Yesterday I inked all the wood pieces. It’s subtle, but adding some color on the edges adds some dimensionality. Today’s work so far was to attach all the shingles on the tower roof (4 rows of 8 shingles each).
Not only does this Bungalow have 200+ parts, it also requires most of those parts to be embossed and/or inked. Here I have just started inking the bottom of the shingles with black.
Embossing pieces entails putting them in an embossing folder and whacking them with a mallet. My phone kept warning me that I was being subjected to sustained loud noise as I pounded away. I was wearing hearing protection, however, and ignored it.
Here’s the beginnings of the dormers and all the inked shingles.
And here are the finished dormers, the base, and some structural elements for the tower.
Next up were all the “wood” parts. Every one of these had to be embossed. The inking will come now that they are glued into shape. Making the window casings wasn’t too difficult, but making the beams was finicky work, especially the ones that are L-shaped.
I think most of the components are now done. Next step: putting them all together!
The workers finished up the revamp of the front yard last night. I am very, very pleased with the results.
Here’s the old look for comparison:
Here are two pictures of what my totally “blah” front yard looked like up until today:
Here’s what it looked like when the crew knocked off work at the end of today:
It’s on schedule for getting finished tomorrow; I’m really looking forward to it!
Here’s how I displayed my water lilies before:
The vase, itself, weighs about 8.5 pounds. With the aquarium rock in it, it was very difficult to move. I have finally found something lighter that still gives a nice water effect. It’s a mixture of blue and white shredded paper. Basically cut the weight in half!
I made these over the weekend.
I still have a few more tulips to make, but then I’m going to be focusing on making this “Bewitched Bungalow”. I need to have it done in order to set it out at the beginning of October.
It’s a rather ambitious project as it has about 225 pieces! Here they are all cut out and ready to start assembling:
I was asked to make a quick bouquet with yellow daisies and red roses, not a combination I would have thought to put together on my own. I made the centers the same color so that they had a shared element. It turned out to be a nice combo!
Since moving to the other side of Henderson, I have been trying out a number of new restaurants and cuisines. There is a lot of good food here without having to venture anywhere near the Strip.
One cuisine I am not very familiar with is Japanese. Just a couple of blocks away from me is a nice-looking place called “Osaka” and after looking at their website, I decided to broaden my palate and give it a try.
According to their website:
Osaka was the first Japanese restaurant in Las Vegas when it opened in 1967. Now with two locations, West Sahara and Henderson, it has become a hometown favorite and withstood the test of time. It is currently operated by the second generation of the Nakanishi family.
Osaka Japanese Bistro in Las Vegas was voted by Japan’s largest weekly magazine, the Asahi Shukan, one of the 50 best Japanese Restaurants. Of all the Japanese restaurants around the world, Osaka was the only one outside of Japan given this honor. Osaka has also been selected twenty times by the readers of the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper to receive the “Best of Las Vegas” restaurant award.
Osaka has built its reputation in carrying only the finest in fresh fish and its ability to create a variety of rolls which satisfy even the most adventurous of tastes. The restaurant also boasts carrying the most variety of fish of any sushi bar in town. Currently, we are carrying exotics that are usually found only in Japan such as aoyagi (live surf clams), awabi (live abalone), sayori (halfbeak), katsuo (bonita), kanpachi (rudderfish), and Blue Fin Toro.
I figured if I was going to try Japanese food, this sounded like a good place to start. I first went to the restaurant a couple of weeks ago. This is the lunch menu; the dinner menu goes on for pages.
I was in the mood for noodles that first day and ordered the soba noodles with shrimp tempura. I also got the Lisa Lisa lunch rolls. The soba and shrimp were very good, but the Lisa Lisa was incredible.
For my second visit, I had the Tempura Udon noodles and the Japanese Lasagna lunch roll. Again, the noodles were very tasty, but the lunch roll was absolutely delicious.
Now, about the chopsticks:
I have never been particularly comfortable or dexterous with chopsticks. I wouldn’t starve if they were all I had to eat with, but I’ve never seen much point in pretending that I don’t find knives, forks, and spoons a lot easier to work with.
However, since the restaurant wasn’t crowded and the waitstaff wasn’t terribly busy, I decided to take whatever amount of time I needed and eat the meals with chopsticks. The first meal wasn’t too difficult: I managed the lunch rolls fairly well and the noodles also made it to my mouth without too much trouble.
The second visit, though, was another story. I seemed to be having a much worse time with the chopsticks then I had just the week before. The lunch rolls tended to fall apart before I got them to my mouth. And the chopsticks kept crossing themselves and twisting. I felt like a total klutz.
But the real difficulty was the Tempura Udon. It came with a spoon, of course, and I could easily slurp up the broth. The noodles themselves, however, were a seemingly impossible task. They were thick, they were long, and they were incredibly slippery. They wouldn’t stay on the spoon; it was all I could do to occasionally get one to stay on the chopsticks long enough to suck in the whole noodle with broth flying everywhere as the noodle flailed about.
The manager and I had been having conversations about vacations and food and other topics whenever he was free. I had told him I wasn’t very familiar with Japanese food and that I was just thinking of working my way through the menu. About halfway through my udon, I decided to demonstrate this ignorance by asking how I was supposed to eat this dish. Just as he was about to tell me, he was called off to seat some other customers, and I continued to struggle on.
When he came back, he said:
“Yes, those noodles are very thick and extremely slippery. I usually eat mine with a fork.”
My doctor had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for her new office. Daffodils are supposed to be a flower signifying new beginnings, so I made these for her new space.
Tuples and Attributes 