Melting

The bearer, now ready to trek through Jimland

After the monsoon season in which I visited the Durham Show (see last week's blog) , I've been melting here in the Saharan heatwave, which is really not that conducive to getting anything done hobby-wise.  In addition, after the aforementioned show I was left feeling a bit 'flat', unenthusiastic and decidedly unmotivated. Despite all this I have managed to make a small dent in my jungle terrain and have painted the errant bearer for 'Jimland. Nothing spectacular and it did take me the biggest of efforts to sit and do an hour's- worth of hobby related stuff each day and I also managed to find a couple more animals!
Here's the results of my paltry efforts over the last week or so.

40 to 60 Palms ready to base up

Basing up palms etc. (not the ones above!)

I've been basing up palms and came across the snag of the larger ones having a metal wirer running through them. No problem you might think, however whereas previously I've stuck the extra long 'stalks' though the base and slice it off with a craft knife, this didn't work with those that had the steel wire insert.
Cutting the wire before basing them up was a frustrating experience as the damn palms refused to stay vertical long enough to glue in place..    

Clips, making a quick and dirty fix!

As can be seen in the photograph above and in more detail on the photograph to the right my solution was to use clips to act as supports holding the larger trees on place whilst the glue and filler did their jobs.
When finished the jungle bases in the above photograph will approximately double the amount of jungle I'll have, but the photograph below shows that I have at least as many bases more still to to - though I doubt I'll run out of plants and palms to fill them all out.

Even more bases; note the pile of them bottom right

Here's the animals I sorted, previously purposed for duty in the arena (54mm gladiator).

Previously shown rhino on the left, new on the right

 The new rhino is larger (possibly too large?) than the one I've previously shown, but possibly not so large as to be unusable.

Hippos (new one on the left|)

I now have three hippos, all probably usable, but I'm not completely convinced!

And that's it for this completely lacklustre week, I really am finding it difficult to drum up any enthusiasm hobby-wise - could be a very difficult blog post to write next time!

Thanks for taking the time to look and as always your comments are both welcomed and appreciated.