Long Time Man

  • March 3, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?

Death Stinger

  • February 29, 2020

With my birthday fast approaching I figured it was time to catch up on old birthday gifts… like this guy:

That’s a silly-big model kit of a robot scorpion ZOID! Do I know anything about ZOIDs? Not really, but they look cool and this is one of the coolest. I got this kit for my birthday 2 (?) years ago and dedicated myself to completing it before this birthday. So I did!

The box is massive. Here’s what was inside:

So many runners! So many pieces! And yet the instruction manual wasn’t the biggest I’d seen in a kit, mostly since there’s a lot of repetition.

Assembly wasn’t particularly difficult, but took me 4 weekends working maybe 5 hours at a time. As I reach my dotage I find that my developing arthiritis tends to make these tasks a little trickier, and Kotobukiya kits are harder than Bandai ones because they don’t shy away from very small pieces and complex connections.

Luckily I had assistance to help with the complex bits:

I’ll spare you the interim photos and get right to the finished piece:

It’s impressive isn’t it? It’s also quite massive; easily the biggest kit I’ve assembled. I’d say it’s about 10 inches from front to back (with the tail folded up) and wider than my outstretched palm. There’s an insane amount of articulation: not only do all the limbs and guns move but you can even open lots of the flaps and vents (probably to emulate cooling systems) which can make it even bigger than it is here. Here’s the scorpion head when you open up the head armour:

It was a lot of fun to build and looks great in our glass cabinet. I wouldn’t recommend this kit though since it’s a) way too expensive and b) not ideal for a beginner. If you like the look of ZOIDs start with a smaller kit, or even better a toy version since those are much less pricey.

  • Posted in Crafts
  • Robert

Zoffy

  • February 14, 2020

It was exactly a year ago today we lost our beloved cat Yossie. That was a difficult time, and the tears still flow if we spend time thinking about it. She was a big part of our lives.

But time moved on, as it does. The sad memories fade; the happy ones strengthen. And as all cat-lovers do we eventually took a new cat into our house. You already know who I’m talking about: Zoffy!

I did an update a couple of weeks after we adopted her, but that was almost a year ago and now that Zoffy has grown into an adult I thought it was time once again to feature her!

She’s all grown up now! At about 12 pounds she’s almost half-again as heavy as Emi and not too far off Yossie at her peak. As you can see Zoffy has a lot of dense fur which sometimes makes her look chubbier than she actually is (especially around her chest). She’s also got a ‘dirty mouth’ and a dark fur patch right under her jaw. Both are charm points!

Virtually every day since we adopted her she has eaten her own meals from these plastic bowls I bought from Target. We’ve settled into comfortable routine: she gets a breakfast when I do, and a ‘cat soup’ when I have my dinner. She sits and waits for both, except in the morning when she follows me around from when I get up to when I feed her. She loves her special foods! (Emi doesn’t get special food, and wouldn’t eat it anyway. She’s happy with her kibble and occasional treats.)

From a young age she adopted this pink puffy cushion as her own and she now sleeps on it every day and most nights. Her claiming this was – and is – quite adorable, since this was also Yossie’s cushion, and the two are very alike in personality.

This is most apparent in how close Zoffy and I are (much like Yossie and I were). We always know where each other is and usual what we’re both doing, and when I’m home she’s almost always very close by if not in my lap. Every weekend I usually spend hours in our library working on crafts or hobbies and she’s usually right there with me 🙂

She’s got her own hobbies too of course, and still lots of ‘kitten energy’. We maintain a good pile of paper and boxes in the dining room so her and Emi can play in and amongst them!

She’s also sometimes maybe a tiny bit naughty, such as here when she got inside a recliner for a bit of carousing. There’s also been claims I can’t keep my study door open like I used to do since a fuzzy bandit might jump up on my desk and steal some figurines… but no one has ever witnessed who this bandit actually is 😉

She’s also got a newish habit of looking out our side window. This is somewhat unusual in that no other cat has ever shown interest in this one, but almost every day I find her sitting on the chest looking out. I wonder what she watches?

She’s a wonderful cat, big in personality, charm and love. She’s not Yossie – no one will ever replace Yossie – but Zoffy filled the void and has effortlessly worked her way into our hearts. I look forward to many, many years of joy with sweet ‘little’ Zoffy 🙂