January 28: Painting Miniatures, Illustrations, and Outline Progress

It's been five days since I did one of my general-life posts, and I've completely lost track of what I did when. I'll start with today and see if I can work my way back.

Mostly I've been painting miniatures today. The Death Jester is ready for assembly now, and Lut's been working on that. I told Lut some time ago that I didn't like assembling miniatures because when I was a kid, any miniature that had to be glued together inevitably broke apart, often immediately. I'd be willing to put together my own miniatures if Lut wanted to sit with me and give me pointers, but he offered to do it for me and I'm like "well I hate this part anyway, sure, go ahead and do it."

On Wednesday, we picked up a new box of terrain, which -- crucially, and the reason we got it -- includes some features used in the scenarios we've been working our way through. I immediately started painting them. Like, immediately. I base-coated them when we got home with the box and started painting on Thursday evening after work. We've been using cardboard cutouts and straws and blue tack as substitutes for these bits and it's annoyed the heck out of me every time we play. I really want these parts finished and assembled; there's like twelve of them (two each of six different types, IIRC) and basically every map uses between four and twelve of the things. The base coat went wonky somehow and it's repelling the paint instead of giving it something to stick to (I was wondering if the problem was with the miniarute paints, which I mixed and stored in empty pill bottles, but the paint sticks fine to the parts where the base coat spray didn't really reach.) So it's taking extra coats but it's fine, it'll get done. Eventually. I should soak the parts I haven't started painting yet in stripper to take off  the base coat, tho. And maybe do a really light base coat afterwards? Idk what went wrong this time. The base coat that's repelling paint looks and feels just the same as the coat I put on the older set back in October or so.

Anyway, I only did a little miniature-painting on Thursday through Saturday, but I spent 4.5 hours on it today. I have zero finished terrain pieces to show for it and several partly-finished. I also illustrated an Apothecaria entry during Craft & Chat. While I've been painting terrain and miniatures, I've been listening to a fiction podcast Sasta recommended: "Monstrous Agonies", which has the premise of an agony aunt/radio advice segment intended for creatures of the night. I finished the last episode of the podcast today. I've listened to the blooper episode and part of the Q&A episode after the end of the show, but after that I might look for another fiction podcast to listen to while painting. The same creator started a new podcast so I may try that next. I should try audiobooks again at some point but ugh. Audible has a lock on the audio market and from a creator perspective Audible is a complete trashfire, so I'm really not keen on using them. The last time I tried audiobooks was 20-ish years ago when I checked some out from the library. But the selection back then was not great and I don't know if I didn't like audiobooks or just didn't care for these books. 

Saturday: Lut and I played Kill Team. I did a little painting but not much, and got in some minimal exercise just before CoffeeQuills's stream.

...which I guess I should do right now, come to think of it, or I'm gonna run out of time to do it again.

Okay, so now I have also exercised and showered today.

During CoffeeQuills's stream on Saturday, I illustrated my two remaining Apothecaria entries. After the stream, I wrote another Apothecaria entry so that I'd have something to illustrate today. Buffer's still pretty thin there.

Friday, uh...

too long ago, whatever I did Friday is lost to the mists of time.

Oh wait, the time stamps on my Surface say that I illustrated three Apothecaria entries that day. Possibly I worked on the Be That Way outline but I don't think so. I must have done something else but who knows what.

Thursday, I worked at Day Hobby, exercised, and napped. I think CoffeeQuills had cancelled their stream for unforeseen reasons and I watched Jonathan Ong's stream instead. And illustrated an Apothecaria entry.

I think on Wednesday, I finally made some real progress on the Be That Way outline. Definitely at some point, I made real progress on the outline. It's not done yet but it's starting to look like an outline. That might have been Tuesday evening, though, because on Wednesday I made the ridiculous "Works-in-Progress" list that I posted Wednesday night, and I spent a silly amount of time on that.

<-checks version history in 4thewords

Okay, yes, it was Tuesday night that I made progress on Be That Way. I haven't really worked on it since because I'm feeling stuck again. Oi. I feel like I had two days this month where I was super-productive and the rest of the month was a write-off.

Oh, and in an update to the trash situation: the city picked up the trash on Tuesday afternoon, about 2 hours after I gave up on them and put it in the garage. The really annoying part about this is that we're only allowed 2 trash bags a week, but when they didn't pick it up two weeks ago, the city said we could put out four last week. And since technically they picked up the trash last week (just 24 hours late when they have literally never before picked up garbage the day after trash day, and when they communicated their intent to do so exactly nowhere online), presumably it's back to only 2 bags this week. x_x

Fortunately, I usually only have one bag so I can dribble out the excess bags over several weeks but ugh, so annoying. You can buy special tags so you can put out extra bags, and they're only a dollar, which would be fine except that it would require me to (a) figure out where actually sells these things and (b) then go there. Easier to dribble them out over several weeks. Haven't decided if I'll try putting out more than two bags tomorrow and see if the city just takes pity on me. I'm not optimistic so I probably won't bother. Maybe if I see some neighbors putting out more than two.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I should get back to the outline. It's the only creative goal I set for January that I haven't accomplished yet. Oh, and I should pay bills before I forget.