Yodeller

Felt already better today so decided to continue building the Rivendell. The plan was to just finish the second part, but once getting up to speed it's hard to stop.

The third and final part is almost finished too. There is still one hour and fifty minutes of the last movie left, and eight bag of pieces (out of 49) so it still seems possible to finish the build in time it takes to watch the shorter versions of the movies.

There has been some quote challenging and unique techniques required to build the model and some that require quite a lot of focus to get the details right. So far it has been a lot of fun regardless. There are a lot of details that will be hidden when the build is finished, so the only way to know about those is actually building the set yourself.

While the nine hours build time seems still doable I couldn't have done it in that time alone. Luckily my youngest one has been helping me in the building which in addition to speeding up the building adds another nice thing to the mix: doing it together.

Today has been a strange day. I was already feeling the coming sickness yesterday evening and the night went with very little sleep. I got up at half past three as it felt impossible to fall asleep at that point.

I got up and took some medicine and then settled on the couch. Then, just like that the clock was already eight! I must have fallen asleep really fast after the medicine kicked in.

After waking up the second time I felt better for a while but it was just momentarily. The tiredness and powerless feelings came back and I was sleeping, or at least something sleeplike on and of throughout the day.

Sucks to be sick.

After rigorous search for a way for me to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended editions in remastered 4K format I finally had to give up. If I would stick to that requirement my LEGO Rivendell set would have never got built.

It seems all the streaming and online rental services only offer the remastered theatrical versions here in Finland. I was so desperate that I actually considered giving in and getting them from Apple TV, the only one that seemed to have them available. Unfortunately it seems it's so hard to make a working streaming application for Android that only 4 out of 5 major streaming providers have been able to do that.

So my options were either watching the theatrical versions with better quality, or watch the extended editions in lower quality as I already own those original DVD boxes. The problem with the later option was that it would have required me to get a DVD player as we haven't got one for years in the house.

The set is estimated at around 12 hours build time, just perfect foe the runtime of the extended editions which total just a bit over 12 hours. The theatrical versions run only for 9 hours, so there will be 3 less hours for me to complete the build.

Challenge accepted!

Starting collecting something that has been on the market for a quite while and is still bringing our new items is rather challenging. Especially if you are starting a bit late.

Luckily the collector fly has only bitten me for things I already had. It's nice to have at least something to start a collection, would be even more challenging to start from scratch.

But even of I had a good starting collection there are still many old things missing. The beauty of collecting such things is that it's not just walking (browsing) into a store and buying what you need, but hunting the items around the shops in good enough condition and reasonable price. For the new things you miss that part. Of course it makes it a bit more chaotic as you don't really want to focus on finishing just one part of your collection, but getting what you find.

The new things, while easier to acquire, is a different challenge. While you need to keep some budget available to catch those good finds from the older items there is always new things coming up you need to get before they go out of stock/print.

Doing both at the same time is the real challenge. It would be so much easier if either the list of items you want wouldn't be constantly growing with new items, or that there would be only a few nee items coming out every now and then you could just go and buy.

Today we celebrate our country's 106 years of independence. On this day 106 years ago we claimed independence from Russia. Finland is in the minority of countries that don't celebrate the independence from the United Kingdoms.

There are 65 countries out of 195 that have been at some point under British rule. Around 50 countries have never been under the rule of another country and the rest are mostly the ex colonies of European countries from the colonial era. Most of those 50 countries that don't celebrate the independence from the rule of another country are, or have been a part of some sort of union with other countries and still celebrate some sort of national day to signify their departure of said unions. There are only two countries that don't celebrate either: United Kingdom and Denmark.