Yes, Khajiit has looked at some his stuff. Mirocu is quite talented!

Yeah the blade was very sharp. The handle was the first this one attempted.

Yes, I wish he lived in the US, I would kidnap him to help me with my house, lol. He does excellent work, and (even though he refuses to work for money) he has an amazing work ethic!

This is so cool that you are making your own knives and swords! Awesome !!!!!

Lol, kidnapping and forced labor. You are hardcore!

Well, at least he is of age so it isn't child labor, lol.

Today's project was composing and mailing holiday snail-mail letters to the four people I still send them to. Three are for old military buddies. One goes to an aunt and uncle in their early 90s. Normally one generic letter suffices. This year my aunt and uncle get a separate letter due to age sadly beginning to take its toll on them. The other three continue to receive identical letters, though I did add about half a page for the friend I keep in closest contact with.

I would likely have procrastinated for some days before composing them except that my brother wanted me to copy HIS letter to our aunt and uncle on my printer. He called last night to remind me that he wants his letter mailed ASAP. We planned to share the same envelop. I was pretty much forced to get mine done or waste money on an extra stamp. Once that letter was out of the way, it only made since to whip out the other(s).

This morning I took my first stab and a long contemplated but never before attempted tidying and simplifying of my Oblivion Bash Installers directory. As a certain US politician might say, it's a mess, especially texture and mesh BAIN packages. I run a mix-and-match combination of a great many different downloads, added piecemeal over the years. Each download normally has its own package. Some packages partly overwrite others. Some house a good many files, only one or two of which are needed. I found one package thus far that is totally overwritten by other packages and thus useless. And so on. None of this does any in-game harm as BAIN is smart enough to know which conflicting files need to take priority, so long as they are arranged in the right order. But . . . it's hard as heck for "me" to keep track of what's what. Plus, should I ever need rebuild my Oblivion installation, it'd be next to impossible reconstruct exactly what I have now, assuming I want it to do so, which for the most part I would.

I started out with some relatively simple (though it took hours) organizing. I combined separate BAIN packages for caves, Ayleid ruins, sewers, and forts into one "Dungeon Texture & Mesh Late-Load Combo" package, making sure to keep my preferred file choices in those few cases when individual packages conflicted. Also made an "Odds & Ends - Texture & Mesh Late-Load Combo" package. It's built, as is the Dungeon package, in true BAIN format, as follows:

01 Cook Steaks
02 Better Ham
03 Better Potion Bottles Reduced
04 Rugs & Tapestries - Mgtr
05 Dinnerware Combo v1dot7
06 Road & City Signs (this itself a combo of two separate sign downloads)

I could have lumped these together in traditional format, but categorizing them as I do makes it easy to see exactly what I have.

The last combo made thus far today is another true BAIN package, consisting of:

01 Cascade Foaming Falls Redux
02 Foaming Falls Elsweyr
03 Enhanced Beach Foam

My plan is that, from now on, when I download texture/mesh packs that relate to the above I'll modify the appropriate Combo package to house 'em, rather than pile on separate packages.

Sooner or later I'm gonna have to tackle wilderness textures/meshes and Landscape LOD files. THAT's gonna be a chore. Over the years I experimented with a great many of those, with lots of little BAIN packages cluttering my install folder. Wrye Bash keeps track of it all, but I go snow-blind just looking at 'em. Gonna make those the last of my combo projects. Hopefully it'll go easier once I'm more comfortable with the process. I don't intend to make one HUGE unwieldy wilderness package, but am not yet sure how I intend to sub-divide.

Benefit thus far... 18 BAIN packages removed (including the one that was totally overwritten and one I stopped using some time ago but forgot to delete), 3 Combo packages added, making my installer folder 15 packages lighter.

At some point I found myself replacing mail with the telephone, and can't seem to make myself go back. The words written may be reread (and so remembered long after the moment has passed) - but in my memory the sound of their voices touches deeper and lingers even when the words they spoke are forgotten.

Heh... indeed. Spent a few hours this afternoon compiling a LandscapeLOD color-map combo pack for my self-created files. Man o man that section was a mess. They were originally housed in somewhere between 18 and 23 separate BAIN packages. (I forgot to write the number down.) To my own amazement, those old packages contained so many variants of the same files that, once redundancies were eliminated, my Combo Package consisted of a grand total of seven files. Seven!!!! I will next tackle a complementary combo package for self created LandscapeLOD normal maps. Those too are a mess, but are a least housed in far fewer individual packages. On the other hand, those old packages aren't well labeled, making the files difficult to decipher. (Unlike other Oblivion textures and meshes, LandscapeLOD file names are written as numbers rather than letters, giving no clue which section of the map they correspond with, especially to someone like myself who has absolutely no head for numbers.

As to correspondence, I'm too slow witted these days to trust myself to spontaneously extemporize orally with any guaranty of success. Leastwise I'd rather not have to depend on being able to do so.

Penguins?!

Small project this evening: glue a jigsaw puzzle I put together about a year ago onto a board. Got the board from "work" a few weeks ago so I could do it. Some trouble getting the puzzle on the board since it was round but I managed.


The motive is animal wildlife from the poles.