It’s my day off again, but with Mrs Dim going back to work, there’s no lazy lie in for me. And that’s a good thing, because FanExpo Vancouver is only two weeks away, and I have a lot to do. Most of Mrs Dim’s costume is done:
This photo is actually a little behind the times, since I have completed and painted the toe caps (the white thing in the front of the picture) and I also managed to produce the apron/skirt thing:
If all this is looking a bit weird, maybe I should post the picture of what we’re aiming at:
I’m left with the belt and boot tops to produce (the gauntlets came in the post the other day, and can be used for gardening after Fan Expo is over, much to Mrs Dim’s delight.)
For Tiny Weasel, I have to produce the character pictured at the top of the post. That’s Hollow Knight. Tricky as it may seem, I already have the helmet, made for a past Fan Expo but never used. I also made the sword. Today’s real task is coming up with the cloak. I had a plan for that, but then I decided to do my research properly and I’m having to rethink things. At rest, the cloak looks like a leaf:
But in motion, as at the top, it’s lots of separate…what? Tentacles? Strips? Anyway, Tiny Weasel has had the material and the sewing machine for a fortnight and hasn’t touched either of them, so I guess it’s down to me. Luckily, Derek the Dalek looks like this:
He has a working voice box, sound-reactive undersill lighting, and a compressed air canister to squirt out of his gun. He doesn’t need any more work, just a test run when Eldest Weasel comes over for brunch on Sunday.
For once, I’m glad I don’t have a costume to wear. Life is busy enough!
There are many great things about my job, but the craziest is that it means I love Mondays. Every other Monday is a day off, because I have a four-day work week. The Mondays when I’m at work are the one day of the week we don’t go out and do deliveries.
Don’t get me wrong, I like doing deliveries – it’s a great part of the job. But on a gray Monday in January, after hiking through the rain to the Skytrain, then on into the office, it’s nice to settle down at a desk, knowing you don’t have to leave again until the day is done. There’s always something to be done, and today I got to wrap up a whole bunch of tasks that have been nearly complete for a while. It was a day for sorting things out, for answering the phone, for crossing things off the to-do list.
I understand why this is often a hard time of the year – ordinarily people are coming down from the holidays, facing the financial realities of the New Year, and a long wait until the weather picks up, or the next break arrives. So I guess I should be grateful that our holidays were sub-optimal…The only way is up!
Wherever you are on your emotional calendar, I hope the sun is starting to show through the mist.
It’s 2023 – you probably noticed. It was all over the news. The internet, or at least the corner I wander through, has been filled with people rounding up their achievements in 2022 and setting out their intentions for the coming year. I explained in the last post why I don’t have one of those, and how our year got rounded off in a rather unexpected way.
There used to be a regular pattern to the end of one year and the start of the next. The excitement of the run up to Christmas (with three kids, you can’t avoid some excitement – it’s contagious). I’ve always had the kind of jobs where you don’t get a huge chunk of break over Christmas, and there’s no holiday allowance to book. That makes the days off more precious, and those weird in-between days, when I go back to work, but all the adults in the workplace are still away, fun and relaxing. In the Home Library Service, those days between Christmas and New Year are our Off Road week, where we don’t make any deliveries, but catch up on stuff in the office that we need time for – reorganisation, changing the shelving, looking at delivery routes and stuff like that. Again, it’s a quiet time in the library, and the senior staff often take the time off. It’s a fun time to be there, and low stress.
Then the New Year would kick off, and it would all be fresh and exciting again. So much possibility in those first few weeks, where whatever new routine I had assigned myself was still functioning, and the exceptions hadn’t materialised to spanner everything. I would be exercising, writing, planning… But not this year.
The Kidney Stone incident really knocked Christmas for six. I feel like I barely saw the kids when they came to visit, and I spent more than half the day in Emergency. Nobody got any real Christmas dinner. I got into work for one of the Off Road week days, but the stone kept me home for the rest of it, and then I got worried about Mrs Dim’s cold. She still hadn’t shaken it, so we took Covid tests. She and I were positive, Tiny Weasel was not.
So there we go, after nearly three years of dodging the bullet (you know, by getting vaccinated and being responsible and wearing a mask etc) we finally got it. Which meant I couldn’t go back to work on Jan 3rd, like I should. Worse, Mrs Dim didn’t get to do her first trial morning of return to work today, which she has been so looking forward to – it’s been a very long time off work for her.
So the beginning of this year feels like the inversion of all the others. It’s been a bit of a mess, a disorganised shamble to the finish line of 2022, and a rocky beginning to 2023. I’m hoping that means we get an inversion of the usual trope for January too, and we suddenly find things pick up, instead of falling apart. Fingers crossed.
About a month ago I had an idea to write a round up of the year. I think maybe the reason I didn’t, was that there isn’t a great list of successes and achievements. No matter how many times I try to revise my expectations, or review what I count as “success”, there’s still an insistence that I must produce new work every year, and by produce I mean “finish and publish”. This only applies to plays, of course, because I’ve given up on the notion of the e-books being anything but a way of storing information about my prop-building exploits.
But it’s the year end, and Spotify have sent out emails showing you what you listened to. Authors will be reviewing their favourite books of the year, there’ll be “Best Movies of 2022” articles everywhere, video games reviews and so on. All in all, it’s a strong incentive to look at our own achievements and put things in “pro” or “con” columns.
Mrs Dim said the other day that she’d found a note that said our word for 2022 was “Optimism”. You have to remember that, back at the start of this year, we had no idea how she would be affected by her stroke long term. There was no projected date for a return to work. There was a faint chance I could move up to a full-time position, but that turned out to be too long a shot to pull off. So we’ve spent the year being optimistic. We managed to buy the apartment, allowing the elder two Weasels to move out and still live within their means. Fluctuating interest rates have made that harder, but now we know Mrs Dim has the chance to return to work in January, our income may rise a little to offset that again.
My brother came through his health scare with some terrific new scars, but a working heart. My mum and dad have got through the worst (hopefully) of the UK winter, despite a Conservative government actively trying to kill off large sections of the population.
We went to Seattle and showed off Derek to an actual DOCTOR. If I ever need to smile, I just watch the video of Derek trundling around. He only got motorised this last summer! That seems incredible to me. I’m resigned to the fact that most of his renovation work won’t be completed by Fan Expo in Feb, but he MIGHT be talking…
Anyway, we were optimistic right up to Christmas Day. We had gather the kids together for a nice lunch and to open presents, when I got a resurgence of what I had thought was a grumbling appendix. When it hadn’t stopped grumbling after a few hours, we went into Emergency, and they finally determined it was a kidney stone. I came out with some medication, the advice to pee through a strainer, and someone else’s cold, which I then passed on to Mrs Dim.
None of this has made the last week of 2022 any more optimistic, but I don’t think it’s knocked us down either. I made it into work today, and I won’t need to come back until next Tuesday if I don’t feel up to it. Mrs Dim has a similar timeline before her trial return to work period starts, and it’s a graduated return too.
We’re aiming for “Stabilisation” next year. Mrs Dim finding her footing in work again, Tiny Weasel doing the same in her job at the library. The elder two weasels are wrestling with work and college still, and I obviously have health issues to work out. And Daleks to renovate.
Maybe we don’t have a laundry list of accomplishments for the year, but maybe we don’t need one. Maybe we can just stand on the mountaintop and appreciate the view before we start the next climb.
It’s December, so we’re sat here watching seasonal movies. (Mrs Dim watched “Sleepless in Seattle” while I was at work, so we’re rounding out the Nora Ephron canon with “You’ve got mail”). I don’t know that watching seasonal movies counts as a tradition, because everybody does it.
Anyway, we do have some traditions that we chose to make our own. Christmas Eve afternoon, we have a “picky tea” – food you can pile on a plate and eat with your fingers – and we watch two very special things – Muppet Christmas Carol, and Simon Callow reading extracts from Dickens.
Again, maybe not wildly original, but something we have come to love doing.
And then there’s this:
I know it looks like a collection of crazy toys, but it all started with a beautiful Christmas village set that a friend gave us soon after we arrived in Canada. For several years,we laid out the fake snow material and put out the houses and bought the odd small addition – streetlights, raccoons in a bin…And then one year, I forget why, we decided we were going to tell a story about what was happening in the village. We would write one short installment each day on Facebook, and include a photo. We’d start December the first and finish on Christmas Day
Most of the stories centre on Boots McGee (she’s the one in the hat, next to the Minion dressed as a Napoleonic soldier). She’s a brave orphan who usually has to struggle against great odds to solve a problem of some kind. Some years there are specific themes or running gags. One year I tried to work in a line from a Christmas carol into every day without disrupting the storyline. Last year, we hid titles from festive movies in every installment – Boots McGee had taken up with the criminal shorty Gnome Malone, for example.
Over time, the original inhabitants of the village have been joined by Lego figures, Star Wars figures, a T-Rex skeleton, toy cars, and even a model of the van I use for my day job.
If you look closely, you might just be able to see that Boots is wearing a false mustache in this picture. She was in disguise.
But the big issue this year is more of a logistical problem than a storytelling one. Part of our house renos during 2022 was removing the living room fireplace and, therefore, the mantelpiece that went over it. We’ve gone from this:
….to this:
There isn’t room under the TV to assemble the village, so we’re probably going to be using the shelves…I don’t really know how it’s going to work this year, but we have to figure it out soon… The Nuns of St Frideswide have just set out from the niche in the hallway, intent on leading the donkey and camels they confiscated from the Three Kings with the aid of The Bad Batch from Star Wars back to Mantelpiece Village…
All this is a very roundabout way to say, keep only those traditions that bring you joy, or connect you to things or people you hold dear. Quite a few people seem to have found the phrase “Traditions are just peer pressure from the dead” this year, and I think that’s worth reflecting on. We’ve chosen traditions that bring our family together, that raise a smile. I hope we always will.
Thmoas Edison – one of the men who invented the lightbulb. Yes, “one of” because it was ALSO invented in Sunderland, UK. As was I.
It feels like the last fifteen years have been filled with positive messages about failure. My generation seem to have arrived at our peak (ahead at work, senior in many things, making decisions for our communities) and taken time to reassure one another that failure is a part of the process. That if you’re not failing, you’re not trying.
I’m the one on the right, looking down at the ball I just dropped.
As a juggler, I’m very familiar with that kind of mindset. We used to say “A drop is a sign of improvement” and “a touch is as good as a catch” and other such encouraging things. We meant them too.
But it occurs to me now, sitting in my job’s break room, thinking about the debt I have tied up in my house, that we only risk failure willingly when the stakes are not high. No one was forcing me to learn to juggle. Although I tried to make it into a business, nothing major hung on it. I wanted to make a living from juggling, or teaching juggling, but when I couldn’t, I went out and got a regular job. You MIGHT say I failed
The latest upgrades for Derek the dalek are challenging.
Following my own logic, then, I should be willing to risk failure in my hobbies. Eager, even, since there are no real consequences, and no one to disappoint. I can carry on mucking about with upgrading Derek the Dalek and no one minds if it takes ages and goes off the rails from time to time. Right?
Well, no. There’s me. Although the stakes may not be high in terms of life or death, lose the house, bankrupt the family, I DO feel there are stakes involved. Derek earns nothing for the family. We have fun parading him around, but every dollar I spend on him is a sunk cost. The next stage of the upgrade is making a cast of the 3d print I just did of the front half of his shoulders (see picture above). If I get this bit right, we can replace the wood and hardboard construction of his shoulder section with lighter but just as strong fibre glass, giving Laurel much more room inside to work his various functions. But the gear for casting has cost $150. Just making the front half on the printers has cost at least $60. I’ve never done any casting before, and right here is where I am suffering my greatest fear of failure. The next step I take might wreck some of the supplies. I might use too much and have to buy more. I might even get as far as producing the mold, and then get the casting bit wrong. There are SO MANY opportunities to get this wrong and waste money I don’t have, and yet the outcome if it all goes right it just people going “Hey, that looks pretty much the same from outside.”
Mrs Dim sometimes says she doesn’t understand why I have hobbies that make me angry or depressed, but the truth is, it’s not the hobby, it’s ME. I want to do this thing, like fitting Derek’s speech box, and I muck it up. I might not even know HOW I mucked it up, but I do know I’m not learning anything from the experience other than that I can’t trust myself to get these jobs right. I’m fifty now, and I think the real fear of failure is that I can’t learn a new skill, can’t master something I didn’t spend time on before.
I don’t want to be afraid of trying, but I really, really don’t want to screw this stuff up.
I wrote a post not so long ago about the joy and magic of 3d printing, and how my younger self would have been utterly bewitched by this machine that could produce any action figure you could get plans for. But then the other day, a friend of mine mentioned they were considering getting one, and asked my advice. I wondered what I would have liked to know before I got a 3d printer. Here are the five things I came up with.
It’s still early days. While the technology has been around for a couple of decades, the majority of the 3d printing community are quite techy folks who are happy to tinker and recalibrate and even print new parts and additions for their machines. Furthermore, a lot of printers still arrive in pieces that you have to assemble yourself. It’s not quite soldering circuit boards, but very few are “open the box and go” models.
Perhaps because I’m not very techy or willing to tinker, my results can vary immensely when it comes to printing. In the recent spell of hot weather, a lot of my prints went sideways. Because of the hot weather? Well, maybe. Again, this is a young field, so there’s a lot of opinions and not a lot of established lore. Should I enclose my printers to try and control their climate? Maybe. That’s a good, solid maybe, you understand.
Filament. Filament is the plastic string that you feed into your printer to be turned into your masterpieces. It comes on reels, in 0.5kg and 1kg rolls (mostly). The stuff I get tends to cost around $30 a reel, but I can’t tell you how long it lasts because each print uses a different amount, and what you’re printing doesn’t often have a real world equivalent. What would it cost me to buy the segment of Dalek that’s in the photo above? I don’t know, you can’t buy it. Well, except from someone who’d 3d print it for you.
But here’s the thing about filament: It comes on plastic reels, every time. After a little while, you have a lot of plastic reels that you really can’t use for anything else. If you ask, people will point you to projects like this:
Yet I don’t need all the storage things I already have, so I’m not keen on using MORE filament to make MORE storage I don’t need. I have used a few reels to store Christmas lights, but the rest are just stacked on a pole in the corner of the basement. And here’s the OTHER thing about filament: You won’t always use all of a reel, so you’ll be left with a few turns. The logical thing is to link all these pieces together to use them in another project, but if you are not a tinkerer, there are NO straightforward, reliable methods for joining filament. People may want to argue that point, but I will stand by it. The devices for sale on Amazon that claim to do it all (heat, connect, smooth and release) have terrible reviews – they’re described as shoddy and unreliable and overpriced. All the DIY methods I have tried have failed. It’s a shame, because I reckon I have at least a kilogram of odds and ends of filament that I would LOVE to re-use.
4. You don’t just download a file from the internet and print it. Most of the files you’ll find in places like Thingiverse.com are .STL. You take that file and import it into a slicing program, which converts it for your printer. My FlashForge Finder has a specific slicing program which is great – intuitive and easy to use, for the most part. My Tinkerine Ditto has an online-only slicing program which is less user friendly and has fewer features. For example, the Finder program can actually cut up large pieces into smaller units for printing on a small print bed. The Tinkerine can’t. So if I have something that’s too large, but I want to print it on the Tink, I have to slice it in the Finder program, export the sliced pieces as .STLs and then slice them individually in the Tinkerine program before saving them as .GX files for printing. Then I put them on a storage device – an SD card for the Tink, a USB stick for the Finder – and take them to the printer.
5. My final tip may not come as a surprise: 3d modelling is difficult. In the early days of the pandemic, I spent two weeks or more doing an online tutorial in Blender, because I have that program already. I learned a lot, then forgot most of it. I have designed and modelled a few things which I went on to print. All were very simple shapes. Some worked first time. Some were complete disasters. I need more practice to make it easier, but I don’t want to practice because it’s difficult. A bit of a circular issue there, I know.
The main point I want to make is that the best printers out there are not the simplest to use. But if you’re thinking of getting one because you want to do something awesome, like 3d printed armour, or helmets or hey, a life-size dalek? Then aim high, grit your teeth and prepare to do the work. You may find you take to it like a duck to water, but if you don’t, there are plenty of people out there in internetland who would LOVE to help you out. The 3d maker community is NOT an exclusive club – they are very keen to spread the joy and answer your questions.
If you’ve read more than a couple of these blog posts, you’ll know we like making stuff in this household. We are happy to put on crazy outfits for the flimsiest of reasons. Halloween is obviously a big deal for us.
For our last Halloween in the UK, we followed the traditional custom of having a party to which the Weasels invited their friends. At the time, the UK was just coming to terms with adopting the North American custom of Trick or Treating, so rather than patrolling the neighbourhood trying to finds someone who was prepared to hand out sweets, we hosted a crowd of kids in costumes.
Arriving in Canada was a bit of a revelation. People had LOADS of Halloween decorations. The shops were stuffed with special supplies of sweets, and giant inflatables. Since my first job in Canada was working at Home Depot, I got to see some of these crazy giant decorations up close…
So we have made the most of being here – we’ve added to our own collection of Halloween decorations every year, and although we don’t have an animatronic dragon (yet!), we DO have an animatronic witch who is quite creepy enough, thanks.
The last few years we’ve made a giant spiders’ web which stretches right across our driveway and supports a giant spider. Sweets get hung from the web and the kids have to pick them off. The advantage is that we don’t have to spend the whole night outside if it’s cold or rainy, just restock the web every now and then.
Now, I don’t know where this year’s idea came from, but it got settled early on that for 2022, we would have a pirate ship in the driveway. There’d be a hole in the side of the ship, and kids would have to go into the ship and find the sweets in the treasure chest.
It took a couple of false starts, but eventually, we ended up with the wreck of the good ship “Queen of Scream”, a firing cannon, five pirate skeletons, a cursed treasure chest, and a forty-five minute pirate soundscape (courtesy of Middle Weasel) that included some great pirate songs, creaking rigging, someone walking the plank, a pitched battle at sea, and a fight with the Kraken!
This picture is from the TV series “The Magicians”, itself adapted from the books by Lev Grossman. It’s a series of books I like to listen to, and I very much enjoyed the show. The added bonus is that it’s filmed right here in BC. When one of the characters is in hospital, the entrance that they used for filming was one of the residential homes that I visit for work. And the picture above? It’s the main entrance to Brakebills College in the show, but in real life it’s at UBC, and so was I today:
It was fun to see a location I knew from the show, but it was more of a surprise to arrive at our intended destination (The Botanical Gardens, for UBC’s Apple Days Festival) and see ANOTHER location that I didn’t know was from UBC. In real life it’s the Rosaline Sturdy Amphitheatre:
But in the show, it’s the world between worlds, the Neitherlands:
We had a great time at the Apple Days Festival, but it was great to get a reminder that Vancouver really IS Hollywood North, and at any time you can find yourself in a film location.
Thanks to an accident of birth, I’m free to live in Canada. It’s a land I have no claim to, and though we acknowledge every day that we are here on someone else’s land, we still hide behind sophistry. We say “unceded”, when we mean “stolen”.
We live on the land that was taken from people who had lived there for thousands of years. Because they looked different, because they valued different things, lived a different life, they were judged lesser, deemed uncivilized. Though the people who stole the land professed to hold to a religion that says stealing is wrong, they compounded their crime by trying to eradicate the people who lived there first. They tried to destroy their way of life, and they stole the children to separate them from their families and their culture and their heritage.
There’s no excusing what was done. It’s not enough to say “It was a different time.” or “They didn’t understand the impact of what they were doing.” They did know. They were very clear that the culture that existed in North America must be replaced with that of the European Colonists. That no act of violence was too terrible if it resulted in cutting the next generation of the First Nations off from their families, their stories, their history.
We talk about Truth and Reconciliation, but it’s not ours to give, or to take. The uncovering of the Residential School graves last year was a step towards truth, but like many things, this was a truth the indigenous peoples have been telling everyone for years. Any reconciliation has to be on their terms, not ours.
And if you think that’s too much to ask, imagine having your children torn away from your family, being denied contact, having them raised in a culture and religion that is not your own, and perhaps facing the horror of them never returning. Having no idea what happened to them, or where their remains lie. This one aspect of the crimes committed against the First Nations should be enough to stop us in our tracks.
We have allotted one day to mark Truth and Reconciliation, to stand against decades and decades of abuse, erasure, prejudice, and mischaracterisation. It’s a long road that we must walk now, and the First Nations have to be the ones leading. We can’t ask how far we have to go, until we acknowledge the terrible weight of the burdens they have already been carrying all these years.
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