Procopius

After much fettling, the front and back portions of the canopy more or less fit: The interior of the windscreen was masked, painted black (the inside of the windscreen looks black, unlike the Dark Admiralty Grey-looking hood), then unmasked, and the windscreen was affixed. The gunports were also resprayed. I've made a start at fairing in the windscreen with perfect plastic putty:

We should be so lucky. Your Roden Schweinhund certainly looks nice, though! I've always considered them limited-run, maybe because I've only built their 1/72 WWI stuff. Yes, there seems to be quite a bit of variation, even in different photos of the same aircraft, but if anything, I fear now, in the cold light of day, that it's the upper ports that are too pale, if anything. I've promised my mother I'll wait until she's dead, but I've broken promises before. The thing about memoirs is that there's an element of risk involved, at least to my mind: what if I discover everything that I felt was interesting or traumatic about my life is dull and commonplace to others? There are few things more uncomfortable than to have things that were wildly dramatic for one's self be met with polite, bland disinterest. I feel my own life has been left malformed and distorted by adverse life events, but at the end of the day, I'm still really just a bland product of the suburban middle class, fiddling around with my tiny planes in a basement somewhere. Can anything that ever happened to me really be so bad if it hasn't prevented me from leading a life of quiet mediocrity? A lot of people would kill for that chance. I've purchased a bunch* of 1/48 kits for myself, for reasons I don't fully understand, since I actually really enjoy 1/72 and find the size of the finished models to be perfect. The lure of good kits for aircraft I like was part of the appeal, I think**, and I always get carried away and want to build up a reserve for a theme, which is insane: it takes me a month or more to build less-detailed kits in 1/72, and I have at least two builds planned to do next, so this was all speculative purchasing for at least a season in the future, to add to which I always try to find some historical moment or person to hang a build on...I've often mentioned that buying model kits is a form of control fantasy, as I once read and now regurgitate endlessly: the idea that we'll be masters of our fate and have time enough to do all we want whenever we want, which isn't usually how it goes. But in happier news, I cleared the obstruction in the pipe for the sump pump, and my neighbours were (hopefully not) treated to the sight of me in the yard in my underwear getting drenched by a torrent of water emitting from it as I laughed maniacally at one in the morning. In that moment, I felt truly alive. * Kinetic Sea Harrier and Harrier GR3, Airfix Meteor F.8, Sabre F.4, Gnat, Sea Vixen, and Javelin. ** And holiday frustration/stress and seasonal affective disorder, which is at the root of so many poor choices for me.

This build is a little frustrating for me, and I fear it's not going to be a very successful completion, a painful reminder that while I can get an average result from a nice new kit like a Special Hobby P-40 or Eduard Spitfire, I still struggle with limited run stuff. In any case, I masked and painted the upper gunports with Alclad dark aluminum. The effect seems a little too light, and isn't visible in all light conditions. After this I also rescribed some of the gunport panel lines, because: come on. I also masked off and painted the lower gunport blanking panels, with Alclad Steel, which is of course too dark. I also managed to fix the spine: Anyway, hopefully the lessons learned in this one will be transferrable to the next Lightning I do.

Kinetic Harrier GR3 and Sea Harrier FRS1, for which I blame Troffa.

I almost did, but I bought them from Exito in Poland, who had their own sale ($16 USD each), and shipping was $9 for all three.

1/48 Airfix Hunter F.4/F.5 1/72 Special Hobby Meteor NF.11 1/72 Special Hobby Meteor NF.12 1/72 Special Hobby Meteor NF.14

😬

A busy few days taking care of my children (I'm off work this week to take care of Madeleine while Mrs P works) and learning how much I hate Christmas music (as Mrs P and the kids play it without cease on the Google Home), and then this evening I discovered the sump pump's drainage pipe had flash frozen during our current cold snap (10 F or -12 C) and the pump, in attempting to force water out of the house and through the obstruction, had blown the pipe free of itself and fountained water over part of the basement. Delightful. I hope our low-powered hot pad will be enough to thaw the l-shaped section of pipe that's frozen tomorrow. Anyway, I've been trying to fix the side of the Lightning, at peril of becoming the old lady who swallowed a fly in the process. Ultimately I realized I would need to lay down some Mr Surfacer, which still revealed the prominent divot, so more was added: Then, I sanded it with progrssively finer sanding sticks. Finally, I went back over it with Alclad: Far from perfect, but better, I think? Not sure how much more I want to risk with this, potentially some further rescribing. Hopefully my situation will improve soon and I can really get back to work on this. Or at least Christmas will come so I don't have to listen to five hundred more permutations of "Greensleeves" and "Good King Wenceslaus" ad nauseam.

Some fascinating recipes start cropping up around 600 days in.

Oh yes, it's infinitely smarter than any other kids' show the boys watch, for certain. Oh man, I wish. I frankly wonder if I'll ever be able to retire, even with my work pension. So in all honesty, my views on almost any subject imaginable are fairly nuanced -- I swear! -- and this includes healthcare systems the world over. My dad spent a lot of time in the UK during the early 1990s helping with the UK branch of motivational tape company Nightingale-Conant, around the same time as my younger brother was diagnosed a fist-sized neuroblastoma tumor due to my mom's steadfast insistence that something was badly wrong, despite being told flat-out that she was crazy* by multiple doctors, and going from hospital to hospital until someone listened and did an X-ray. She repeatedly told us as kids that in the UK, Jimmy** would never have had it caught in time. Is that true? I dunno. I've certainly been very poor here in my younger days and effectively uninsured, and was simply unable to afford basic medical care like a doctor's visit, or even to have stitches in my palm removed (I cut them out with a pocket knife, leaving me with the sort of scar normally reserved for Indiana Jones villains), but at the same time, some tiny part of me always remembers Edward's First Rule of Weddings: the more you let someone else pay for it, the more you have to give them a say in what you do. And like most crypto-authoritarians, while I love telling other people what to do, I hate being told what to do myself. I'm not particularly interested in what further healthcare restrictions might be applied on myself and my fellow citizens at the behest of the morons we elect, nor am I very interested in the sort of targeted punitive measures Americans so love to direct at anyone they perceive as being on the other ideological team. I'm rambling here. Anyway, on the subject of any professional class being saints, I'm married, of course, to a teacher, a group that's almost untouchable, and I can assure you, many if not most of them hate children, and quite a few of them are utterly incompetent, as adjudged by their peers. Winston's former teacher at Mrs P's school, before he went elsewhere for a year or two, was so nasty to him in front of me during a parents' visit to the school that I just took him home because the alternative was flipping my lid and letting out decades of accumulated rage at authority figures. When I learned later that her fiancé left her at the altar, my response was, a la K-K-Ken in A Fish Called Wanda, "Good." I don't think there's really any profession that doesn't consist largely of people doing the only job they approximately know how to do because it pays for the heat. Modelling! Tonight, good fortune was not my companion, and everything went slightly wrong. I sanded down the nose to fix the step, and resprayed the area with more AK Extreme Metal. Unfortunately, the masking lifted a huge chunk of paint and the primer beneath it, despite my repeated pre-priming surface prep with IPA, and this exact same thing happened to me on the last Sword Lighting. Infuriating. Spraying over it of course did not fix it. I'm hoping that if I gloss coat, the gloss will fill in the divot and I can then respray over that. Then, while trying to spray silver over the divot, I accidentally got some on the spine. I thought maybe I could remove it with IPA without damaging the enamel underneath. I could not. That, at least, will be an easy fix. But I decided at this point I should probably quit digging before I set myself on fire or something. Winston lost the pilot and seat to his Airfix Lightning F.3, and since I have a lot of resin Lightning seats, I offered him a seat (and pilot) from the Airfix F.6, which he primed himself using my Badger 105 and Vallejo acrylic primer (so as not to poison him). Since it was sitting around down there, and since I figured it might be nice for him to have it painted, I got out a brush and some paints and did a quick jobbie on it, followed by Liquid Skill in the form of Agrax Earthshade. Hopefully it pleases him. * True, but she was right in this instance regardless. ** James is also known as "Jimbo the Bimbo" to my siblings, generally not to his face.

Aw, buck up little fella, it's not so bad!

Sorry for the lengthy delay betwixt updates, I've had one hell of a week. Mrs P went back to work on Monday, and Grant and Winston both caught colds. Normally colds aren't a big deal, but our children have inherited the asthma that plagued us in our own childhoods*, and it makes the boys' colds a deadly serious matter; we have to wake up every four hours to pump them full of albuterol, and if their coughing reaches irrecoverable levels, we have to take them to the ER**. So everyone was under a bit of stress. Additionally, Winston had to do some testing with a neuropsychiatrist, at the behest of his school. Now, his school is Mrs P's school, and it's really for families a great deal richer than ours; we send the kids because Mrs P gets free tuition, and because it's important to her, even though at this point, after making several hundred lunches that have to be stored in reusable plastic containers (which I need to wash every night) and which have to have silverware and a glass plate and a glass cup and be carried in a special wicker hamper you have to buy from f...araway Africa for $50, and dealing with the fixed-smile wide-eyed Stepford robots who administer it, I cordially hate it. The school, as I have mentioned, admitted Mrs P when she was a mere slip of a lass, and did not, very pointedly did not, in fact, admit me. No doubt they regard it as some sort of systemic failure that someone so clearly not Montessori Material (presumably) enjoyed a few seconds of passion with someone who was Montessori Material, thereby disrupting what I imagine to be a Bene Gesserit-like breeding program for a race of super-self-satisfied and ultra-unbearable Birkenstock wearers. In any case, this means that Winston, who's a little too much like me for comfort, is not an Ideal Pupil, and so they've required us to, on our own dime, see this doctor, who has a longstanding relationship with the school, and who, going by his eye-watering rates, specialises in diseases of the rich. So because this guy is so expensive***, we had to cram every possible visit with him this year, since we've paid EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS out of pocket for medical expenses, and our insurer, in its munificence, picks up the rest through 31/12/22. I was going to take the morning off work on Monday and take Win in, but Grant's illness made this impossible; there was no way I could haul two boys, one visibly sick, to a psychiatric office and loiter there for four hours. So in a game of parental musical chairs, I ended up with Grant and Madeleine at home, while my mother took Winston to his appointment. This went more or less okay -- except that when bottle feeding, if Madeleine looks up and realises the milk is not, in fact, coming from Magna Mater, she flies into a tiny, chubby rage -- until my mom dropped off Winston, pumped full of sugar and grandmotherly indulgence, back off with me and took Maddie with her (as arranged), and then my two older children whiled away the afternoon in attempting to kill each other. Fun. The following day was worse: I had a six(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)-hour block of unskippable meetings, including some important ones as I'm in the process of being outmaneuvered on several things professionally****, and both boys stayed home. I can barely remember what I discussed or agreed to, because the children spent the six hours punching the crap out of each other in between episodes of Bluey*****. Additionally, I needed to go and get some antibiotics and a lot of replacement inhalers from the pharmacy, and both boys needed to come with, because if you leave them alone in the house, you go to jail. Winston was, to put it mildly, resistant, up to and including attempting to make himself vomit on the carpet. I do not like cleaning up vomit, and I really do not love Winston's intransigence. At this point, I made Melanie's F-bombing of Grant on Sunday looked like dropping a water balloon at a park, because I absolutely lost my mind, shouting while barreling across the length of the house and forcing him outside, where he continued working himself up until he did throw up, finally, in the flowerbed, which can take it. Not my finest moment as a parent, but I didn't throw him through the screen door like a javelin, so it could have been worse. It was a very, very, very long day. Then Wednesday, I just gave up and took the whole day off, because now I was sick too, and Thursday Grant went back to school and Mrs P took every set of car keys in the house with her to work by mistake, leaving me a prisoner there all day on the day she had a late meeting/holiday party, and THEN on Friday, a cheeky 1/48 Airfix Javelin I ordered from Amazon was delivered and turned out to be this: Before a label inspection revealed that it had been delivered to the wrong house, and I quickly switcheroonied it with the much larger package on my next door neighbour's porch that was addressed to me, which was much more satisfactory: Strewth! What a week. I was almost dead on my feet by the end of it. I almost forgot to mention a few bright spots: Pedu's Lightning for Winston arrived, and he's in love with it, though not very careful about where he puts it down. Fortunately, the sturdy 1980s-era Airfix plastic has survived multiple feet so far, but he can't be lucky forever. SO MAYBE HE SHOULD CONSIDER BEING TIDY. He wants to paint it as a USAF what-if, using F-86 decals he has from an Academy Sabre. On some level I feel as if I've failed as a parent. Winston wasn't the only person who got a Lightning this week, because Steve's incredibly generous gift arrived from Germany as well: And because Grant wanted a model kit of his own, I tried to placate him with an Arma P-51B (which hurt, but I have a lot of them so could spare it more than the others), which he gamely tried to build, and got pretty far with. However, in his impatience, he neglected the ducting in the lower fuselage, and demanded a snap-together kit, which to avoid him sinking any deeper into nihilism than he's already mired, I was able to source. The Pegasus snap-together kit is not very good, but it made one little boy very happy: Any, any, ANYways, after all that, I managed to mask the spine and tail and lay down a coat of AK White Aluminium: I bet you'd given up on there even being any modelling in this post, didn't you? I also unmasked the metal intake ring: There's a bit of a step there that worries me. We'll see how the situation develops. It might work well on the Airfix kit, but I don't think it's worth attempting on any Sword ones in the future. * Mine vanished c. 2008, when I realized nobody was ever going to like me for my personality, and took up middle-distance running for the next seven years. ** $300 copay just for showing up to the ER, by the way. Best healthcare system in the world, I'm told. *** To be fair to him, he did get and laugh at a deep cut joke of mine about Winston's writing being like a product of Theodore Roosevelt's attempt at instituting Simplified Spelling, so he's not all bad. **** I'm really, really bad at arguing my case, and I worked alone for so long that I never really had to, and so I'm no match for expert bureaucratic infighters. Which is perhaps unfortunate, because after eight years of doing this, I think I do know a little about social media, even if I'm nowhere near as good as someone with an agency or a big corporation. I at least might know more than people who spent their whole careers before this in legacy media. Hopefully. ***** The dad in Bluey, Bandit, sets some very unrealistic expectations for fathers, I might add!

If it's too good to be true...it probably is. This is what was delivered to me today. EDIT: FALSE ALARM! My poor neighbour doubtless wondered how his guitar strap became a giant model plane.

...who voluntarily goes to Norway in the winter?

I have an inexplicable fondness for the Flogger, the idiot little brother of the Cold War-era MiGs, and this is a splendid example. Very impressed by all the extra work you had to do to make an IAF bird.

Amazon US had two Airfix 1/48 Javelins for $50, and I had a $10 Amazon credit, so I got one. Not my scale, but the best kit out there, and you never know when the ol' vision will fail you.

You know, I never noticed it before, but the Bearcat looks like someone put a Brewster Buffalo on the rack.

Also this: "I would like to point out that due to the situation where there is a noticeable drop in sales especially for accessories, we are putting into production volumes consistently based on the total number of pre-orders for each item produced. The quantities that create a reserve for customers without pre-orders are significantly reduced in production and are largely produced only according to the requirements resulting from actual orders. Therefore, if you do not have pre-orders, your new orders may be delayed. This is a situation we have long warned against. In the boom times, this was rarely the case, but the current situation is different and forces us to rationalise our procedures."

The 2002 rebox of the Esci kit, so markings for three USN and one Aéronavale option. But my children are five and seven, so the odds of their getting to the decal stage is...low. Though Winston wants to build the Airfix Lightning F.3 @perdu very kindly sent him as a USAF WHIF, using decals from the Academy F-86 Sabre.

For $45 (plus shipping, which may turn this into a net loss) in an auction from some Ohio-based auction house: 1/48 Airfix Sea Vixen FAW.2 1/48 Tamiya F-51D Mustang 1/48 old tool Airfix Hurricane I 1/48 Academy F4U-B Corsair 1/72 Italeri F-8 Crusader 1/72 Hasegawa/Minicraft F-16 1/72 Hobbyboss F-5E 1/72 Minicraft PV-1 Ventura 1/144 Revell Embraer 190 I mostly wanted the Sea Vixen, so I figure the others can be offered up to my children.

Are you aware the Starfighter affair -- more properly, the Lockheed Affair, since it involved multiple aircraft types -- occurred sixty years ago, before most of the people currently involved in the Luftwaffe procurement process were born?

The pin wash looks incredibly promising. For my own part, I found oil paint dots have given me the best results for a semi-realistic finish, but I'm far from an expert -- or even at all good at it.

As it happens, I have that one! Pretty much anything with the P.1121 in it is on my bookshelves.

In a moment of insanity, I purchased a discounted Maintrack Project X P.1121 vacform, since the resin kit from the lamented S&M Models will never be seen again.

I mean, what does your firm bill for your services for an hour, Steve? These Hawks are equal to major litigation by now!