Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
I guess yesterday’s model represented the Alchemy profession rather than Cooking, since today’s model appears to represent an alchemy supplies shop:
On the City calendar, we are supposed to get a photographer minifig, but I got a mountain climber:
Dark green legs FTW!
Alert readers will recall that I had a mistake in the Day 2 City calendar as well. I wonder if anyone else is finding these errors?
No new figs today but more accessories for our previous figs. The warlock now has a cooking fire and cauldron. I guess she’s leveling her cooking skill? I don’t know any recipes that call for snake meat in WoW though.
On the City side, the diver has one of those underwater self propelled units. Probably a good thing because with that life vest he’ll need some help getting down to any depth.
Here we see the figs with their new stuff. The diver had better watch his feet with that propeller so close and unshrouded!
But one thing I noticed just now was that the diver has the same face as the Good Twin and Evil Twin! I guess that means he must be Chaotic Twin. Here’s the family portrait:
Happy Feast of Winter Veil!
Today the Castle theme gets a new figure – this time it’s a human warlock, casting a shadow bolt spell. She has apparently run out of Soul Shards and cannot summon her Voidwalker. Perhaps tomorrow’s set will provide a minion for her?
Meanwhile the diver from yesterday gets his fins along with a “diver down” flag buoy thingy and life vest. The fins are attached to the sprue from molding. Remember when 1×1 round plates came that way? Ah those were the days…. Anyway, I don’t see how he’s going to dive down very far to use his speargun with that life vest on!
So I have decided to take a stab at a little LEGO e-commerce. I now have a Bricklink store where you can buy new and used parts. My plan is to put into the store any sets that I buy duplicates of, and to hold back just the parts from those sets that I want. I’ll also be selling off the instructions and sticker sheets that I don’t want.
Note to local Bay Area people: get free shipping and/or pay for your item in cash by picking your items up from me directly at any BayLUG event that I’m attending. If that isn’t convenient, maybe we can meet in person some other way to exchange the items.
This is my first ever train car MOC, would you believe?
I’d done locomotives before, but never a car, at least that I can think of…
This gondola car first appeared at the November 2008 Great Train Expo layout by the Bay Area LEGO Train Club. I made two of these cars with a cargo of coal.
One end has a brake wheel; the other does not. Originally I built it with brake wheels on both ends but was told that was not correct, so I removed it from one end.
Today we get a Frogman and a Frog.
The City calendar gives us a new minifig, so now the pie vs pizza mystery is forgotten and we have some kind of fish spear hunting guy with two mask/snorkel pieces, but no flippers or SCUBA tank.
On the Castle side, our intrepid dwarf warrior gets a new axe, a mining shovel, and a box to store them in. Oh, and a frog for a companion.
Day 12 brings us more props: a mining cart for the dwarf and an oven for the chef. Hooray for the dark blue jumper plates!
My World of Warcraft analogies are starting to fail on me … oh wait, I know! Deeprun Tram! Well, kinda.
And I guess that must be a pizza after all. Maybe it’s one of those weird Chicago-style so-called pizzas?
This showed up in my email today. I filled out the survey, and encourage everyone else to do it too.
The LEGO Group Wants to Hear From You!
As Adult Fans of LEGO, you bring an important perspective to the LEGO Group. We respect your creativity and passion for our brand.
Please take a few moments to complete this short online survey to let us know your opinion on how we are doing.
We promise to listen to you and use your feedback to improve!
You might notice that the link refers to the LEGO Kids Inner Circle; this is because Satmetrix, which hosts that site, is also supporting our efforts to track AFOL opinions. Rest assured that this survey is for AFOL’s only.
Thank you.
Steve Witt
LEGO Community Relations Coordinator
Truthfully I didn’t have a lot to suggest. I think LEGO’s pretty much doing everything right these days. My only beef is the discontinuation of 9V trains but then, I understand why they are doing it. I just hope the new Power Functions trains that are supposedly coming out next year are good enough.
Today is another prop day.
City: Cherry pies for the chef. (I know most of you are thinking pizza, but LEGO has printed tiles for that. Cherry pie sounds more Christmasy anyway.
Castle: Gold Vein (Requires Mining 155)
(Sorry about the World of Warcraft in-jokes… ok I lied. I’m not sorry.)
This has been a feature of many BayLTC train layouts over the past few years.
This is an old-fashioned train signal, or "semaphore," which uses lights for nighttime use and an arm at various angles for daytime use. Signals like these were widely used on railroads all over the world in the early days, but particularly in North America they have been phased out and replaced with light signals. Now you mostly see them on tourist railroads or in train museums. Here is an example (from the Wikipedia Railway semaphore signal article) of an Australian version of this:
Update: I make no claim of accuracy for any particular railroad. In my research online I found many different systems for semaphore signals, both “upper quadrant” (such as this model) and “lower quadrant.” Different colors and designs were used on different railroads, and across different countries. There was probably some railroad somewhere that used a signal like mine, but I couldn’t tell you which one. Here’s another article about early railroad signaling if you are interested in reading more.