Clay!Geek

After mattmatt's inspiring example, Jimmy and I spent a chunk of time this afternoon/evening making little dudes out of sculpey, for use as miniatures in my D&D game. You can see pics of my efforts in my Amazingly Geeky Gallery, but here's the group shot:



The things I've learned from this experience are as follows:
1) Something about dwarves lends itself to excellence in clay miniatures. mattmatt's dwarven cleric looks great, and my dwarven monk came out better than any of the others I did.

2) My webcam is a really, really bad camera. I may borrow my dad's much nicer digital camera sometime soon and take better photos of these little guys.

I'll probably end up doing some of the less-in-demand-as-miniatures characters later on this week, so you may be seeing a few Valmaiverse regulars in clay form in the not-too-distant future.

My Front Yard is a Place of Weirdness

It just never ends over here.

Walking home from class just now, I saw a guy lying on his back in my front yard, behind the wall. I honestly can't tell if he's asleep, or passed out, or what... I'm suspecting he's been drinking or doing drugs, from the way he's splayed out (does not look like normal sleep posture). I called the police. I told Jameson that if he wasn't on crutches right now, I would have had him go out with me to try and find out if the guy needs medical attention or something, but since my boy has limited mobility, I don't want to get close enough to a strange man who may or may not be in a chemically altered state to tell anything useful.

Soooo... I'll just wait nervously for the cops to show up. And wish that I had a front yard that was less attractive to strangers, I guess.

ETA: The very nice bicycle policeman woke the guy up (he was only sleeping, after all) and told him to go away. He went. Then the policeman told mom and me that if the guy comes back on our property, we can have him arrested for trespassing.

And then, as I was coming back to my house after going next door to talk to the policeman and mom, I saw the same guy asleep on the steps of the building next door, right across from my front door. Somehow, I don't really feel totally ok with this.

I guess I really need to find out who actually owns that building, and have a talk with them about what they intend to do about the fact that whenever transients aren't sleeping on the steps, drug dealers are selling their wares there. I can handle the occasional emotional teenager having a dramatic moment in my yard or driveway. I'm pretty deeply uncomfortable with all of the scary, fully adult persons engaging in numerous illegal activities ten feet from my front door, though.