Boredom

I’m currently locked in for COVID so boredom is a real factor in my mental health right now.

When you’re as overprivileged as I am then boredom is not a lack of choices. Just in media I have about a thousand movies, four and a half thousand episodes of TV, and somewhere between five hundred and a thousand books in my network storage. I know how to get more, indeed I collected 500Gb more media over the last two days. (I wanted all five series of ‘Fringe’ in 1080p and picked up ‘Line of Duty’, an English cop show.)

Let me tell you a tale of how I came to feel bored. This break from work was meant to be dedicated to two things, organising my stuff, and building Lego. I’m not that strong with the COVID so I’m not sure how much organising will get done.

I started building my Lego Ferrari 488 Corse, around seventeen hundred pieces. I got as far as half way through the first bag when I found I couldn’t find a particular piece, I found three but I needed four. The likeliest reason for the absence is that I accidentally dropped the piece and it is somewhere on my floor. I did a good search that included darkening the room and searching with a torch (you might be surprised how successful it can be).

The final step in the search was to log in to ebay and buy the piece. Still no piece has ben found and I am waiting for the piece to turn up some time next week.

My thoughts then turned to a clone kit, Wildflowers. One of the problems you find in clone kits is that the fine tolerances of Lego are not found. You can get a kit with sloppy fit, fine fit, or tight fit. Wildflowers had extremely tight fit so I can only work on it for a few minutes at a time before my fingers give up.

The final attempt was at a second-hand Ferrari F40, not the Speed Classic one but a larger Creator model. I don’t have the instructions for it but that’s no problem, Lego will give you a PDF of the instructions for any kit released in the last fifty years, and maybe even beyond.

Since it’s second-hand it comes as a box full of unsorted pieces, some still connected to each other. I can work on that for longer at a time, sorting pieces into large bunches before I narrow down the size of each bunch with a sub-sort.

That’s going well, I think one more session and that will be ready for sub-sorting. Pulling pieces apart still hurts my fingers, perhaps not so badly.

Then there is the media. I spend an incredibly long time flicking through various pots of film and TV without settling on anything. I even have three streaming services, the SBS, and ABC to flick through. Most of the time I start a few new films, watch for ten minutes, then move on before deciding to watch something I’ve watched before.

The other variable at the moment is the effect of the medication I’m taking. The largest contributor to that is the large dose of prednisone, a steroid, every morning. It gives me a hot flush a couple of hours after taking it, leaving me with jittery shakes and slightly hyperactive. Luckily my asthma is pretty good so I’m not taking Salbutamol (Ventolin, except I buy generic to save the dollar) which makes those symptoms stronger, last for more of the day, and amp up the anxiety.

Therefore the boredom isn’t a lack of choices, it’s hyperactivity and an inability to decide.

Lego Monster Fighter for Halloween

 

I’ve had this in my collection since I picked it up as a sales item after Halloween last year. It seemed the perfect time to build it.  The Monsters Fighters Zombie Car (Lego #40076) goes well with the Mummy minifig.

Gandalf Arrives Lego Set

The box

I’ve finally built the Lego sets I received for Christmas from Jessica. The first was the “Gandalf Arrives” set from the “Lord of the Rings” series.

This is a nice small set, the box doesn’t say how many pieces but I’d guess less than 100. Lego have rated it as an over 8 years old build and I think that’s fair as it has a few tricky spots that might confound younger builders.

I particularly liked the construction of the cart with sloped sides. It uses the small hinge pieces for the sides and there are some nice details added using a studs not on top method.

A Cluttered Mind

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s Daily Prompt, entitled ‘Clean Slate’ asks:

Explore the room you’re in as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Pretend you know nothing. What do you see? Who is the person who lives there?

I sit in a lounge room with cluttered bookshelves DVDs and books spilling out of them. At one end if a large TV and sound system with large central speakers. The shelves contain more than books, there are Lego models, papercraft models (some of these are strange and geometric) and small tech toys. On top of one speaker is a cardboard giraffe model with a wire crank handle, next to the TV is a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat.

This is an eclectic and cluttered room, the person who lives here would seem to have a wide range of interests.

The bookshelves and the books on them attract my interest. At the bottom of one I spy a shelf that holds three dictionaries (one with a magnifying glass sitting on top of it), two atlases and two copies of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. In the same bookshelf are books on Macintosh computers, Unix and various programming languages. Further up I see Science Fiction, Penguin classics and a wide range of non-fiction. Philosophy, politics, language and the theatre seem common topics. This person is a reader, even the coffee table has several books on it with odd bits of paper and cardboard sticking out of them marking a place.

Computers obviously hold a central place in their life. As well as all the IT books I can see a MacBook Air on the coffee table plugged into a charger alongside an iPad and there is an iPhone charging on the arm of the lounge. An external hard drive and a Bluetooth keyboard are among the objects on the coffee table. Is that a Mac Mini sitting next to the TV?

Animation might be an interest; I can see toys from Toy Story, Cars and the classic Warner Brothers cartoons in various spots around the room. A look at the DVDs and Blu-Rays show the same, all the Pixar movies, some WB cartoon collections are there. A strange mix of movies and TV with a lot of BBC natural history – a David Attenborough fan.

This is a man’s room. I can imagine him as an interesting person to talk to with a wide range of thoughts and opinions and a strong interest in listening to others, those philosophy and political books. I can imagine a desire to learn, all those dictionaries. He likes to build things, the Lego and papercraft. While he’s obsessed by things, all that Lego and toys, he’s obviously not obsessed with tidiness though there is a sort of organisation to the room with different things in different areas, apart from the two bookshelves full of books where you can find a book on PHP next to a book on Shakespeare and “The Exegesis of Philip K Dick” next to Clancy’s “Patriot Games”. I think he has a cluttered but interesting mind.

Do you think you’d like him?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Excellent Thanksgiving Lego vignette. Never happen in my kitchen of course.

Modelbuildingsecrets's Weblog

This small vignette by Walter Benson just made me smile when I saw it.

Now granted no one wants a burnt turkey for T-day, but his parts solution for a burnt bird is great and the flames coming from the oven and the woman’s expression are perfect.

Hopefully we’ll (at least those of us in the States) all have a great Thanksgiving with no burnt food. 😉

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