My Blog is Still Defunct

I think this may be my last blog post - laziness has gotten the best of me. I've read The Venetian Betrayal by Steve Berry, Rules of Deception by Christopher Reich and Dead Even by Brad Meltzer. Now I've started The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It remains to be seen if it will be completed.

The Steve Berry book was about what I expected. Rules of Deception started off good and fell apart spectacularly about 3/4 of the way through (I don't recommend it, at all). Dead Even is, I think, my new favorite Meltzer novel.

On the LEGO front I haven't built anything new since Brick Magic and Brick Fair is less than a month away. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out...

Getting ready for BrickMagic

This is going to be my quarterly blog post for 2Q 2011. I'm working on several projects for the NCLUG BrickMagic layout. Hopefully they all get done by the first weekend in May.

I finished The Black Echo and have started The Black Ice. Good times.

My blog is defunct

My last post was in December. It's now March. Since the last post I have finished reading The Passage by Justin Cronin, read Path of the Assassin by Brad Thor and The Judas Gate by Jack Higgins. I'm almost done with The Black Echo by Michael Connelly.

The Passage was epic good. I would say my number three favorite, behind The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer and The Quiet Game by Greg Iles. I was really upset about the ending of the book until I found out that it's the first in a trilogy. I'm definitely looking forward to the next two.

On the LEGO front I participated in LEGOpalooza with NCLUG at the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill the weekend of March 5. It was good times. Brick Magic is in a mere seven weeks, then Brick Fair in August.

Maybe I can find time to update this blog again sometime during the second quarter of 2011.

updates

Almost a month since my last blog post. I'm such a slacker. We had a huge snow this weekend and the first white Christmas that I recall. Good times. We all went sledding in Raleigh this morning then I had to come home for work tomorrow.

On the LEGO front not a lot has been going on. I built a house for a contest on flickr and have been working on some other projects, but nothing major. I got the Emerald Night from my parents for Christmas, and I'm super excited about that.

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I liked the first book the best, but they were all pretty good. The second and third books a really one loooong book and it gets sort of tedious by the end. I got a Kindle from the in-laws, so I downloaded a bunch of classics tonight. Love the free-bees on Amazon.

All around a great holiday with the family. On to 2011!

more books etc.

I finished The Girl Who Played with Fire last night. I'm starting The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest next. In other news I built the Millennium Falcon last night, and it is awesome. I'll post pictures later. The Wolfpack crushed my spirit by losing yet another important late season game to Maryland today. The words epic failure come to mind...

But ND and Auburn had big wins this weekend. Maybe I should have considered the athletic program more when I chose a college. The Pack hasn't won a conference football championship in my LIFETIME (Irony - the '79 team won the ACC, but did not play in a bowl). The last ACC basketball tourney championship was when I was six, regular season when I was eight. Folks, thats 20+ years with no conference champs in sports that matter.

Then again, I choose to pull for the Mets, so I guess I'm a sports masochists.

books

I finished the Lions of Lucerne by Brad Thor today. I realized I never updated the "what I'm reading" do-ma-hickie for that one. O0ps. It was a good read, I'm going to have to start reading more of his stuff. I picked up one of his books on tape for the drive to BrickFair and thought it was pretty good, then spotted Lions at Ed McKay.

LEGO update

So, building a football stadium was cost prohibitive. That little project has been abandoned. I have substantially downsized the farmhouse from BrickFair (and there is no more interior). I'm also working on a couple of other new houses and a train project.

Here's the new, one baseplate farmhouse:

When I finished building the house I picked it up and noticed a problem:

Now I'm happy to say the roof stays put, unless you hold it upside down.

what's up

Wow - it's been a long time since my last post. I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, had an awesome birthday weekend, and watched a lot of football. I thought the book was good, but I'm not sure that it lived up to all the hype. Becky tells me the second book is better. We'll see.

I started a fairly large scale LEGO project, a mini-scale football stadium. It's a long way from done and I want to get it done before I start another project, so LEGO boxes have started to pile up a little bit in the basement. Sort of like books on the "to be read shelf."

What I've been working on lately

Posting some pix of the stuff I've been working on lately. Mostly town stuff...

My first train MOC

With box car

My rebuilt ambulance

Looks a little like a camper, huh?

A little white car. It looks a little like a Golf GTI, although that wasn't my intention.

Interesting fact: this is the first Lego car I've build that has a back seat.

Twitter

I'm on twitter now! Yay me! I'm still boycotting facebook though.