Procopius

Not big enough to allow me to sneak through to the other side, sadly. My plans of illegally emigrating and working as a dishwasher in Putney are thwarted again. It's not cheating to have keen eyes! Such are the trials we he-man types have to face, Buffers. It's fascinating how easy manual labour is to the the people who never do it. Incidentally, the boys are very keen on going with me to the UK to "visit Ced", ever since I told them that the most beautiful scenery I ever saw was when you were (very kindly) ferrying me down to Dover for the Battle of Britain flyover, and you said, "See, to me, this is England" just as we turned a corner to see the most intoxicatingly gorgeous vista of rolling green hills, a memory which has stayed with me these eight(!) years. Luckily for you, funds will not permit a fullscale expedition until they've matured more than somewhat. Indeed, I've played a few games recently, and actually won one! My longstanding theory that I cannot win unless the boys wish me luck was borne out, and boy did they show up for it for me that time. Win opened the game by chanting "Legio! Ultra! Victrix! Aeterna!" with me, and midway through, when things were looking a little dicey, the boys burst in and began waving Union Jacks as a cheering section. I know how improbable this sounds, so I captured a photo: (My opponent remarked "All my hilarious theories about you are confirmed as true!") Thanks to their moral support and a tank (a potent combination), I powered through to completely wipe out the opposing army. A gift from my mother aeons ago; Winston is fascinated by it and yearns for it. Currently it holds 1:6000 WWI naval miniatures for playing through the battlecruiser action at Jutland -- if I ever paint them. My father, who's orders of magnitude more handy than I am (and my primary resource for home repair questions), has suffered tenfold at the whims of my mother what I have suffered from Mrs P's flights of fancy, but she and I are young (not really) yet. Yes, I've noticed a Polish seller on ebay I frequent has them available once again. Now, I don't want to take credit for anything, but I'm sure you can all draw a direct line between my mangling one of the last kits out in the world and Sword's panicky re-release of them mere months (months, sir!) after I'd begun my ham-fisted endeavours.

Spruebrothers had the 1/72 GWH F-15E for 50% off today, and although it's not a type I have much interest in, I'm also a fool, so I bought one. From Hannants, the two DK 1/72 Hurricane IIb in the far east decal sheets, and some paint masks for the Finemolds F-4J and F-4C. I've been waiting a long time for decal options for Indian Ocean Raid aircraft, which are what brought me to this website initially, over a decade ago. Some new resin, for my 3D printer, to hopefully enable me to make stuff that's less fragile. Tally-Ho: RAF Tactical Leadership in the Battle of Britain, July 1940 by Patrick Eriksson

Curiously enough, she is in fact the nicest baby we have ever had, and it's not even close. She has a very sweet disposition, and my only issues with her are her phenomenal weight, which gives me terrible pains if I carry her for any length of time (forty: not a great age to be the parent of an infant), and her peripatetic sleep habits if Mrs P leaves her in the bed rather than transferring her to the crib. Only with mechanical assistance. She is a terrifyingly fast crawler, though. It is indeed a Super Sabre (an F-100C, I think), Bill, and you may claim your five pounds! Many years ago, my old boss once remarked to me, apropos of nothing, "You know, I never had any problems with two. But three, three's a ▮▮▮▮ing nightmare." Mrs P and I are of the opinion that years 3-5 have been the worst for our children so far, though of course Grant could remain awful indefinitely and foul up our calculus. "I'm just as god made me, sir." Yes! Okay, so what have I been up to? 2023 has definitely been a case of "short years, long days", and it's been rare I've had more than two hours to myself in the evenings. (At present, Mrs P and the children are in Michigan camping with my in-laws, which is not, as you might have surmised, a form of court-ordered punitive justice.) I've been trying hard to be a better husband and father, although so far there doesn't seem to be a lot in it for me. As part of this Sisyphean project of self-improvement, while Mrs P was away with the kids earlier this summer (they go away for two magical weeks in July, and one in August every year), I took care of The Wall. The Wall is the far wall of our dining room, which abuts the kitchen. When the house fell into our hands, it was painted a very flat white, but Mrs P thought it would be fine to let the children play with packing tape. Because their first instinct is always towards property damage, they promptly stuck some on The Wall and yanked it off, revealing rather moribund-looking lime green paint dating back to no later than the Nixon administration. The actual patch of paint exposed was probably no larger than a pound coin, but it stood out. As it turned out, it also exerted a curious pull on the ganglion that controls most of Grant's higher-level functions in the absence of a brain, and he was unable to restrain himself from peeling away more paint, until eventually it reached a little more than three inches in diameter. At this juncture, Mrs P, yielding the field to no one in the realm of neurotic compulsion, informed me that we couldn't have friends over for the boys to play with as long as the spot, as troublesome to her as a spot of a different hue was to Lady MacBeth, remained upon our wall. Now, despite our best efforts, the entire ground floor of our house has a second carpet of lego atop the actual carpet, Grant has not yet mastered the art of lifting the toilet seat and regularly anoints it with his urine, neither boy will change out of their pyjamas unless broken on the rack first, and there's a perpetually hooting dove in the house which is frequently allowed out of its cage "for just an hour" and left to crap all over our home for literal days on end until I can both catch it and have sufficient mastery of my temper to keep from doing to it what Mr John Michael Osbourne did to that hapless bat way back in 1982. Aaaaaaanywayyyyyyyyyyyy, to repaint the wall was a big undertaking, because the spot was located immediately adjacent to the major thoroughfare of the ground floor, and the paint's two-hour drying time meant that there would be lots of opportunities for small, slightly greasy hands to have their way with my hard work or -- even worse -- the paint and paint roller themselves. So it had to be done while they were gone. I ended up painting the entire wall there, because otherwise it looked jarringly weird, and also, because when I lifted the masking tape off the molding, all the paint on the molding went with it. Clearly, the whole thing hadn't be treated prior to painting, and I ended up having to strip quite a bit of it and sand a lot more down. Anyway, success! Except then, a week after they got back, the boys were painting miniatures using paints I'd given them (Army Painter, which if you're not familiar use those little Vallejo-style dropper bottles), and one of the nozzles became clogged. Instead of running downstairs and asking me to stop working and help them (which they will do at the slightest provocation), they asked Mrs P to clear the blockage. This she did by squeezing the bottle with more force that I would have imagined she could exert (her grip is notoriously weak, and many coffee mugs have hurtled to their demise from her nerveless fingers). I suspect all of you know what happened next: the bottle's nozzle practically exploded off, with a jet of tan paint in hot pursuit. The paint distributed itself liberally over the wall I'd painted. So I had to repaint it, which I did this morning. My life is one of constant adventure. In the past few weeks, I've built two wooden shelves, a bunk bed (for the boys to do anything but sleep in, apparently), and cleaned my grotto (no small thing). I think it looks quite nice now. In the process of being cleansed: The end result: Some new plastic shelving I added: All in all, very satisfying. Anyway, Oshkosh. So I had decided I would take the boys to the Airventure airshow in Oshkosh, giving Mrs P and the baby a day to themselves (and the baby naps quite a bit, so that's as good as giving Mrs P a day to herself). I made sure to set the ground rules beforehand: the boys had to listen to me and do what I said or we would leave (since they wouldn't fare well if they ran into a spinning prop or were ingested by a jet engine -- and it might injure a rare warbird), but if they were bored or not having fun, all they had to do was tell me and we could leave. The boys were excited, because Wisconsin is home to many things, one of them being regional fast-food chain Culvers, which they love. (Ol' dad, who dieted his way to losing twenty pounds this summer, was also pretty excited about this.) It's almost exactly 150 miles from my home to the airshow, which is a long drive, indeed, the longest I've ever driven one way without another driver in the car with me. The boys behaved splendidly on the drive up*. Unfortunately, while the EAA website said the airshow component would begin at 1430, it actually began at 1330. I had timed our drive and lunch perfectly to get us there at 1400 so that as we made the approximately seven hundred mile trek on foot from the parking lot to the flight line, we would be seeing the dull opening act. Instead, it was already disporting above us, and we could see a Super Hornet and two Corsairs flitting about the whole time we trudged (or rather, I trudged, and dragged them and a cooler in the wagon) towards registration. My second blunder was going on Sunday. My reasoning was simply: it was $40 for tickets and parking on the last day of the show, as opposed to $70, and I was already going to be out a lot of money for gas and food (and the airshow occurring at the tail end of a pay period, an almost comical procession of minor emergences and repeated instances of Parent A taking the children out for ice cream after I had told her that we should probably not go out that week at all had conspired to cut deeply into my budget), and if the boys were bored, I wanted to be able to turn around and leave and not try to force them to get our money's worth. Well, what did the boys DO at this airshow? Did they go and watch the F-35C take off and do a short display, the one thing I was most interested in, having never seen any flavour of F-35 in flight? No, of course not. Winston wanted to go sit in the F-100C cockpit section he'd seen on the way in. So we did, as just out of my eyesight, the F-35 made a noise like the end of the world and hurtled skywards. I saw the canopy for about three seconds as it raced down the runway, and that was it. After wasting an immense amount of time in the cockpit (and receiving a free fern from Bell Textron, who were closing down their booth to leave, thereby encumbering us greatly), Win saw the souvenir tent, which I had been dreading. We missed most of the rest of the flying displays as he bustled about trying to find something he could have purchased for him. Eventually I cracked and got him and his brother each a $10 set of Lego knock-offs. I wasn't kidding about the fern. We also toured a C-130 (incompletely, because some blowhard was occupying the doorway to the cockpit and monopolizing the crew's time with a story about the USAF in the 1980s that seemed to take several years to relate, oblivious to the fact that the line of people waiting behind them was now extending back out of the aircraft and starting to make threatening noises), and looked at some Army helicopters. Sadly, by the time we got over to where the warbirds were parked, there was only a single Corsair left, and so we headed home. I was quite tired, and it was getting a little dangerous, so I had to pull over and buy a coke from a gas station, but other than that our trip home was uneventful. The boys appear to have had fun, at least, which was the whole point of the endeavour. Anyway, how's the Lightning coming? Today has largely been wasted, wall repainting aside, but a coat of AK light aluminium and some aqua gloss has been laid on the wheels; I plan on brushpainting the tires. I also got the wing walk stencils on, and as long as you don't look at them both at the same time, they look great: * Or so I thought. Told he could take one painted rock from the rock garden by the waitress at Culvers, howling vortex of need Winston stole a second one.

As you may recall, the rump was in a bad way after getting the resin engines to fit: Imagine me as Colonel Blimp, in my Turkish bath (decorously clad, of course), huffing loudly and causing the ends of my alabastrine mustache to billow upwards like curtains right before Nosferatu enters the room: "It will never do, sir, no, it will never do, by gad!" I sanded the bejeezus out of it, lubricated my sanding sticks with foul oaths. then sprayed over it with Tamiya LP-11 silver. Sure, that works. Let's fix the tail. Time for an absurdly Heath Robinsonesque masking job, and then out comes the Colourcoats. Mmmmm. I've missed that smell. Wait! My mask! Dammit. My basement flooded a while back, and my decals and my extra Lightning stencils were on the floor (because I'm a revolting pig), and were lost. So I carried out the glorious tradition of robbing Future Edward blind and stole some stencils from the Lightning F.3 I was kindly sent, thereby kicking the can heartily down the road. Man, that poor idiot who lives in the future will be cursing my name someday. Of course, no serials, but I do have a Hannants sheet of loose Lightning code letters and numbers, which I'm sure won't be excruciating to try and do properly. Then, using my pin vice, I drilled out the wheels and assembled the MLG legs, then primed: I do not know why I didn't buy one of these sooner, total game changer. The nosewheel leg was either short shot or, less charitably, the product of shoddy fly-by-night Czech moulding practices, no doubt in revenge for 1938 and 1968. It required much sanding, carving, and an alarming amount of grunting to get more or less okay and make things fit. It's now so late/early that my head is producing uncommanded sways, so my hilarious/perilous adventures, encompassing driving the boys 150 miles to the Airventure airshow in Oshkosh, home renovations no sooner done than undone by Mrs P, and the current state of Lady Chunkerton of Chunkersly Hall, my most recent and physically densest child, will have to wait, inshallah, for another day. It sounds melodramatic, but I have missed you all more than words can say.

If I can, I'd like to give it a go.

I'm alive! We're on month eight of the children getting sick every month, so you can well and truly tell the masks are off in schools. Win's initial interest in models sadly went into a bit of stasis after he began lying, like a lot, and lost model building privileges for several days, which was long enough for his interests to shift elsewhere. It's very difficult to punish someone with ADHD. Lady Chunkerton of Chunkersly Manor is doing well, but has been sleeping in our bed. Perhaps sleeping isn't the right way to put it, more like "careening around drunkenly at 3 AM and slamming into her sleeping father with the force of a Christmas ham fired from one of HMS Victory's carronades", and so I'm rather tired of late.

Quiet you fool! Everyone will want one.

It is indeed her birthday today. I made her a breakfast sandwich, a handy arrow in my culinary quiver I picked up because Starbucks is expensive. I like to think I've gotten it down to a science, and I can fry the bacon, followed by up to three eggs if necessary (Grant likes the idea of having a breakfast sandwich, and Winston doesn't like anyone getting something he doesn't), all in one pan. She didn't get a present from me today (a) because she's been vague and evasive, and (b) because I got her a new phone and an elaborate spherical outdoor fireplace last month. Winston, having exhausted my stock of models intended for him and Grant (Grant has doggedly claimed two of them, but really has no intention of building them and no idea how; he just doesn't want to give up a millimeter of his prerogatives), inveigled from me a trip into my grotto to see what he could see. Regrettably, his interest for some reason was in my big Revell A400M and my Zvezda C-130, the latter of which, for obvious reasons, I'm unlikely to be buying any more of any time soon. "Maybe we could build one of the big transports," he suggested, hopefully, about a hundred times. This stopped abruptly when he discovered that the Trumpeter Wyvern in 1/48 has a series of interlocking gears to make the contraprops contrarotate. I'm not sure he was even fully cognizant of anything else about the kit: he saw the picture of those gears on the box and his focus became laserlike. As my last Trumpeter Wyvern (one of the earliest 1/72 kits I built that I felt pretty good about) had perished ingloriously at his hands several years before, I felt what I trust you will agree is an understandable reluctance to turn its replacement over to him (I also consider this a positive sign: my urge to build something may be creeping back), quite aside from the fact that it's a fairly fiddly kit and I'm not sure he would really enjoy it. Winston employed all of his considerable and rarely-seen charm to get the Wyvern, but I was resolute. I had an ace up my sleeve: a Tamiya Seiran was coming in the post for him (and an Airfix Sherman Firefly for Grant) that evening, so I just needed to stall. As I suspected, Win was quite taken by the novelty of the floats and the beaching trolley. It's very interesting to compare the way I model versus the way he does. I love the research, and trying to find a specific aircraft to build. He enjoys the process, and he likes whatever he likes; at seven you're a little divorced from historical context (though never entirely in this house, of course). The one way we are similar is that it quiets our restless, overactive brains and lets us power through the static of life to focus on something. After being woken up so early yesterday, the modelling supplies and the model were kept in my bedroom last night, but I don't think the experiment was a success: Win came down at a more appropriate time, but he was hyperactive and unfocused, whereas when he was creeping down to model at all hours, he was mellow and relaxed, and able to follow instructions on the first go. So we'll see. I'm on the prowl for some older big transport aircraft kits, so if you see any good stateside deals, let me know. I also managed to find the old 1/35 Tamiya Centurion, which is not a good representation of a Cent, but which should be easy to build, and there was a Centurion in Conrad's War, so he'll have a connection to it. For those of you who've built the old-tool Airfix Lancaster, how was it? The new one is a bit of a trial.

The new Airfix 1/72 Sherman Firefly and a 1/72 Tamiya Seiran for my children, as my oldest has not only built most all of the kits I got in an estate sale lot for him, but several that were supposed to be for his brother as well.

Hullo all, The dishwasher was finally replaced for realsies at the start of the month. But the big news is that Winston has been bitten by the modelling bug in a big way: Every day he's been waking up early to work on his models, and it's the first thing he does when he gets home. He got up at 3:30 AM to build an Airfix Hawk, and he would have gotten away with it if he hadn't hand-selected the dumbest accomplice known to man, who chose to burst into my bedroom at 4:30AM, to let Melanie and me know the microwave door was left open. He has been threatened with me locking up the supplies at night now. He's already cheerfully admitted to popping down every now and then around 1AM to glue the odd bit and bob on. Mrs P's birthday is tomorrow, but if time permits, Win and I may work on a more complex kit together this weekend. He can also read fairly well (but not without effort) now, which lead to the following exchange: I just finished reading the wonderful Conrad's War to him, a book which could equally be about me as a boy or Winston right now. Part of the book involves young Conrad suddenly discovering himself to be flying the Airfix Lancaster he built on the Nuremburg Raid, and the aircraft being lost, in part because he glued one of the propellers so that it couldn't turn. Winston was quite interested in this, and Conrad's subsequent adventures in Colditz, so I played an interview with one of the few Great Escapers to survive, Pilot Officer Alan Bryett, as he recounted the night the Halifax he was a bomb aimer in was shot down over Berlin. The aircraft's pilot, Flight Lieutenant H. Kevin Hornibrook RAAF held the aircraft steady so the surviving crew could bail out. With the aircraft out of control after its control cables burnt through and the g-forces pinning Bryett to the side of the fuselage, Hornibrook bodily flung Bryett out the nose hatch despite knowing full well that there was only time for one more man to escape before the aircraft crashed. After the war, both Bryett and the Halifax's navigator, Pilot Officer R W Chaston, would name their firstborn sons after Hornibrook. When I turned it off for dinner, Win said "hey, that was interesting." "It's a sad story," I said. "But also a good one," said Win. "The pilot did his job; he saved all his friends." Talking about it later with Mrs P, I knew, at that instant, that whoever he might become later, my beautiful, horrible, pig-headed little boy, faced with the same ultimate test, would absolutely have stayed with his aircraft to ensure everyone else got out, because he would be unable to conceive of any other course of action. "And," I told her, "he would complain the whole way down." "At least he could spend the last few moments of his life doing what he loved most," she replied.

Ehhhhhh...our dishwasher broke at the start of the month, so we bought a new one. Lowe's somehow delivered the wrong one (a cheaper model, or I'dve kept my mouth shut), and then replaced that the following week with the correct model, but broken from the store. They've spent the last two weeks failing utterly to replace it and giving me conflicting information, including at one point claiming -- wrongly -- that I would need to first buy a new one and then be refunded for the old one when it was returned, causing me to respond, in a thin, strangled voice which was not my own: "Zach, I appreciate that none of this is your fault. But that in no way diminishes the incandescence of my pure, unfocused rage." I just got off the phone with the customer support line, and it turns out the store has had two of the same model in stock this whole time, but in their ineptitude, failed to update the ticket to get the dishwasher actually sent out to me. It's unreal. I try very hard to be nice to people in the customer service industry, having worked in it myself, but this has brought the obscenity-spewing variant of Colonel Blimp who lurks in my innermost depths perilously close to bursting out from beneath the sea to deploy mighty F-Bombs on anyone within earshot. I'm so, so tired of washing the dishes for five people by hand.

Still no further progress, but my Winston dug out his Tamiya Churchill yesterday and built it. Well, he built the turret entirely by himself, but had me do the greeblies on the hull and, like any sane person, he declined to build the Churchill's 10,000 roadwheels, so I handled those and melting the tracks together. He was quite pleased with the result.

A 1/72 Sword F-84F, because I never learn, and the Suez Crisis exerts a strange hold over me.

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.