My new car.

Make / Model / Year?

There's a conference being held at Uni this week - part of a series of conferences that have been running every other year for a few years now. Last time I was on the organising committee and also presented. This year i was going to present but decided not to - and I also doubted I'd be able to pay the delegate fee to attend.

Bless him, my supervisor sorted me out a day pass on the conference expense account - justified on the grounds that I am helping organise. My 'organising' role has basically been to sort out who will chair the various committees. This has involved a grand total of about 2 hours work spread across several days :P

So on Thursday I get to attend the first day of the conference (always the most exciting - that's when you get your keynote lecture and a lot of the social stuff). I was umming and ahhing for a while which day to attend - there are just too many good panels! Settled on the Thursday, partly because of the keynote lecture, but also because there's a panel with two papers that look like they may feed into two areas that I am really interested in right now (cultural attitudes towards desertion, and knowledge networks/transmission in the military).

So - that's what is making me happy. I get to go and spend a day with a bunch of people from my field - many of whom I've met several times and get along with really well - and hear about some really interesting and original research. In the meantime, round robin emails to delegates asking for volunteers to chair made me feel reconnected with some people I really like and admire, and who seem equally pleased to reconnect with me.

When you get an email from someone whose work you greatly admire and they say 'Oh I am so glad you'll be there, I was hoping I'd get a chance to catch up with you' that's pretty fucking happy-making right there :)

So after all these years of fighting the establishment, now you are the establishment. :lol2:

I am in charge of an event at our school called the Uniform Exchange. Donate uniform stuff your kids have outgrown, and come buy other families' stuff on the cheap. The first two years were solid little events, but this is the first year it's been super organized (thank you, yes I'm awesome, thank you,) and it has unexpectedly grown far larger than it has ever been before.

To wit: I have personally collected, sorted, folded, and stored over 2,500 uniform items in about 28 giant plastic storage bins. These were inside my house until I hit about 17 bins, at which point the school finally gave in to my begging and allowed me to take up some space in their storage unit.

I have rented 20 garment racks, each 6 feet long, which should just barely cover it (and also just barely fit inside our small gym.)

I learned that Old Navy just throws away their hangers, about 2-3 garbage bags' worth each day, at each store. I am in the process of gathering 2,500+ hangers from the three stores nearest me, and sorting them into shirts vs. pants. Currently at a little over 1,800, should only need one or two more collection rounds. The storage unit is overflowing, so I once again have boxes taking over my living room.

But honestly, I love it. This thing is going to be awesome.

Kool.

Pete used to do that for our kids school... maybe not as thoroughly. :)

All the donated used gear at our school's sports equipment free swap fit on a six foot folding table. You wouldn't be able to fill half a garment rack.

Way to go brother!

Not today - but on Thursday when I went to the conference, the day's activities included a guided tour of the Waterloo exhibition at the Leeds Royal Armouries. It was very good. I always love the Armouries but getting a tour of the artwork by a guy who really knows his stuff was great fun. Very powerful stuff too.

I'd only ever seen Maclise's Waterloo cartoon in books - seeing it full scale was breathtaking. It was the preparatory drawing he did for what would become his mural painting, The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. But the cartoon is much bigger than the mural - it's enormous - made up of panels set next to each other across a long wall - done in chalks (I think). I've never seen anything like it. The detail was staggering. I could have just stood there looking at it for hours.

There's a fairly decent pic of it here - but the scale really doesn't come across:

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhi...clisewaterloo#

As well as the art, there were many fascinating artifacts. One of the most compelling and disturbing things to see was the breastplate of a young cavalry man (I think) with a hole ripped right through the front and back out the other side. They'd set it up on display with the cannon ball (the small canon shot type) at the position it would have been as it exited.

God damn, 9x13 metres, not what I pictured when you said cartoon. I figured it would be outlines of items in the general layout.
I suppose by working out all the detail in the "cartoon" at home, when he went to do the wall painting at parliament where undoubtedly there was pressure to get it done, he would have already made most of the decisions.

Yeah - and he made some interesting changes for the finished painting too. On the right of the cartoon, there is a vivandierre with a cart of loot and goods and in the cartoon there's a dead soldier just behind her, leaning over the side of the cart - in the final painting that becomes a baby strapped to her back, and the baby is reaching into the cart to play with the loot.

There are some other changes too that are more political in nature - one guardsman is altered to a highlander, for example - so we get representatives of each part of the union in one of the set pieces.


But yeah - the scale is incredible and the level of detail mind-blowing.

:cheerldr:

Since you asked ... first off, the Altima I bought in 2008 with help from the awesome Jim Helm had a catastrophic event and passed at the age of 10. She was a good car.

For the first time in about 25 years, I bought a NEW new car. A 2015 Honda Civic ES. This car is teh awesome. Handling and gas mileage, the electronics, cameras and gadgets ... sun/moonroof, bluetooth... OMG I love this car.