My cats fighting again

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*Yawn*

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What's my cat doing?

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MG Strike Freedom

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As promised a few months ago, some action shots of my finished Strike Freedom kit.

Happy Canada Day!

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Mixed

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I thought it was about time I re-organized my photos since ImageStation went kaput and I lost the album functionality on my homepage (yeah I know, it's been over a year). So I was trying a few online photo services recently.

The first I tried was Flickr; actually I had an old account with them but I never really used it. As a rogers subscriber I was signed up for a pro account too, but that's gone to waste since it's getting reverted to a basic account in July. Anyways, I liked the way that all your photos are put into a pool (or PhotoStream as they call it) and then you can loosely organize them into different sets and collections. But ultimately I decided not to use Flickr because the basic account has some limit where you can only view the most recent 200 photos in the PhotoStream, and I sure wasn't going to pay $25 or whatever it was a year for a full fledged service.

So the search continues. Next I tried to PhotoBucket; actually I only got to reading their service agreement. I think that service is mostly free, and doesn't seem to have a hard limit cap on the number of photos. However, there was some weird clause which says you have to log into the account every 3 months or so, or else something wouldn't work or what not. I decided that was too complicated and didn't even bother creating an account.

Next I tried was Shutterfly. The name sounded familar and a quick google search reveals why; it was the service that took in the old ImageStation users. I had receive a few emails back when ImageStation was shutting down that I should migrate my photos to Shutterfly, which of course I totally ignored. I looked over the features and the terms and conditions and there wasn't anything major I didn't like and so I created an account.

As you can see by the album I posted, Shutterfly is the service I stuck with. The services has a number of interesting features that I'd like to point out but I'll leave that to another post since this post is already getting fairly long. Bye for now.

Update

First of all, a happy father's day to all the dads out there, the old ones, the new ones, the soon to be.

Once again, it's been a while since I updated. Apparently being lazy is in my nature, so I'm not going say anything stupid like "oh I being going to get my act together and update this blog more often, stay tuned, blah blah blah"; it just ain't going to happen.

And so here we are, an update to my blog, once in a blue moon. Where to begin... well, let's start off with some pleasant news, which you can see in the picture below:

Yes, we have a new 10 weeks old Calico kitten at home. Her name's Cora and she's simply adorable. There's a story of how her name came about. My parents and I actually gone through a bunch of names: Callie, Coco, Mimi, Fifi, Cookie, Muffin (my personal favourite), and we could not agree on a name. We debated on that subject for a good several days and as a last resort, we went through 2 rounds of voting to finally "agree" on the name Mimi. Then on the day we went to pick her up at our vet, the staff told us that they had been referring to her as Cora, but because we went thought that whole naming process we decided to stay with the agreed upon name, Mimi. That would have been the end of it, but back home the name Cora keep gnawing at the back of my head; it had a nice ring to it and it just clicked. Finally, we gave in and phoned the vet to change her name back to Cora (while keeping Mimi as her middle name on record).

And now onto some sombre news, which you may already have guessed as to why we got a new cat, and that is that Baby is no longer with us. It's almost a month since it happened. One day she just stopped eating, and she could barely take a step. Her energy level just drop drastically. When we took her to the vet, I had still hoped that it's not as bad as it looks, that maybe there was still something the vet could do, like keeping her overnight to give her nutrients via IV. But the first words he said to us when he walked into the examination room was "I think it's time", and it really hit me then that the moment I've dreaded over the past several months has arrived.


Although we knew she didn't have much time due to the cancer, it was still very tough to let her go, possibly even more so than when Dee died because through baby's death, we are also re-living through those memories of when Dee died--and also because ever since Baby had the surgery on her paw last year, she's become more affectionate towards me (or maybe I was more affectionate towards her because of the cancer). I was a wreck afterwards much longer than when Dee died. I still think about her everyday and missed the way that she always come up to my room and lie down nearby while I worked.

But life goes on as they say, in closing I'd like to say farewell to my beloved cat: I miss you Baby, but I'm happy you are in a better place now, and you won't be alone because Dee is there with you (I can imagine them sitting side by side look down on me, like in that one picture where they were looking out the window). Don't worry about Chumsley, he's the big cat in the house now and he'll have little trouble maker Cora to keep him busy. And I hope you don't mind that Cora seem to have taken a liking to sleeping at your favourite spot under my bed.

Pictures of my cats: http://andrewscats.shutterfly.com/

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 21

FINISHED! Yes, finally. I decided not to keep my readers waiting for another couple months (all zero of you...) So here is the completed product. Seriously, this took longer to blog about than to actually build it. Well whatever. It's done :) I suppose I should take a few more action pose, but you may have to wait another couple months for them.

So the kit's been sitting in my cabinet for a almost half a year I guess. I've no new project to work on. But speaking of which, I just finished watched Gundam 00 and I quite liked the Exia design -- not at first, but it has grown on me especially since the 00-shoulder-pads-with-spatulas-gundam doesn't looks so hot. If they come out with an MG Exia (or I should say *when* they do, it's only a matter of time before they start milking that cash cow), I might make that my next project.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 20

Ok, this is the second last day, I swear. And yes, probably no one is reading this, now that I've managed to put off updating for such a long time. But for completeness sake I will finish what I started.

To be honest, from this pic it looks done, and I can't quite remember why it took me another day to complete it. Maybe the final dragoons needs to be sanded? It was such a long time ago, can't remember.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 19

So close... looks complete doesn't it? Actually there are still a few dragoons missing, but hard to tell from this pose.

2 posts back-to-back :)

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 18

Almost...

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 17

A quick follow-on to yesterday's post, the kit is very close to done now. In fact, this could very well be a pic of the completed kit since the dragoons are removable. Only 16 more pieces (2 per dragoon) to go :)

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 16

Happy Holidays! Once again I've been slacking off on my posts. I don't have as much motivition to post after the kit has been finished and sitting in my cabinet for over a month now. But fear not, I'll make my New Year's resolution to finish posting its progress ;)

The pics for this day shows the wings are nearly complete. Two more wings to complete then all that's left are the dragoons.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 15

Not a whole lot of different between this pic and last day's pic. Another wing stub is completed.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 14

Bet you thought I had stop blogging didn't you? Well it's really been a while since my last post. Here's the 14th day pic. Not that much progress, just another part of the wing is done. This part of the construction is quite tedious, since you have to essentially build 4 identical wings.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 13

More of the wings completed. I'm quite amazed at the inner mechanics of the wing assembly. When you rotate the rear assembly it causes the 4 "spokes" of the wing to spread apart slightly. And when you rotate in the opposite direction, the spokes will return to their original positions.

Indeed, quite a marvel of toy engineering.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 12

Haven't reported my progress in a while. That's because the model is actually completed and I've been occupying my time playing a free mmorpg recently :) Nonetheless, I'm determined to document each day of progress, so there will be quite a few post to go before you can see the finished product.

In today's picture, the backpack and wing stubs are finished. With painting, I always found darker parts are easier to paint; somehow the dark paint adheres and coats the parts more uniformly. With sanding, it is the opposite; sanding the darker parts is harder because if you over sand it or sand in random directions, it is easy to see the white scratch marks of the plastic. The reason I'm mentioning this is because I actually over sanded the wing stubs. However, you won't be able to see that in this picture because luckily, I had a pack of gundam markers which I used to cover up the unsightly scratch marks.

I never quite grasped how to use gundam markers, which is why all my kits so far do not have panel lining, or have attempts at panel lining that didn't quite turn out very well. So I was pleasantly surprised by how well using markers to cover up the scratch marks worked. Here is the procedure I used:

1. Apply the blue marker onto the surface with the scratches
2. Apply the clear marker onto the same surface (I think the clear marker is used to dissolve or thin out the ink--this is the part I never quite understood)
3. Take a q-tip and spread the ink evenly over the entire surface

It felt like I was applying polish onto a pair of leather shoes. The marker actually gave the surface back a bit of shine, but no where near the glossy finish that the unsanded plastic had.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 11

Look! Standing on its own two feet :) Finally 2/3 complete!

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 10

Wow, 10 days already. I never kept track of how many days it took to build my previous kits. Did it always take this long? I don't think I'm close to finishing this one yet. There are still many parts left for the wing assembly.

Strike Freedom Construction - Day 9

Haven't updated in a few days, but not because I've stopped working on the kit. It's actually because I've been caught up working on it that I haven't updated my progress here.


Here's how the kit looks on the 9th day. Nice legs! But it's getting cold so let's put on a pair of shorts :)

Notice on the second pic one of the beam rifle is missing. That's because I'm making a modification to it. It may actually be my first time modding a kit.

As you can see in the pic below, the end of the beam rifle can open up and allow the other rifle to slide in to form a "mega" beam rifle. The problem I found is this part doesn't remain in the closed position very well. So after thinking about it for a long time, I decided to cut a small piece of soft rounded plastic from the "PC" runner (that's the gray piece) and super-glue it onto the end piece.



So now, the gray piece will fit into the open slot at the end of the rifle and thus keep the end piece in the closed position. To open, I'll need to apply a little bit of force and pull out the end piece so that I can rotate the gray piece out of the slot.