I can’t believe it’s already December and time to crank up the old Advent Calendar engine once more! This year I purchased two of the available five calendars LEGO has released: Friends and Marvel. Like with last year, I’m doing daily YouTube videos as well as blog posts, so choose whatever medium you like…
Category: Brickpile
Administrivia about Bill Ward’s Brickpile
Advent 2022 Day 18
Power outage at my home means I’ll have to post it tomorrow, sorry!
If you really need your Advent calendar fix, check out The Brothers Brick or Jay’s Brick Blog. Jay’s not doing City, but both of them are also doing Star Wars and Harry Potter, which I decided to skip this year.
Power’s been off since 4:30am on Sunday morning, and I missed the chance to watch the World Cup Final unspoilered and have been juggling a generator and batteries ever since. It’s 2:30am Monday morning as I write this update, and they say it should be back on by 4am. We’ll see. Originally they said 6pm, but all night long whenever they reached their promised time, they push it back by 2-3 more hours…
And now I feel a migraine coming on, and my fingers smell like gasoline. Not having a great time here. But I am very grateful for the friend who loaned me the generator and who also brought their waffle iron and made waffles on my back steps!! Thank you Xander!
Advent 2022 Day 17
It’s day 17 — just one week left y’all! — and today we get the following from the Guardians of the Galaxy, Friends, and City LEGO Advent Calendars:
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I’m still here
What do you say when you haven’t been doing anything to talk about? I haven’t built any new LEGO models in a while … somehow over the course of the pandemic my work area where I built stuff has become a collection pile for junk! But I’m really excited about the new season of LEGO Masters coming up next month, and hoping to watch the Australian show which just started this month as well.
I’m hoping that I feel safe and brave enough to start attending conventions again this year. Bricks by the Bay is coming up in June, and I’ve been wanting to build stuff for our BayLUG collaborative displays on Jungle and Dia de los Muertos. In the meantime, BayLUG is having an in-person parking lot meeting (members only) this weekend, so hopefully that will also help get me inspired.
I’m in the middle of getting my storage locker moved to a new location that’s larger and close to my home, which will make it easier to dig out my work area and maybe get those creative juices flowing.
Watch this space.
Why I’m only doing the City Advent Calendar this year
Over the past few years I have followed a tradition of blogging each of the LEGO Advent calendars every day from December 1st through 24th. I’d buy the 2, 3, or 4 calendars produced by LEGO that year, and each day during the lead-up to Christmas, I’d open that day’s models, and build, photograph, and blog about them. But this year I’ve decided to only do the City Advent Calendar 60268. (CW: Harry Potter)
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New LEGO Conventions page
I’ve added a new page about LEGO Conventions to this site, with links to the conventions’ websites, and for the events I attended, all the trip reports / travelogues / photos I’ve posted on this site about them over the years.
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Follow me on Social Media / Micropolis Houses
I’ve recently been trying to up my social media game, and want to post an update and reminder. I’ve started being a bit more active on Instagram and Twitter, and I’ve been posting on my Facebook page for a while now, but if you’re not following those then now’s a good time to start.
Instagram: @billwardsbrickpile
Twitter: @bwbrickpile
Facebook Page: Bill Ward’s Brickpile
And here’s my latest model, a pair of Micropolis houses, which I also just posted to Instagram.
Thanks to Little Brick Root’s Four Months of Houses project for the inspiration. For more information or to build your own Micropolis, check out the Micropolis standard from TwinLUG, and info about the arches for wiring that BayLUG members use in our Micropolis modules.
Short C-23 Sherpa
This Short C-23 Sherpa is an Army surplus cargo plane that has been converted for use by the US Forest Service as a “smokejumper†plane – firefighters jump out of a perfectly good airplane into a burning forest! I built this model as a commissioned kit for one of the USFS pilots, including instructions.
Talks at Bricks by the Bay 2018
For the first time in a few years I gave my Brick Geometry and Studs On All Sides talks at the Bricks by the Bay LEGO convention in Santa Clara, CA. I updated both presentations for this event by adding a few new pages in each one. Here are the updated versions of the files if you’d like to look at them:
Let me know if you’d like to see me deliver one of these talks at an event near you! Enjoy the information, and happy building!
New Article: Sorting Time
I’m catching up on my backlog of unsorted elements that have been building up over the past few years, and wrote an article about the process. Check out Sorting Time to read about it.