2012 in Review (a WordPress Annual Report)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 11,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 18 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Where Was I? Right…

My blog updates are sporadic and far between. If nothing else, you can always check my twitter feed. It certainly gets updated more often than my blog–but it’s a lot less model-centric.

ANYWAYS… What I’m currently working on: Another Maschinen Krieger scratch-build:

Back At The Bench

I actually managed to sit down at the workbench and do something last night–for about 45 minutes before I fell asleep in a near-narcoleptic fashion.

I’ve started laying the foundation for my current project. There’s really not all that much to see at this point, but if you combine the below picture with my previous blog entry about photo reference, then you might have some idea what direction this is heading.

I promise–it’ll eventually start to look a lot better than it does now.

Thanks for reading, I’ll continue to update as I make progress.

The Modeler’s Eye, a.k.a. The Referencial Treatment

Since taking up scale modeling again, I’ve started to look at the world around me a little differently. Now, on occasion, things in my environment will just strike me as unique and noteworthy in some way–I’ll see them as references for scale models. Oh sure, there’s the obvious references: Air shows, tanks on display in a city park, 0r a gathering of hot rods at the local Culvers.

What really catches my eye is the less obvious insprations: The structures, the buildings, the rust. This doesn’t make me special in any way–I know many modelers do this–but this blog has always been intended to be an amateur modeling blog for beginners and amateurs like myself. So I think it’s worth pointing out where some of my ideas come from.

Let’s start with something that I’m going to be messing with very soon: A pumping station in southeast Nebraska:

It’s just so unique-looking! Immediately upon seeing it, I knew that I needed to snap some reference pictures.  Here’s another view:

Back On The Saddle? Not Quite

It’s been over a month since I’ve had anything to report, in terms of modeling. And, truth be told, I still don’t have much to report. It’s been very busy at my various jobs (but hey–I got a six hour ride in a UH-60 Blackhawk!), with no real signs of slow-down.

Despite all that, my daughter and I managed to put in some time on our tanks yesterday. She considers her tank “done”, and mine isn’t terribly far behind. She’s anxious to start a new model already. I’m just anxious to get anything done at this point.

Sorry, I Need To Rant: About Roundabouts

Good news, if you live in Lincoln, Nebraska! The roundabout at 14th & Superior (pictured below–or after the jump) is now in the testing phase. I can’t decide if the city planners are dumber than a bag of hammers or just hate my housing development. Possibly both. Y’see… there were essentially three traffic routes in/out of our neighborhood. The city closed one of them last Fall. It’s still closed. The second one closes Saturday while they …put in another cursed roundabout. We were told this would only happen after the first closed route has been re-opened. Based on my last look, it’s going to be months before that one reopens. This only really leaves one route in and out of our neighborhood. I fully expect that, at some point, I’ll try to come home to find all three routes closed and no way to get to my house.

 

So, to the city planners–in their infinite wisdom–I would say this: I hope that when you go to buy coffee, it’s cold. I hope that when you go to buy soda, it’s hot. I hope your soup has flies and cat piss in it. I hope you steer into a bridge support. I hope someone high-fives you. In the face. With a chair. I hope someone sneaks around in the middle of the night and begins construction on a roundabout in your driveway, forcing you to seek an alternate route through your own backyard for months at a time. And then midway through the construction phase on your driveway, they decide to widen your backyard to four lanes, thus closing it down for a year and forcing you to drive on the sidewalk for three miles (in the wrong direction) before hopping on to a road.

Teeny Tiny Tank!

So… no updates for a while. Work has been busy, and “Minecraft” was released for the Xbox 360. Between those two things, I haven’t had much time for modeling. Fortunately, I took a few minutes out of my hectic schedule and tackled a 1/144 M1 Abrams tank kit by Dragon.