Yodeller

Since I have been cooking mostly for myself I tend to plan my weekly menu at once. That way I don't have to do groceries so often. Cooking for one means there is usually food for several days at once, so it's not really that many dishes I need to come up.

The problem is sometimes a food lasts for two days, other times three. That combined with the short expiry dates of some products can lead to situations where I still have food left, but need to already prepare the next one so the ingredients don't expire.

For example today I still had food from Friday left that would have been enough for the day. But the meat I had reserved for the next one had to be used today.

Couple of days ago there was an ad hoc inquiry whether anyone would be interested playing some boardgames today in our playgroups chat. There were few interested (as usual) and a couple of games suggested as well. I also suggested a game I just recently got, given that I have enough time to get familiar with the rules.

My suggestion got some interest, so I had to start going through the rules. The game isn't the most simplest, especially with it's extensive campaign mode rules. Luckily it also has a single scenario mode which skips a lot of those rules and I only had ro focus on actual gameplay rules and how to setup such single scenario play.

Having played a lot of boardgames it wasn't that impossible task. Many of the mechanisms were quite familiar from other games. But the challenge comes when the rules are quite, but not exactly like in some other game. For example the quote common ruling in these type of games is how to determine the line of sight (LoS). It's usually rather simple, but there are however differences how to determine the LoS. In this particular game an interesting detail was that it matters which way the enemies are facing. They do have different sight range depending whether it's to the direction they are facing, to the back or to the sides.

Anyway, after a rigorous study I only had to double check a few rules details during our playthrough.

Comment...

Roadmap Adagia Lifelog

After not being able to finish building the ornithopter yesterday I could barely wait until I was able to get back to it after work today. It didn't took that long to go through the remaining bags and I was able ro put it together just in time before I had ro leave to play some badminton with my wife and her friends.

I'm quite impressed with the model. The technics parts is a true marvel of LEGO engineering. The fact that the mechanism is rather well hidden inside the otherwise regular looking LEGO model is astonishing. And by regular I don't mean it's nothing spectacular in that sense either. It's a really nicely put together model overall.

While the part count might not be that impressive as some of the premium models it's still not a small one. I was actually surprised how big it turned out to be. Of course most of it is due to the quite impressive wingspan of it's eight wingblades that gives it the wingspan of nearly 80 centimeters. That's 20 centimeters more than the UCS Millenium Falcon which contains over 5 times more pieces!

I finally got started building the LEGO Royal Atreides Ornithopter model from the Dune movie. I've had it waiting on my shelf since it's release back in the spring (around the time the part 2 movie was released). I wanted to build it much earlier, but for some reason LEGO decided to use some colourful brick and connectors in some parts of the model.

Those are just small details, but from the otherwise cool looking dark gray (dark bluish gray to be exact) those few colourful spots stand out. Luckily those are easily replaces using more suitable coloured parts. It just took me this long to finally acquire all the required replacement pieces.

The model is surprisingly challenging to build. It combines some advanced Technics techniques along with interesting methods combining bricks in rather innovative way. I was assuming I could easily finish the build in one evening, but I had to give up on that hope after going through the first seven bags of bricks (out of ten). With "only" 1369 pieces it's nowhere the biggest model I have built. Based on the piece count alone I estimated it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to finish.

Maybe they designed this set complex enough so that it's build time would too align with the movies runtime...

Today I visited one of our smaller offices. It's not actually even pur own office, just a co-working space where our employees can book desks and meeting rooms. The team is also not that local - put of the 6 people working at that "office" over half are not actually even living at the town, but around that area. They also mostly work remotely so it's rather uncommon for them to be at the office at the same time (we still missed one though today).

Even though they don't work that often together at the same location, or even in the same projects they do have quite nice team spirit. Rather different than the people at pur bigger offices have.

It was also nice for me to see them (almost) all. It might be the difference that I don't see them that often, but we had some really nice and interesting conversations throughout the day. The same theme continued in the afternoon when we headed to some beers and darts after the working hours.