SPA Modeler

Plastic ships are long slow projects. Wood ships, are even more so by an order of magnitudes. And above all, don’t force any sessions of progress. Embrace that this will be a stop & go project, that your mojo will flow like the tides, and you’ll be just fine on this.

You are so right Stick. Good advice.

Thank you both. Sincerely. After I took a basic inventory of pieces, I noted that the original owner included the sales receipt from the hobby store where he purchased the kit in 1990. On one hand I feel good picking up where the builder left off - unbuilt and now build status pending. On the other I feel sadness for all the unbuilt projects out there. Maybe he was a collector... I will take photos of the pieces inside over the weekend... or perhaps later today.

Yeah, I'll bet there are more purchased unbuilt kits than built. It is so sad when a modeler passes and his wife sells the stash for pennies the dollar. We get them and the cycle continues.

Truth. Wisdom. I felt so many emotions from seeing that invoice. It was meant to be seen—bagged carefully and prominently. I don't know. I get emotional when I see things like this.

The receipt brings to mind something from my work past. I had the handle on a death where an older gentleman had passed away due to old age/natural causes. Standard procedure is to walk thru the location to look for any evidence of foul play to insure that things are as they appear, and not staged. Going thru the home, from photos and other such memorabilia I could see that he was a former sailor, and appeared to be a WWII Navy vet. In one area of the house, I came upon his hobby work area, and there on his workbench was a nearly complete large scale Fletcher class destroyer. It looked to be the Lindberg “Blue Devil” kit, 1/125 scale kit. I do hope that his survivors kept that memento of his past and did not just toss it into the trash.

Thank you so much, Carlos—an incredible story and especially in light of seeing a man’s modeling legacy—what we leave behind—encapsulated in a hobby shop receipt or a model being assembled on the bench. When my father passed suddenly and unexpectedly after retiring he was living alone in Palm Harbor, Florida at a Lutheran retirement home. The heart attack which claimed his life happened at his desk. He was repairing his answering machine and left behind a list of items to buy at the hardware store. I kept the list.

This is going to be fantastic to follow. I have a few plastic sailing ships to finish; this might just give me the impetus to get them done.

Get a building then!

I'm trying but with all the handyman work I've been doing and preparing for my trip to the Nationals; I barely have any energy to even eat before heading to bed. LOL! On the plus side, I've lost some more pounds; down to 242 right now. Walking around at the San Diego Comicon sure helped too.