I have no idea how to categorize it, but it is amazing. Click the link to be amazed. Oh, and you will want to make sure you're in a place that allows you to listen to the music. The song really adds to what the page is trying to say.

Today was a pretty interesting day. Earlier this week I heard some ads on the radio for the 2008 Bodybuilding.com Boise Fitness Expo with special guests Jay Cutler (the current Mr. Olympia) and Bill Romanowski (a former Denver Broncos football player). Although I am a scrawny guy with almost no motivation for working out, I do have a small fascination with the world of bodybuilding and I was curious to see how big Jay Cutler is in real life. I also thought it would be pretty neat to get Bill Romanowski's autograph, as I am a fairly die-hard Broncos fan. The event was held in a local concert house, which was extremely cramped and poorly lit. It took almost an hour to get in the doors and then another hour or so just to find out where Jay Cutler was so I could get a picture with him and an autograph. He's not very tall, but the muscles certainly live up to the hype. His biceps and shoulders look like volleyballs. As the place was not lit well and my wife was taking the photo with my cell phone the photo is not very good, but here it is:

We fought the crowd for a little while longer trying to find Romanowski's table, but we couldn't see it and eventually gave up. At least the admission was free. I hope that if they do the event again next year they spring for a larger venue with better organization. If the cost of renting the place is an issue for them I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable admission fee if it meant avoiding the hassles of this year's event. I posted my review on the Bodybuilding.com forum and immediately got flamed by some dude from Texas, so we'll see if my suggestions are received well by the actual event organizers.

In more traditional nerdy news, I went to the local Wal-Mart today to buy some dog food and noticed that they had packs of the new WoW TCG set on display. In the hopes of pulling a loot card for an in-game item I bought a couple packs of them. I was feeling buyer's remorse even before I paid for them, but for once it was unfounded. In the second pack I found a Personal Weather Maker Loot Card, which is redeemable for an in-game item that creates a little randomized storm cloud/sun/snowstorm animation over your character's head. So that's pretty cool. It doesn't really affect your character's stats at all, but it's a cool status item to have.

I was unable to hold out until I had enough Honor Points for my PvP boots, so I bought the PvP cloak and had an Agility enchantment put on it. Then I found out about the daily fishing quests with all of their awesome prizes, so I've been leveling up my fishing skill instead of playing battlegrounds. Once I get my fishing skill up to a decent level I'll go back to the battlegrounds and just do the fishing daily quest every day.

My Goblin Warboss on Gigantic Spider arrived the other day, after some concern on my part about whether it would get here. I was notified by e-mail that it was on backorder a week or two ago and with Games Workshop it seems that backorder is one step away from discontinued, especially since this model is a collector's edition and Games Workshop has been making drastic changes to their catalog lately. The model is quite impressive, with no fewer than 16 parts. It should be a bear to assemble, and hopefully I can give it a good paint job.

I didn't make any more progress on the Easterlings, as we had overtime last night and I was tired. I was too tired even to bake some chicken nuggets and tater tots in the oven.

On the Fantasy Sports front, I won the TMP Hockey League championship. I've made it to the championship round in both of my Basketball head-to-head leagues and I should win one of my rotisserie leagues. The other rotisserie team made a good run at a trophy spot around midseason, but has floundered ever since and should finish out of the top three. The Fantasy Baseball season has started out fairly well, but it's too early to really analyze my teams much.

I actually made some progress this weekend on my projects. The paragraph that follows is a very nerdy discussion of my thoughts on the subject of gaining gear and enhancements for my World of Warcraft character. If you have no interest in these things it would probably be best to skip it.

On the World of Warcraft front I am about 75% of the way to getting my second piece of PvP gear, the boots I linked to in my last post. I'd be a lot further along if I hadn't got caught in successive PvP groups full of people who are even worse at PvP than myself. And I am bad at PvP. I went through and worked out every piece of gear I want to buy with Honor Points, and then I searched around for the enchantments and upgrades I wanted to make to each piece. I also bought the materials for all those upgrades. The only one I'm going to have trouble with is the Glyph of Ferocity, which requires a Revered status with the Cenarion Expedition faction. To do it the long way I could buy Coilfang Armaments on the Auction House to trade in, but I'd need 116 of them. They sell for around 9 Gold each, which puts the price of the enchantment at an absurdly high number. If I find groups for runs through Steamvaults I can get ~1100 reputation points per run as well as a chance at getting some additional reputation through Coilfang Armaments that might drop. We'll see how that goes. I haven't played in a group for several months. Anyway, my list is pretty exciting to me. Sometimes I think the planning and list-making is almost as fun as the actual game-playing. I feel similarly about some of my wargaming projects.

In addition to playing World of Warcraft I found some time to paint this weekend, finishing the armor on nine Easterlings and making a fair amount of progress on the cloth portions of their uniforms. Perhaps this signals that I'm out of my (lack of) painting rut. I'm looking forward to finishing these guys and maybe working on some Dwarves or Elves or something. Maybe if I cycle through painting units from different armies I won't feel like it's such a grind to get them finished. At least there is no shortage of things to work on.

My little brother spent the night at our house last night. We didn't do much aside from playing computer games and watching a movie. My sister and her husband bought a house and are moving out of the trailer park, so on Saturday we spent a little time helping them get the trailer cleaned up in preparation for selling. My contributions to the effort consisted mainly of telling bad jokes and getting in the way, although I did clean one counter-top very thoroughly. We have some new neighbors, and met them this weekend over the back fence. Their pit bull has a big litter of puppies, so we held a couple of them for a while. I imagine that if we didn't already have two large smelly dogs in our house we'd have talked each other into getting one of those puppies. It was an oddly social weekend for me, as I also met our other neighbor for the first time. In this case I went around the back of the house to bring Buddy in as he was barking it up. I found Annie standing up on the fence getting petted and Buddy was standing below trying to look intimidating; probably jealous that he is much too short to be petted over the fence. This neighbor had a Labrador at some point in the past, so he wanted to come over and meet Annie. We chatted for a minute or two, so after about two years I have finally met both of my neighbors.

I guess that's about it for tonight. This week I plan to spend my free time getting my PvP boots, finishing this batch of Easterlings, and working on some of my projects around the house. I'm sure I'll post about it all at some point.

Well, I'll just start out by saying that I haven't accomplished a single thing on the hobby front. Painting toy soldiers just hasn't been high on my list of things to do lately. I've been paying a lot of attention to the start of the baseball season and trying to finish out the Fantasy Basketball season on a high note. Other than that, I've been trying to do more work around the house. So far that is going well. The wife is happy about it, and when she's happy she starts baking pies for me and who can really argue with the housework = pie equation? I suspect that she'd bake me a pie even if I didn't lift a finger, but at least I feel good about myself for pulling my weight a little more than usual.

Yesterday we went in and had the second ultrasound of the kid. It's gone from 11mm to 26 mm in length, so that's pretty cool. It still looks like my wife's side of the family, though, with it's large head and reptilian tail. I realize that it looks like a blob of static encased in another blob of static, but I'm still going to post the photo, with illegible labels as is my custom.


Since I haven't been in the mood to paint miniatures, I restarted my World of Warcraft account. I've been spending a lot of time in the PvP battlegrounds trying to gain Honor Points so I can buy a full matching set of armor. I got my bracers today, and am about 1/3 of the way to getting my boots. Only 94,858 Honor Points to go. In other WoW news, my wife and I have possibly found a guild to join. I was browsing around the internet and found a group of other LDS gamers who play the various MMORPGs on the market. They've got a forum and apparently have a real-life get-together every year. We'll see how that pans out. Most of them play Horde, but in response to recent demand they are starting up an Alliance branch to cater to players of both sides. Hopefully we'll have a little more in common with them than we have with past guilds we've joined.

And that's really all the news I've got. It just hasn't been a very exciting couple of weeks aside from the baby pictures.

I was going to post on several topics tonight but time caught up with me and I have to go to bed. Maybe I'll get around to it tomorrow.