Vacation, Spy Kayak, Ant Lions and Lucius

First off, a WIP pic of Lucius for all the 40k bloglists. I'm using glazes of VGC somber gray for the black highlighting. I need to cool down the palette on the leg-faces a little. They are a little warm compared to the chest-faces. I also need to remember that I have less than a month to go, and I still have two arms and a backpack to add! Get to work, me!

Mostly Armless

In non-painting news, I'm back from a great week at my parents' cabin in Manistique, MI. The kids loved it so much last year that we made a real point of going back this year. Wanna know something else? I really don't want to go back to work tomorrow. Sigh.

It's quite picturesque there.

Your trip starts at Michigan.org (quote from the "Pure Michigan"
ad campaign that promotes local tourism)

The cabin is right on the northern shore of Lake Michigan, and a unique feature is the abundance of ant lions. Look them up if you don't know what they are. Here is a little glimpse into how many there are:


I tried to grab video of one catching an ant, but it just wasn't very dramatic. Some captures are pretty epic, but I never managed to have my phone camera nearby when they happened.

My parents have a strange neighbor up there. While my brother and his fiance's kids were swimming, he waded out in his clothes to reprimand my brother for the children screaming (specifically the six year old girl.)  My brother (always the diplomat hur hur) assured him that the little girl had been screaming for six years and that it was unlikely that she was going to stop today. I guess hearing screaming a few hundred feet from his cabin made him hear "danger." I sympathize to a degree if he thought kids were out there alone and drowning, but the whole family was out there. Later, as my folks and brother and I were relaxing under the shade of an awning, the neighbor paddled his kayak over and stopped aligned with where we were sitting and just stared at us for something like 7 or 8 minutes, after which he paddled off.

I'm sitting in my Spy Kayak giving you the stink eye!

If he was trying to make a point, I missed it entirely.

The beach this year was littered with crayfish parts and mussel shells. Literally millions of them. It was better than dead Alewives, that's for sure.

If Nottingham was ruled by crayfish, this is what the WHFB
Realms of Battle table would look like.

I also found a rock that looked happy. Not much more to say than that.

Happy rock is happy.

For some reason this year there was bumper crop of wood ticks. We were constantly pulling those bloodsuckers off our clothes. Occasionally one managed to find some skin and chomp down to feed. My brother (such an educator) actually had all the kids gather around to demonstrate a tick searching for a feeding spot on his arm. After letting it bite, he pulled if off and demonstrated how tough they are by smashing things onto it on the tabletop. It's amazing that something the size of a grain of rice can feed on blood until it's the size of a grape. In case you were wondering, the wood tick is pretty harmless; it's the deer tick that carries Lyme disease. That variety is only about the size of a pinhead, so much harder to detect.

But now I'm back, so it's time to get back into the regular swing of things. Did I mention I don't want to go to work tomorrow? I'm pretty sure I did.