Anotherblog

Archery

I went to archery on Saturday morning, and tried out the old limbs/string/arrows. I was kinda expecting my accuracy to be much worse (the riser isn’t quite tuned to the old limbs), but to my surprise there was very little difference, except that I could now shoot more than 30 arrows. This is very pleasing. It always felt like a bit of a waste when I’d go to archery and only be able to shoot for half an hour.

Rubber-band gun

Rare is the day that I get all linky and point people to something on the web. But I’m too excited to resist. It’s a site that shows rubber-band guns. Really, really good rubber-band guns. I used to make these out of lego when I was a kid - remember that, Sandor? - but although we designed a working gattling gun, it could only fire six shots, one per barrel. The string-and-pegs method of getting multiple rubber-bands out of a single barrel is truly ingeneous.

I’m still proud of my simple-but-deadly booby trap, consisting of two pieces of long technical lego held together lengthwise with a rubber-band. Sticky-tape one of the pieces to a wall, tie a piece of black thread to the other one, run it across the hallway, and recreate that scene at the end of “Where Eagles Dare”.

Archery = soreness

Before Sunday I hadn’t gone to archery for about two months, so the slight tightness in my shoulders, neck, and arms that I’m experiencing now is not exactly a surprise. It’s clear that my interest in archery has waned, but I suspect that’s only a relative measure: I enjoy it heaps, it’s just that it loses every competition with other things I want to do, starting at “Spend time with Von” which and going down to “Play guitar”, which is only slightly above archery most of the time.

So, hmm. Being realistic, I’m not going to be going more than once a week. Also being realistic, if I keep the bow at its current tension, I’m just going to hurt myself, or at least, not be able to get in a good day’s shooting before my arms get tired. I need to wind down the tension a bit.

Over the last couple of times I’ve shot, I’ve found myself shooting more and more to the right. I was trying hard to correct what was obviously a stance or anchor problem, but couldn’t find anything wrong, so figured it must have been my previous stance or anchor that was the problem, and adjusted the sight.

I finally discovered the problem. It wasn’t me. It was the bow. A screw in the plunger button (it’s a complicated bit of apparatus that touches the nocking point on the bow) has wound out. I discovered it because it had worn a hole in my archery bag.

“Funny,” I thought. “I wonder why there’s a hole in my bag. Oh, look. It’s that screw. I never noticed how much that stuck out before.”

And half an hour later, the penny dropped. I wound the screw back in, and the instant result was the arrow going way off to the left. Hooray! Problem solved!

Is there a term for the kind of worker who never blames their tools, muttering pithy aphorisms to themselves as they attempt to hammer nails with wooden handles?

Creativity vs. Wii

The lunchtime gang are mostly working on puzzles this week - I made two! - and Darths & Droids looked like it was going to fall below (gasp) a four-week buffer. But I completed a comic on Monday using the Comic Creator on my mac (and now I’ve sorted out how to do it, it should be much easier and faster) and the other guys have been writing up a storm. So it looks like we’re back on track.

In general, it’s been a week of creativity and intellectual betterment. Two puzzles, Darths & Droids comics, a draft of the “Cars” short film set to Evan’s song “We All Want To Drive Our Cars”, plenty of guitar practice, Cantonese lessons on the way to work, chess puzzles every night before I go to bed, and I’ve gotten many positive vibes from the proposal video. While this kind of activity is sporadic, and surrounded by great periods of lassitude, it’s nice when it happens!

Oh, and Von and I bought a Wii together, and have been playing Raving Rabbids 2 (as well as the odd bit of Guitar Hero 3 together on the PS2). It’s fun. A lot of fun. The character design for the rabbids is excellent, really really fun. Kat has been playing Wii Tennis and has become a Pro in very short time.

So, you may well ask. What has been suffering to make way for all this activity - not creativity, not having a good time with my fiance (sudden thrilled feeling as I write this… aahh…), not work… well, that’d be sleep then.

Haven’t done archery in almost two months. It’s definitely also a casualty at the moment…

Proposal video

Aaand… here it is!

So there we were, minding our own business…

Veronica and I had an unusual experience at the movies on Sunday afternoon. We’d gone in for a session of the film “Into The Wild” at the Chauvel cinema and were watching the ads before the film, when a rather startling ad showed. Veronica was in it! And then the ad said “Veronica Luke, will you marry me?”. Fortunately, I just so happened to have a ring in my pocket, so I quickly seized the initiative and proposed to her, and she said yes, and we exited the cinema (to a big round of applause). Phew! You’ve really got to be prepared for this kind of thing nowadays.

Veronica wasn’t, though. :-)

And all of today, I’ve been in a haze of happiness. Hooray for the magic of cinema advertising! Hooray for the Chauvel cinema! Hooray for Veronica! (And yes, the “spending more time with Veronica” thing in the last post was a hint…)

Happy New Year

Hello everyone! Happy New Year. I was thinking about resolutions recently, but I did very poorly in my previous year’s resolutions (but with VERy gOod reasoNs, I CAn say - there are higher priorities than my projects!) so I decided this year not to. There’s so much going on that I’m sure I’ll get to the end of the year and be as happy as I was with last year.

Projects I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing this year: Darths & Droids (still going strong!), archery (I’ve taken a break, but I’m still enjoying it), studying Cantonese (as I’ve been doing for the last six months or so), writing (Jon will be reviewing my first 10k words of Decision Tree soon), electronics (the DDR mat project is quite fun), classical and electric guitar, and creating short films (I’m already working on creating a video clip for Ev’s song “We all want to drive our cars”.)

And Mmmm, I’m really looking forward to spending much more time with Veronica.