Enden und continunen

(This week I had “beginnen” in my German vocabulary flashcards and putting it with “enden” and other German words I’ve previously encountered like “kennenlernen,” I’m currently not-very-seriously operating on a “when in doubt, add an “en” to make it sound German” theory.)

I’m continuing learning German in the new year, although I am now setting aside less time for it than previously, simply because I want to get some other things done this winter too. So right now, I’m setting aside three to four hours a week for actively studying German, instead of the four or five hours previously. But I’m not counting listening to German in “German time” anymore, so, for example, after studying 45 minutes in the morning yesterday, when I listened to German-language music for twenty minutes or so while making supper in the evening, I didn’t include those twenty minutes as study time. Even though I do hope maybe something will filter through my brain in understandable form from the music too. Eventually. Right now I mostly get “something something, something I am something and something something you something something…”

At long last I have completed the miniature kit of “Mose’s Detective Agency,” from Rolife. I made a few modifications, some on purpose, some by accident. (My lamp is built partially upside down and there is supposed to be an umbrella which I completely failed at cutting – I’ve struggled with origami-type tasks for as long as I can remember – but I added some ink? blood? spots on the floor, and placed some items differently than indicated by kit instruction, including fixing the sign placement. The kit makers show the sign inside the office. Why would the sign be inside the office? Obviously it should be outside, where passerby can read it and decide they need to come in to talk to a detective. Once they’re inside, they already know they’re at a detective agency. Right?)

The instructions with this kit were not great. A couple of times – like with the lamp that came out half upside down – I felt that better instructions might have helped.

The glue that came with the kit was atrocious. It smelled bad, it was an awful struggle to get it out of the bottle, and when I switched to using my own halfway through my only regret was I didn’t switch earlier.

The real problem was that I was just kind of bored with the process for this kit after an hour or two and found it unnecessarily fiddly. A couple of years ago now, I bought a bunch of different kits and 3D puzzles, and this one was an experiment, to see if I liked putting together these kinds of kits. When I concentrated on at last getting it done and off my desk over Christmas-New Years, it took me maybe six or seven hours to finish up, in total it probably took me about fifteen hours. This isn’t that different in time from other puzzles that I’ve done, but I’ve enjoyed them more. This one, I often felt like they were making me do work just for the sake of doing extra fiddly work, and I did not appreciate it.

There seems to be debate in the miniature kit world around if these kinds of kits are better, or if kits which are more cut-out and snap-in-place are better, with this company, Rolife, making changes to their designs in favour of easier, less foldy-gluey designs recently.
I think folding-gluing is probably fine for some people, it’s just not really my jam.
Also I think if you’re going to be building a kit like this, you need to have a dedicated space for working on it – I didn’t count the time it took me to unpack and partially repack the kit-in-progress every time I moved it out from it’s corner on my desk to work on it, but that definitely added time to the process as well.

The highlight with this kit for me was the shrinking of plastic around the wires for the lamp to prevent shorts when the wires were connected – after a brief panic over how I was supposed to heat up the plastic to shrink it into place, (the instructions tell you nothing) I got out my hair dryer and had fun watching the plastic shrivel. And my little desk lamp works, even if it is not perfect!

I do have another, somewhat similar kit, already, which I will maybe struggle through at some point. And I have three or four more sturdy, less fiddly, more mechanical type puzzle-kits, which I look forward to working on more, perhaps later this winter.

I am really happy to have this one done.

And, on the writing front, I have finished my first editing pass on my mini-movie-review-poem chapbook collection, and expect to get it to some potential beta readers by the end of today.

What have you gotten up to so far, in the first week of the new year?