I've got a rather depressing weekend ahead of me. Tomorrow is the funeral for a childhood friend who used to live across the street. Apperently she got married a few years back to an abusive @#%^, who somehow ended uo with custody of her kids and used that as leverage, eventually achieving tragic results.
In unrelated news, the site maintenance this morning was unintended, but was a side effect of some other maintenance that was only supposed to affect the admin / dev side of the house, so appologies for no notice and happening during the day, but it wasn't supposed to affect anything live.
In less depressing news, I started my wooden ship model. It's going to be a fictional 1778 era early american navy 18 gun Brig when it's finished. The kit calls the ship the "Blue shadow" which didn't exist. Near as I can tell, the only 18 gun Brig rigged ships in the 1778 fleet was the privateer Angelica (
http://www.awiatsea.com/Privateers/A/Angelica%20Massachusetts%20Brig%20%5BDennis%5D.html) The Ranger and Saratoga both also apperently had 18 guns, but were reportedly rigged as Sloops, not brigs. I need to figure out if those ships would have been copper plated at the time. The british had been doing it for years, but I don't know if the Americans at the time had the capability or materials to copper plate any but their larger ships. Given the complete dissolution of the entire navy before the 1974 fleet was built, I suspect they probably weren't copper plated. Anyways, i'll put some pictures up once it gets closer to looking like a ship.
Friday the 13th! 