Something about this time of year, and where we live, gives us these sunsets.

We’re treating / painting our fence!  Takes about an hour to do a single panel, slightly less now, and there’s 10 panels left on the side of the house with the most fence.  Some photo’s for proof!  We’re using the same stuff that our next door neighbour used first on her side of the fence, so she chose the colour which we actually quite like.

In order, the front including the half panels, the side, to show the difference between treated and untreated, and lastly, the remaining 10 panels.

The garden’s doing pretty well although we’re coming to the end of summer.  The grass we seeded has grown in and we’re starting to get it tidy, and the flowers are really doing well and have looked great throughout the summer.

This year has seen us do more for the house / garden than we’ve ever done for any property we’ve ever lived in, without a doubt.  There’s so much in the house we should still get sorted (but we’re just so bad at doing it, well, I am, Grete tries to encourage me, but I mainly just stall and fob her off) but getting the garden sorted has been such a good thing and I’m glad Grete has been able to enjoy it while the weather has been good.

I thought I was doing the right thing taking the photo’s without the flash with as much ambient light as I could generate and then using picasa to correct the white balance etc.  However, looking at the new pictures (uploaded) they’re worse than the ones I initially took with the flash ages ago.  These are only there to get the basic images on-line so folk can see the figures, but I’m still annoyed at myself.  Internal warring between the ‘it’s done, leave it, they’re only crappy little miniatures’ and the ‘do it right, if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing it right’ factions.

I’m going to take Simes up on his offer to do some good photo’s of some of the better mini’s, this isn’t about that, it’s just about having a library of all the minis I’ve got in photo form.

Five hours.

Maybe I’ll do them again, but much later.

This is a similar issue to when I was doing the photo scans, ended up throwing a good weeks worth of work away when I changed my mind about DPI and file format.

Anyway, here’s some of the earliest miniatures, in their terrible horrific glory.

Totally clear night last night (Saturday to Sunday, since technically I’m writing this on Monday morning), so it was always going to be cold.  The frost this morning though was amazing.  On the shed roof it looked a little like snow, but the grass and leaves on the ground looked like they’ve been coated in sugar.

Tried to get some shots, but not really pleased with how they came out.  I’ve whacked a Picasa album up (including the shots of the snow we had recently) which you can see over here.

Here’s my favourite shot though (click for full size) and check out the album above for a couple more.

I really can’t praise Wordpress enough.  It’s such a simple install (point it at your mysql server, and it’s done) and although out of the box it looks pretty ugly (in my view), there are so many quality free templates that it can look however you want in about 20 minutes.  Of course, it takes more time to use some plugins and decide on a layout in general, but really it’s so easy to use everyone who wants an web presence but doesn’t want to spend much time should use it.  It’s mainly a blog, but the pages feature means you can certain include a lot of ‘non-blog’ content easily as well.

Anyway, the point of this post, Grete has moved her blog from blogger to Wordpress over at her old URL (http://www.darkstorm.co.uk/grete) and she’s slowly moving the content over from her old personal website at that URL, so it’ll be more than a blog in the end (she assures us!)  She’s using the Mandigo theme as well, so I put together a few random headers for her site, she’s not seen them all yet so they may not all stay and at least one of them doesn’t work very well in my view, so I’ll probably get rid of it later.  But I liked them all anyway

Why are they so evocative?  Click the pictures for full size images.  It snowed in Nottingham today, for about 15 minutes, really heavy wet snow which lay and then started to vanish almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Both cats are old hands with the whole snow thing so no sudden flurry of excitement from them, although Fizz did try and eat a few snowflakes as they fell on her.

My jaw is pretty sore now, both the muscles from holding it open for 20 minutes and having my lower jaw stressed hard when the tooth was pulled, and also the gum/jaw area where the tooth was removed now actively hurts (pulsing pain).

So, here’s a few pictures of the tooth I had extracted.  Feel free to show these to your kids, or your nieces and nephews as a reminder of why they should,

1. brush their teeth more than they do
2. take the advice of their dentist when he says ‘you should consider having your wisdom teeth out’

This tooth was impacted by one of my wisdom teeth growing into it at an angle, and basically got a cavity and decayed at the point of impact, until the hole you see was caused when that part of the tooth fell away a few weeks ago.  I was lucky, it didn’t hurt.

If you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, sorry, you’re going to see the pictures.  If you’re reading it on the site’s front page, you can click the link to see the pictures.  If you’re reading the full article already, then you can’t avoid the pictures any longer.

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Had to take some photo’s of the sunset.

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I was out in the garden earlier because the apple tree in our garden has the brightest yellow leaves.  The photo doesn’t really do it justice, but they are bright yellow.

But a few of the leaves have some amazing colours.

The small tree has a few stubborn leaves just hanging on until the bitter end.

And somehow, there’s a single fresh daisy in the grass, although we’re not sure where it came from.

Did quite a bit.  Finished up the Elmore piece I started an absolute age ago.  Looks ok real-size, looks terrible photographed, I have to work out if there’s a better way (been saying that for 10 years).  Made a start on three Rackham miniatures, did a tiny bit on a vampire and kept going with the 20 zombies.  Doing the zombies is kinda cool, don’t have to be too careful, slap a lot of random colours on that no self respecting heroic single miniature would wear, try out different things to see what works.  The contrast with working on hugely detailed pieces like the Rackham miniatures is incredible, everything takes longer, everything has to be planned out carefully.

The hardest part is seeing what you want to do with the miniature – once you’ve got that in your head it’s just a matter of making it happen.  I’m struggling with the vampire because I don’t know how I want it to look, blacks? purples? oranges? reds? some mixture?  Greys?  Not sure.  Once I have that sorted it’ll be a lot easier.