This photo was taken in late 2015, or at least by mid-January 2016 when it was included in a post.
For context, which may not be easy for anyone that hasn't looked inside the rear doors of The Van as many hundreds, or maybe thousands, of times as I have, we're standing on the ground at the rear of The Van looking at what's inside the passenger-side door.
Starting from bottom left and going around clockwise, we have the inflatable kayak all bundled up in its grey carry-case, the large chamois I used as a bath-towel back then, a green flotation vest, a bicycle helmet, an EasyUp style canopy, and a folding camp chair. A chair I bought in 2010 to go with The then new Van.
The rest of these photos were taken this morning June 11 2026
This is the canopy (a different one) that is pretty much permanently sitting outside the barn under which I sit most mornings looking out across the valley and pond eating plain Greek yogurt (shit tastes terrible but ever since chemo screwed me up helps to keep the gut functioning) and checking emails after working out.
And this is what I'm sitting on.
Yep, same chair. Sitting out in the weather 24/7 for many years now.
A little faded, sinking well into the clay ground, and a bit worse for wear.
Especially as of a few days ago when the abused bottom layer of the two-layered seat portion split as I rocked forward to get up.
Since then that split has spread to the upper layer and I'm pretty much sitting more on the crossed steel supports underneath than on the seat-bottom now.
But I'll just have to make do for a little while longer because it will probably be next week some time before we make a run into town where I can replace it.
It's been a long-time companion and I'll feel a twinge when 'retiring' it. (Edit June 25: I guess not. It went out with the trash yesterday morning.)
Along side that chair is this little folding table I made for Elmer many, many years ago so he would have a place for his coffee and cigarettes when sitting outside his trailer.
Once he was no longer using it I commandeered it for myself.
A little more grey is showing through the green-wash than when it was new, but it's showing no signs of splitting yet.
Wonder if I can find another green chair? (Edit June 25: Nope, the new one is dusty blue. Not a lot of choice in our small town so you take whatcha can get.)
It all started innocently enough with this little wooden
3D puzzle that's been sitting around for a while in my reserve stack (you know, that pile of untouched project stuff you have on standby because, just like running out of books, it would be a disaster to suddenly find you have no project to work on one day).
There's an amazing amount of design and engineering that goes into these lazer-cut puzzles, but they are actually relatively simple things to assemble. This one took
maybe four easy hours spread over a couple of days
to slot all the various components together.
But here's where things went sideways.
I could have, at this point, just simply arranged the pieces in our display case, maybe on top of a nice bit of felt, but somehow I just couldn't leave it at that. (So many things wrong with how my brain works!)
First, I decided to permanently attach the various bits to a base, and since I have loads of foam-board propped up against the wall, leftovers from building out the cargo trailer, that would make the perfect, lightweight, stable base!
But since the hanging-file boxes I use for storing displays when not actually on display have a smaller footprint than the display case (is that too many 'displays' in one sentence?)
I had to strategically split the base so the bits would fit into a single storage box.
Then, that pink foam just wasn't doing it for me, which called for slapping a little paint down.
At first I thought "Wow! That 'water' is pretty intense!" But after a little thought, I decided the intense water would make the unpainted wood puzzle pop. (I don't know if that was true artistry in action or if I was just saving myself the hassle of repainting.)
And, while I'm doing that, how 'bout adding a bit of land over there in the corner for the watertower/lighthouse to live on?
And land isn't flat so that called for a little carving.
Hint, the solvents in rattle-cans will eat foam, but if you lay down very light coats of earthy tones the eating is limited, which is a quick way of toning down the pink and getting a decent, somewhat textured, base-layer for ground cover (Don't do this for water areas which you want to be nice and flat, not randomely textured!).
And if you're really adventurous, you can lay down a few heavier, solvent rich patches in a controlled and deliberate manner, (I have plenty of foam if I screw it up and need to start over, so why not?) to do some quick, more pronounced, terraforming.
I used tools to carve the deep cut across the center, but rattle-cans for shaping the shallow gullies.
With the base-layer down I added some vegetation from my stash of ground cover. Again, a pretty garish color, but in keeping with the intense water.
Shiftinggears, I had a handfull of these little streetlamps I could spot along the dock sections.
That lead to wiring up said dock sections with some under-dock lighting, and for a little pop, the interior of the two buildings got stuffed with some lights as well. Colored this time. And because it made sense, a few more lights for the watertower/lighthouse.
All this required cutting some channels into the bottom-side of the two base sections for wires.
Then it was time
to start gluing things down
and sorting out the wiring.
Foam is, of course, a good insulator, so when using hot-glue to tack wires into the channels, even the low-temp version, it takes a long time for the glue to cool and solidify.
But, apparently that still wasn't enough for me.
When there's leftover room on the sheets all the parts are lazered into the maker of these kits tends to fill that leftover space up with duplicates of some of the more fragile pieces.
Instead of just throwing these duplicates away
I threw on some random pops of color
and built
a few piles of debris, because when have you ever seen a debris-free harbor?
One thing many artists struggle with is stopping when a peice is done. The tendancy is to keep poking at it untill things get over-worked and muddy. The same held true here. When enough was enough I had to force myself to stop adding trash, even though I hadn’t used up all the leftovers yet.
But, aparently I still wasn't quite done.
I took a bit of leftover dock,
broke up one of the 4 boxes you're supposed to set around on the docks, and sanded all the bits so they would sit flat on the "water" and look like they were floating.
A few strategic touches of white paint helped with the illusion
and set the docks and shore-line firmly in the water.
Now, it was time to populate the village!
No, not like that. I'm well past the age, not to mention a few snips, of procreating (My one and only forty-something attempt at this was galavanting around Madrid and Barcelona a couple of days ago.).
I'm talking about the simpler, and far less expensive, plastic minitures version of populating.
But now I had a Goldilocks situation.
The three populations I had on hand were, left to right, way too big, a little too big, and way too small.
Even the new option I bought, far right, was a little too small.
But options are limited in the world of minitures. The 1:87 ratio, second from the left, about a third too big, the 1:160 ratio, third from the left, way too small, so 1:93-95 would probably be just about right. But the closest I could find was 1:100, on the right.
Unlike Goldilocks, this wasn't just right, but but I had to settle for a little too small.
These sets, especially the small ones, often come with, let's call it questionable, paint jobs.
But what do you expect? This set cost me less than a penny per figure. For production efficiency "painting" consists of a couple quick dips into whatever leftover colors have been returned to the paint store as 'yuck!', and a quick swipe of brushed black for hair.
So first step to populating was a little closeup
brushwork to add a few more likable colors.
Again, the trick for an artist is to know when to stop, so I limited myself here. I can always add more people later if I can't stand it, but this is a remote village not an overcrowded metropolis.
Did anyone notice the one-legged man in the tub? Second from the right, orange top, dark pant-leg.
He must have gotten bashed around at some point because not only was a leg missing but his head was cockeyed too,
but I can work with that. After all, every self-respecting seaport needs a peg-leg!
In this case, the tapered tip of a toothpick.
BTW, don't use cyanoacrylate accelerator around those plastic clips! This one, bottom right, intantly exploded into bits and the operation had to be aborted while I fetched an all steel clip instead.
The trick to placing people
is natural groupings
that present the oportunity for the viewer's mind to create a narative, not just haphazardly spread 'randomness'.
Alright!
Home stretch.
Everything fits in the storage box as designed
All the bits
are in place,
And all the lights
are working.
Only thing left to do is dismantle what's currently in the display case, pack it away into a storage box,
and install the Viking Village in its place.
Granted, it looks nice, but really?
Four hours to assemble the original puzzle, but several weeks of a few hours here and there to put the rest of it together, for a silly little nick-nack?
What the hell happened to my life? Where's all the heroic deeds? The monumental accomplishments? The notoriety? The public accolades? - - - Oh yeah, I don't really like any of that shit - - -
