out of bed the next morning (loft bed with railings and a ladder, so trickier than just rolling to one side) I’d sign up for the Seashore State Park 50K that December.

Unfortunately, the 50K was full up by the time of the marathon. Darn. Still, with a rucksack full of food, water, and a pre-race outer layer that I was too stubborn and Norwegian-Lutheran to actually discard and so got stuffed in on top of the 3L hydration bladder, I finished.

(I had covered this distance before [more or less, and spread out over between the Challenge-Light…] and I was used to moving with a rucksack, to be fair.

[And I sweat… profusely, so dehydration was a concern for me.])

A while after that, some guy made the internet for running a half-marathon in a suit, and right after that the cofounder of Ministry of Supply ran a much faster half-marathon in one of their just-released Aviator 2 suits.

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