Thursday 15th June 2017 – I BEAT …

… David Bowie into the bathroom by 35 seconds this morning (I know – I counted them) and so by the time he started to croon “Wake Up Little Sleepy Head” I was already riding the porcelain horse.

Breakfast saw me demolish the last of the muesli (I had some supplies and so I made some more) and by 07:35 I was sitting on the sofa with the laptop on my knee.

This morning I spent part of the time dealing with correspondence. It’s backing up rather, and I had a rude reminder from someone about a form that I needed to fill in relating to Caliburn’s accident. And so I did that, bunged it all in some of those prepaid envelopes (I bought a supply of those) and posted it all in the post box opposite the magasin de presse – the newspaper shop where I buy my baguette.

Lunchtime was spent sitting on the clifftop overlooking the harbour entrance. It was cooler today and slightly windier so I stayed out there with my book for quite a while. In fact, it was after 15:00 when I came back here. And seeing how nice and comfortable I had been, I … errrr … closed my eyes for a while – in fact a darn while longer than I expected.

Tea was a mega-curry night. Onions and garlic fried in a saucepan, with a tin of mixed vegetable, a tin of mushrooms, a pile of peanuts, s bucket-load of bulghour and a selection of spices. Add to that a gallon of gravy browning and we had a meal fit for a King. Four Kings in fact, because there’s enough for three more days so that’s sealed in the vacuum jars in the fridge.

And apart from that, what else have I been up to?

Well, you know this 3D animation program that I’m messing around with? It’s quite good but its models are not transferable over to other 3D sites (but then it’s free, and not a couple of thousand quid so that’s understandable) and models from other sites are not transferable to it. But there is a program for building models and props from design primitives, and the finished products may be exported into *.cr2 format.

This program is likewise free and I downloaded it years ago, but it was so complicated that I abandoned it after several weeks of going nowhere. Its controls do not correspond in any way whatever with normal mouse controls and keyboard short-cuts and has no logical sense whatsoever (for example – to “Ring” the edges of the polygons that make up the design primitives, its CNTRL + … errr … K. What’s the logic behind that?).

Anyway, during one of my lengthy searches on the internet, I came across a series of no less than 24 videos that give a basic introduction to the program. And as the narrator freely states “this is only a basic introduction – there’s much more that you can find out about it elsewhere”. Yes, 24 videos as a “basic introduction”!

And so I’ve been gallantly working my way through them all. 8 videos so far, and I’m still on “control manoeuvres” – we haven’t actually done anything yet.

I have a feeling that this is going to be yet another long hard slog.

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