With the several model completions I’ve posted recently and with at least one more to come shortly, it might appear as if I’m turning these things out at an amazing pace.   In reality all I’m doing is finishing a bunch of projects I nearly completed in the past, lost interest in, and am now revisiting so I can clear the bench for a new project.

Here’s another WWI biplane.  Love those pretty colors!  More photos here.

Saturday morning was Altered Fluid’s fifth outing on the Saturday morning radio show Hour of the Wolf.  While the process of critiquing a story is fairly rote for us anymore, doing it live on the radio does provide quite a thrill.  This time through we went at Rajan’s story “School Bus” and were as gentle with it and him as we thought necessary.

For those of you who didn’t feel like getting up at 5 a.m. to listen live, you can download an audio file of the broadcast from the Hour of the Wolf website, June 27th broadcast.

Senses Five Press has posted my interview with Paul Tremblay, from the new issue of Sybil’s Garage, on their website. Check it out here.

Besides visiting the NASM while in D.C. this past weekend, I also spent more than my fair share of time out at the Manassas National Battlefield Park.  It’s a beautiful woodland area now smack dab in the middle of urban sprawl.  I have to admit to not knowing a lot about most of the first battle of Bull Run, and I have only studied about one aspect of the Second Battle.

My area of interest is Brawner’s Farm, where the Iron Brigade first saw combat as a unit on August 28th, 1862.  The farm remained in private hands after the war and up until the late 20th century.  It’s still a relatively unknown part of the park, as the National Parks Service is still restoring the site and mentions it only in passing in the park literature.  It took me a while to find the place amidst terrific thunderstorms that moved through the Washington area on May 29th, but find it I did, at last, and during a 15 minute break in the weather I was able to walk the field completely alone.

The photos are random shots from the Henry Hill area of the First Bull Run area of the battlefield, and the shots of the white two-story house are the Brawner farmhouse.

This past weekend Kristen and I traveled to Washington D.C. While she was in conferences all weekend, I rented a car and did my usual “visit old stuff” thing. I made several trips out to the Manassas battlefield (more on that in another post) and finally made my way to the National Air and Space Udvar-Hazy Center.  This center, far from the confines of the D.C. mall, is in a remodeled hangar at Dulles airport.  The facility is massive and houses dozens of rare and wonderfully restored aircraft.  I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

Some of the photos are a bit on the dark side as I only had my small camera (one does not take the Chinatown bus while lugging a ton of camera equipment) and the built-in flash just isn’t effective in such an enviroment from any sort of distance.

Sybil’s Garage #6 has hit the streets.  A lot of great ficti0n in this issue, along with my interview with author extrodinaire Paul Tremblay.

Fellow Altered Fluidian Kris Dikeman has a story up for the storySouth Million Writers Award.  Her story, “Nine Sundays in a Row” was published online by Strange Horizons.  It’s honestly one of my favorite stories from the past two years from any market and any author.  Truly a wonderful bit of storytelling.

Check out the story at Strange Horizons, and vote.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse and swapping about of the words “than” and “then”.  Drives me absolutely nuts.  So much so that at my old desktop support position I continually corrected the call tracking tickets of others and let them know of their mistake whenever they’d use one in the place of the other.  Flash-forward two years, I’m back at the law firm as a consultant for a Blackberry rollout project, and I see the reminder in the photo attached to a co-worker’s monitor.

Makes me smile.

Senses Five Press posted the TOC for the next issue of Sybil’s Garage.  While not listed in the post, I have an interview with author Paul Tremblay in this issue.

The fiction and poetry are as follows, and I can say having read most of the pieces that this is going to be one of the best issues to date.

Poetry
Liz Bourke    “The Girl”
Donna Burgess    “Ashes”
Lyn C. A. Gardner    “God’s Cat”
Alex Dally MacFarlane    “The Wat”
Susannah Mandel    “Metamorphic Megafauna”
Tracie McBride    “An Ill Wind”
Kristen McHenry    “Museum”
Jaime Lee Moyer    “One by Moonlight ”
Daniel A. Rabuzzi    “Backsight”
Michel Sauret     “Brick Wall Giants”
Michel Sauret     “Son of Man”
J.E. Stanley    “City of Bridges”
Sonya Taaffe    “Skiadas”
Marcie Lynn Tentchoff    “Sun-Kissed”

Fiction
Rumjhum Biswas    “Mother’s Garden”
K. Tempest Bradford    “Élan Vital”
Autumn Canter    “Day of the Mayfly”
Becca De La Rosa    “Not the West Wind”
Eric Del Carlo    “Come the Cold”
Jason Heller    “The Raincaller”
Paul Jessup    “Heaven’s Fire ”
Vylar Kaftan    “Fulgurite”
Keffy R. M. Kehrli    “Machine Washable”
Sean Markey    “Waiting for the Green Woman”
James B. Pepe    “I am Enkidu, his Wild Brother”
Simon Petrie    “Downdraft”
Genevieve Valentine    “The Drink of Fine Gentlemen Everywhere”
Stephanie Campisi    “Drinking Black Coffee at the Jasper Grey Café”
Toiya Kristen Finley    “Eating Ritual”
Donald Norum    “An Old Man Went Fishing on the Sea of Red”

Here’s another of my recent completions.  This was a quick build as it’s actually a snap-together kit that I built for a group project.  I’m not a fan of Luftwaffe aircraft, but this was a fun build and I learned a few things.  Click on the image for more photos and comments on the build.

One thing that I’ve realized by doing two website updates in the past week is that I need to migrate my personal site to Dreamweaver.  I’ve moved all of my client’s websites to Dreamweaver or templates over the past two years, but I’ve never taken the time to do my personal one.  The old FrontPage application and the convoluted upload procedure I have to go through takes any fun out of the process, and while the migration to Dreamweaver won’t be quick and easy, it’s definitely time to do it.