My wife bought me some Hogan Energy drinks today, and while the concept and packaging are awesome, the product itself leaves a lot to be desired. All energy drinks are extremely bad for you, but some of them taste good. Hogan Energy is not one of the good-tasting ones. I think they may have actually included some actual Hulk Hogan fluids in every can.

I've started work on the tavern crew, and it's reminded me how much I hate painting humans. The skin tones and faces are just terrible to paint. With rats I just have to slap on two base colors and a brown ink wash. With humans I have to work through endless layers of Tanned Flesh, Dwarf Flesh, Elf Flesh, and various mixes of all the above just to get them looking somewhat decent, and half the time the paint ends up all chunky and chalky anyway. It's enough to drive me into a life of crime so I can sell the stolen goods and hire Fernando to do the painting for me.

I am having mixed feelings about the approaching weekend. One the one hand, it's the weekend and I won't have to go to work for two days. On the other, I will have to pick up where I left off as far as organizing the house so we can get the final couple of rooms all cleaned up and organized. I think that once we get the house all cleared out I'll feel much better about the work I had to do to get it done. On the topic of housecleaning, my wife's new vacuum arrived today, and she was pretty excited about that. I have no idea how someone could get excited about a vacuum, but there are many things I do not understand.

I have to go back to school this Fall, and I think that is causing some stress in my subconscious mind. I don't usually remember my dreams at all, but the last couple days I've had some ridiculous nightmares. I'm only taking two classes, as my attempts to go to school full-time since I got home from Iraq haven't turned out so well. My attention span and information retention is not what it used to be, and that makes it difficult to study. From conversations with my fellow soldiers it would seem that this is not really an uncommon problem. I don't know if it's a result of training or stress or anthrax shots or some combination of the whole wartime experience, but sometimes I can barely remember my name. Reading used to be a favorite activity for me, but I can hardly make it through a magazine article anymore. I actually have to take breaks while reading battle reports in White Dwarf, and it's not just because of the glaring grammatical errors. I've got a couple of books that I'm going to start reading in an effort to get my mind back together for school. Hopefully I survive this semester and can take a couple more classes in the Spring.

I really want to get started on my Orcs and Goblins army, but I have too many projects going on right now to fit them in. Besides that, I need another box of Orcs before I can build my first unit. I don't want to paint some of them now and some later, as I'll run into the same problem I'm having with my expanded Plague Monk unit. I painted them so long ago that I can't remember how to replicate the paint job on the extra figures.

This has been a long and winding post. It would've been even worse but I cut out several parts that didn't even make sense to me.