KLS made a terrarrium on Easter Sunday.
I was going to document the creation process but she did it very quickly and in secret, so all I have is completed shots 🙂
Here’s another:
What’s that you say? Something is different?
Maybe it’s the inhabitant:
Lego Minifig series 4, if you’re interested 😉
A few weeks back I tweeted the following:
Just ordered something great online. It cost me nothing, not even one cent (including shipping)! I’ll blog it when it arrives 🙂
Well it arrived, and here it is:
What could it be? I excitedly opened the package, and this amazing thing was inside:
Yes my good sirs, it is a brand new Game & Watch!
But not truly new, for this is the 2010 reproduction of the first ever Game & Watch that has been made available on Nintendo.com to registered owners of Nintendo product. It cost 1200 coins, which means approximately $1200 worth of registered Nintendo product.
It took me over 2 hours the other week to fill out 40+ surveys to get enough coins to redeem for this item 🙂
Those curves! That sexy faux brushed steel! That funi red button!
I like the Club Nintendo logo on the back.
But how does it play you ask? Well my friends, here is the face of someone playing it:
And here is some video of the action:
I only played it once, and in that single game my highest score was 160, as you can see here:
Was I wrong? Surely everyone will agree this is a legendary item 🙂
My brother got me this kit for my birthday:
I just assembled it. The parts are all aluminium, and the nuts and bolts that hold everything together are tiny!
The instructions are clear and very nicely done, with a 1:1 scale list of parts on the other side. It is very easy to know how to put the kit together:
Actually putting it together was quite challenging though. It took me about an hour in total, and most of the time was consumed by trying to get nuts on the end of very tiny bolts with very little room in which to maneuver. Of course I was stubborn, and never went and got tweezers. This particularly step was by far the worst:
The springs are there to make the wings have a bit of ‘give’. Unfortunately although the kit has a lot of springs, none of the others do anything and are purely for visual impact, such as this one:
I did like how some of the parts were made of ‘soft aluminium’ (as described by the manual) and can be bent as the owner sees fit. The antennae are an example:
Here’s a shot to show the scale of the finished mantis:
And here is a dramatic shot showing this mantid golem in it’s natural habitat:
As children, my brother and I were often told stories of life in New Guinea. My parents met there as Catholic missionaries, and dad in particular spent over a decade in the jungles. Often these stories would include mention of a priest named Father Feehan.
I never met him, and indeed was too young to remember him, but the mental image I had of this missionary priest was probably something like this:
From what I had heard over the years, Father Feehan was a friend and mentor to both of my parents. They spoke of him fondly, and he was even (I think) Godfather to my brother. He was a man of caliber, a man to trust and man to never forget.
Now my dad can tell a good tale, but occasionally he omits what I consider important details. In particularly, I question the fact he waited until I was in my late 30’s to tell me Father Feehan carried a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it!
The details are deliberately ignored vague, but you can imagine my surprise when dad regaled me with tales of Father Feehan striding through the jungles with a revolver on his hip fighting off things like man-eating cassowaries,
Headhunters,
and – although dad never mentioned was strangely elusive about this topic – surviving dinosaurs:
Father Feehan, as it turns out was a warrior priest, and someone possessed of the true soul of a man. It probably should have occured to me earlier, but someone doesn’t spend decades living in the Green Hell without having a spine, and once dad opened my eyes I was forced to reconsider my mental image of the man, which now more closely resembles this:
Father Feehan passed away last year. I wonder if he fondly remembered the lawless days he spent striding the jungles of The Lost World, six-shooter never far from his hand? Exploring the lost temples, fleeing from hoards of gibbering pygmies and eating animals unknown to science?
Father Feehan may have spent his last years in Boston, but I’m guessing his soul will forever reside in the still-unexplored jungles of Papua New Guinea.
I haven’t mentioned it until now, but I received another watch for my birthday. Here it is:
It’s from Seiko, and is a kinetic watch. This means it never ever needs to have a battery replaced, since the power comes from the motion of the watch as I move my hands.
The back of the watch is transparent glass, so the workings can be seen. It is very impressive:
The watch is big, heavy and impressive. I like it 🙂
