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.

New uploads on Flickr

DSC_0015, originally uploaded by jchanes927.

I uploaded some pix from our picnic at my mom and dad's the other week. This one was one of my favorites.

In other news, I did finish The Desert Spear a week or two ago. I've been too lazy (and busy LEGOing) to start a new book

My Modular Street is Complete

I finished the Green Grocer the other night to complete my street of modular LEGO sets. I have to confess that I don't really like these sets that much. They are too detailed and the builds are tedious. These will be getting a major makeover in the near future.

Also, I figured out how to post pictures from my flickr. YAY!

Mini-cation

Got back from a beach trip with some friends over the weekend and finished up the Fire Brigade tonight. See it here. There's a lot of stuff on the Flickr stream that I have been building lately.

Apparently Flickr won't let you hot link an image any more. (/lame)

Next on the list is the Green Grocer. Then I'm thinking about rebuilding some of my old school official technic sets.