HAY SEEDS.

 It's been a funny few days. Saturday I felt dog rough and worse after work, thought I may be going down with Man Flu. Felt  so terrible I almost broached the Talisker and Manuka honey to wash down a couple of 50mg dihydrocodeine. I was good and had a hot chocolate and a load of Ibuprofen. I'll save the morphiate stuff for later, dihydrocodeine is great but hard to get hold of, it's cheap and doctors don't earn commission on it. Sunday I wasn't up to much and walking the dogs was an effort. I woke this morning full of the joys of spring and set off to see the horses. We seem to be in a stable weather pattern at the moment, we get a sprinkle of snow at night and it's dry with some sunshine during the day. I can live with this weather.

Once I hit the 'B' Road to Newburgh things improve dramatically, this only lasts for a couple of miles, if that, and it's fine going down hill. I like an optimist and bothering to wheel the tin and plastic bin to the road in this weather is the epitome of positive thinking. This is Ian's bin, I was going to call and wheel it for him as he can't walk. He went on a healthy cycling trip to Holland and rode into a canal and since then he's been very grumpy and confined to a small electric Quad. If I'd wobbled off a push bike into a canal and been run over by a barge I'd have a proper Quad and bugger the Green nonsense. He's obviously a grumpy man with principles and a fat, stroppy German wife. We have three bins now so I'm thinking of making a tow bar with hooks on to enable three bins to be taken down at once. I'll tow them with the Quad. Get the job done quick sticks.

This is steeper than it looks, the Highways have now filled the salt bins, better late than never. The bin you can see on the left of the road had been squashed and they have replaced it. It's eye opening to watch them work. First we had a man in a little van who was trying to find the bin flattener, I suspect folk blamed DPD or the Morrison's delivery van, could have been Iceland or Tesco.  A week later we had a 30cwt pickup with two men to drop the new to the glen bin off and take the flattened one away. Three days later the Gritter arrived and tipped a pile of salt. How the salt got from the road and into the bin is a mystery. The glen is sparsely populated but folk don't usually miss much, if anything, they missed the salt being shifted into the bin or forgot to tell me the saga.

I'm having a wonderful time in Blender, the next two birthdays are for folk with a three letter name so I thought I'd make a balloon with their name on, inflate it and pop it. As usual I have a fall back video and the way this is going I may need it.

This looks okay but won't animate properly, it also has nasty creases in the top. This is easy to write on as it's a UV sphere and all Blender primitives are UV unwrapped. This is near enough to a sphere for their mapping to work. The colour and text are done in Photoshop but any image editor can do this, it's simply a square image.

White with the text on.

This is modelled completely differently. It starts of as a cube and looks much better. but it has to be unwrapped. I am useless at unwrapping but got by in middling style this time.  I now have to solve the problem of having a crumpled up balloon and a fully inflated one. At the moment it sticks where it is in the second image and starts where it is in the first image. I could fake the fully inflated one as it starts off as I modelled it but I want the empty balloon look.

Good enough for video and a tidy bit of UV unwrapping. I must do more of it but there is so much to play with in Blender. The bottom stroke on the 'L' is a bit odd but not to worry, I think it must be lying across one of my marked seams. I'll shift stuff about a bit.

I was going to ask why Von de Lying is still in a job, how she got the job is a post on it's own but a funny thing happened at the horses. 

The paddocks are all snowed up and the horses are naughtier and more playful in snow. It takes twice as long to muck out working round a horse than it does to clear and bed the same loose box empty. I thought to take one out, tether him to the wall and do the job and pop him back in. He thought he was away to roll in snow and bite and rip his friend's rug to bits. He was well poked off. Whinnying, pawing the yard and generally making my life a misery with his racket, plus he was setting the other seven off. I went out to remonstrate using my special words and he cuddled up, it was the full works blowing in my ears and nuzzling. Please let me out to play. Just goes to show that bad words overused are ignored by animals. Only posh horsey women get offended when I'm the one using them whilst loading their spoilt buggers into a truck. The horses are used to it and couldn't give a....It starts with an 'F' and rhymes with truck.

It is good to see them enjoying the snow but it can get out of hand and if they overdo things there is a vets bill or a horse having to be shot. I washed my ears out on Sunday but realised I was hard of hearing on the way home. So hard of hearing I didn't realise for ten minutes that I was listening to that tosser Vine, I listen to the bloke that does the pop quiz on Radio 2 and Whine sneaks in straight after if one is slow switching to Tay FM or Classic FM. The tinker Bramble had been blowing hay seeds in my ears, dozens of them. Friday it's a flogging with red hot rusty barbed wire for him. 

Have fun.