Wall Map Update

I've been making progress on my giant wall map project lately. I had finished the sketching last spring, but then let the momentum die away. However, I have now finished painting the oceans on 7 of the 20 panels - it looks pretty decent. I'm beginning to worry that I'm never going to live in a place with a wall big enough to handle this thing, but that is a problem for later.

You can see that I've finished the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and almost all of the water surrounding South America.


Here you can see the eastern part of Antarctica and Australia just beginning to show up. New Zealand sure looks different than most maps' representations of it; I think that is due to a combination of the map projection I based this on and my own scaling issues. Whatever, it's art. If I ever have to find my way to New Zealand using only this wall map, there are a lot of things going wrong in the world.

I think that my favorite part of the map so far is either the Antarctic Peninsula or the Amazon River Delta in Brazil.

...well, I am also partial to the giant world-crushing cat in this picture.

How Cool I Am

This is what I spent a good chunk of October and November doing:



I tried (and failed) to do this puzzle on my own once in high school...and now you all really know how cool I am. I came back to this puzzle. However, this time I had help.



Maybe the title of this post should have been "How Cool We Are."

Of course, this time I also had some opposition. Dinah has this love for sitting on the table - specifically, for sitting on the puzzle pieces on the table. She'll hop up, move around for a bit, and then just flop and sprawl all over the place. After a visit from Dinah there will usually be 5-10 displaced pieces on the ground. She's a terror.