Procopius

Hullo chaps, I owe you all some kind of update. The Lightning remains in limbo on my bench. I turned 40 on the 15th. I am exhausted. Every day. I've truly entered the meaningless treadmill of middle age. At work I find myself sidelined and aging out in an industry that worships youth, and at home it's a constant struggle to take care of three children and their inscrutable mother. By the time the boys are in bed by eight and after Mrs P has finished showering and takes the baby back around 9, I'm so tired that I don't trust myself not to make mistakes modelling. The gulf between who I am now and the still vaguely optimistic man in his twenties who joined this site back in the 2010s couldn't be greater, it feels like. I hate virtually everything about my life right now, and yet it is the ineluctable consequence of choices I made myself, which weirdly doesn't make me feel a whit better. I just have to believe that this too will pass. I remember being pretty miserable when my other children were babies as well.

Thanks, Bill. That sounds lovely. Mrs P and baby now both have RSV. Mrs P was coming off a cold and is very groggy, baby is in good spirits so far and we are keeping a close eye on her. Grant seems to have turned the corner.

Jesus Christ! As if I didn't have enough reasons not to ride a bike already.

And that's that. Grant has RSV, and Mrs P, who let him get in his baby sister's face all week, is having a nervous breakdown. I am no longer going to New Orleans for work.

Sorry chaps, still utterly swamped. Grant has been sick this week, and thanks to his terrible asthma, every cold is potentially life-threatening. On Monday I drove him to Urgent Care at 8 PM, and today, as he's been insufficiently responsive to oral steroids, he's now in the ER ($325 just to walk in the door with my health insurance) with Mrs P, receiving oxygen treatments. January-February are unquestionably my least favourite months of the year, invariably one disaster after another, and no matter how much I try to be ready for them, it's never enough. I'm supposed to leave for New Orleans for work tomorrow, but if Grant doesn't improve, I don't see how I can go and live with myself, and that means missing some big opportunities to maybe finally get my position upgraded. I had informed my boss I wanted a raise and would outline why I deserved it at my performance review well in advance, did so, was told I needed to wait a few months because HR was doing a salary review, then after doing that, was told that I really needed to have asked for a raise at my performance review. Kafkaesque. Meanwhile, my subordinate, of whom my boss has repeatedly mentioned he thought had a "cushy" job* and strongly implied she was overpaid, received an offer for a position that paid $12,000 more than we paid her (and by extension, more than I'm paid, we had a minimal pay gap), and left us last week, meaning I have twice as much work to do. To add insult to injury, she also negotiated an even higher salary at her new place. Right now is just a time to be endured. Nothing more can be expected from it. I'm doing my best. * My position is this: Our job doesn't have to be arduous to be worth the salaries we're paid, and the idea it needs to be miserable to be worth money is really wrong-footed. What we're paying for is the ability to be confident that someone isn't going to make fools out of us inadvertently in front of the entire world. Also, quite frankly, casual Twitter users have no idea how soul-destroying reading it for a living is. As a manager, I try not to get upset about stuff we can easily fix, especially if we can learn from it, and I try to be really accommodating of mental health issues, having so many myself. Similarly, when my deputy asked me for a raise, I made that my primary focus and kept her appraised at every step of the process.

Was it "brain anyone who looks underneath"? That sounds like something I'd say.

Sorry fellows. I've been absolutely swamped. I'm trying to be a good dad and an adequate husband and an acceptably mediocre employee, and it's just possible thanks to my medications, which only work if I get enough sleep, which means that my days are: wake up, make breakfast for everyone, pack lunches for the boys, make sure the boys get dressed, make Mrs P her coffee, get the boys out the door, turnaround and get ready for work, work, finish work and immediately start making dinner, feed everyone, clean up dinner, get the boys bathed/flossed/brushed/into pajamas, read to the boys, go downstairs and clean up dinner, get more bananas if we've run out, which is weirdly often, and then go to bed so I can do it again the next day. I'd be lying if I said I got any sort of joy out of this, or if it didn't feel incredibly pointless.

Indeed; Swordfish of 788 Squadron NAS were caught up in the attack on Colombo during a ferry flight, and all six were shot down.

She had. Due to her slow speed and the weather conditions at the time, there wouldn't have been enough wind over the deck for an armed Swordfish to take off.

Forgive me for tooting my own horn, but the Indian Ocean Raid is a subject of immense interest to me, and when I was trying to get into graduate school, I did some archival research on it, synthesized here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZWdnK7-LuU2CVnK78Gj3R5YO20N22ggajHW3LOeref0/edit?usp=sharing I have the advantage of some newer information than Tomlinson.

I actually recently scored one of these kits myself, and we have pretty much all the same upgrade bits. I didn't realize you could use the MkV cockpit set with it! I also hope to build mine (ha-ha, like I'll ever have time) with wings unfolded, so I'll steal follow for your best ideas.

To think you've compounded the error by wasting even more of your one precious life on this earth complaining about it.

Given that any potential replacement for it hasn't even flown yet, and that aircraft development cycles take north of twenty years these days, it should last a long time even if you think it's a piece of crap. I'd imagine not, same as the Hasegawa kit. Greatly simplifies construction if your target audience is newer/first-time builders.

Because there are like, fifty people, myself included, in the world who both (a) know what a Gloster Javelin is, and (b) want to build a specifically 1/72 kit of it. Whereas the F-35B is flown by the militaries of three of the world's richest countries and can regularly be seen at airshows..

As someone who has small kids who want to build models like their dad, I welcome Airfix kits like this.