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.

My National Guard unit is going through a transition right now, and as part of the changes, my job was changed from M1A1 Abrams Crewman to Cavalry Scout. So I had to spend the last couple of weeks going to a school about my new job. There are actually two branches to the Scout job, the Humvee side and the Bradley side. I did the Humvee course a few months ago, and this month I took the Bradley course. For those who are not militarily inclined, here is a Bradley:

The training was fairly typical military fare, with long hours and lot of boredom punctuated with a few fun activities. I got to play with some plastic explosive, a grenade launcher, several machine guns, and fire a bunch of rounds from the main gun of the Bradley itself. The Bradley gun is fun to fire, but it's a little different sort of fun than firing a tank. The cannon on the M1A1 makes a big boom that is hard to top as far as thrill factor.

The Bradley gun is more like a machine gun on steroids. It's fun to shoot because you can fire five rounds off in a matter of seconds and watch them all follow each other into the target. They're not huge rounds (a box of 30 probably weigh the same as one round for the Abrams, give or take 20 pounds), but they're still fun to shoot. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks.

Today at work part of the dock smelled like Barbecue-flavored chips, so every time I drove past that area I got hungry. I actually got to a point where I was salivating and having hunger pangs because I needed to be eating some chips. At lunch time I ran out to my car and went to the gas station to buy some chips. It wasn't the healthiest lunch, but I needed to have some chips right then or I was going to go nuts.

The Fantasy Baseball season is going okay. I have three teams in the top 3 or so spots and one team that is slowly making it's way up from 9th place. With a couple of good weeks I could get that team into playoff contention. The Fantasy Football magazines have started coming out, so I'm pretty excited about that. Fantasy Football is fun, but I find it more difficult than Fantasy Baseball or Fantasy Basketball. I think it's because each player only gets one chance during the week to produce stats. In the other sports, a couple bad outings in a week can be balanced out by some good outings. Players have more chances to achieve what you've projected for them. In Fantasy Football, whatever your player gets on that day is what you get for the week, good or bad.

I recently discovered that there is going to be a new MMORPG coming out called Pirates of the Burning Sea, and I'm cautiously excited about it. I want to be head-over-heels exploding with joy about it, but there is the off chance that it could not be very fun for a variety of reasons. I think the thing that worries me the most is that a historically-based Pirate MMO will be limited by the geography and timeline of the real 1700s. I'm not sure how the game will be able to grow beyond its original release and still stay "in character." But I'll probably buy it and pony up my subscription fee every month until it stops being fun.

A lot of the files on my mp3 player were broken, so I cleared them all out and I've been slowly putting my music back on the player. It's a slow process, and I am very far behind on getting all of the music I like. I haven't bought a lot of cds since I got home from Iraq, and there are huge holes in my collection, especially when it comes to older stuff like classic rock, the great hair bands, and "real" punk.

One of my greatest music moments happened in Iraq. We had gotten intel that there were some bad guys in a little village out in the desert and our platoon was assigned to be the outer security for a dawn knock and search of the village, which consisted of maybe two dozen little buildings. We had a hard rock soundtrack playing in our truck to get us pumped up while we drove to the town. I was the gunner on our truck.

When we got to the village we drove a quick circle around it and started peeling off to our respective spots. Rage Against the Machine's "Guerilla Radio" was playing as we pulled into our spot, and the sun was huge, just poking over the horizon in front of us. As I swung my gun around to face out, two Apache helicopters flew directly over us and split off in opposite directions to circle the town. It was like a clip straight out of a recruiting video. That's probably about as pumped up as I've ever been about being a soldier.

Last night I cleaned up and assembled a bunch of figures. Today I primed them, and at some point I will actually start in on painting them. I had to do some conversion work on a Rat Ogre with some green stuff. It doesn't look that good, but hopefully I'll be able to work with it and get it looking better. I was going to do some cleaning up work on the rest of my Warlord figures and assemble my next unit of Clanrat Slaves tonight, but I got caught up in other stuff and didn't get around to it.

I did make up a list of all the figures I need to buy for my Warlord armies, so I can check the little boxes as I add to my collection. I was going to make some sort of list that involved several check-boxes for each unit so I could track a few categories like Purchased, Primed, Painted, and Based, but if I let myself go too far on lists, I end up spending more time on lists than on miniatures. It's a slippery slope, and once I'm on it I can produce an entire notebook based on 25 miniatures. I am planning on making a painting notebook, though. I will be painting the Warlord units in stages as I buy more figures, so I'll have to remember my color choices.

It always amazes me how much priming my figures cuts down the intimidation factor of painting them. I was looking at my Warlord figures last night and wondering how I would paint all those little indistinct details. But once the primer hits the figures they become so much more defined and I am able to see what and where everything is supposed to be. I'm hopeless when it comes to bare metal, but on primed figures I can see what I need to do. It's similar in concept to what they say about writing projects. The blank page can be intimidating, but once you get some ink down ideas will start flowing.

I dragged my wife to Hobbytown today and picked up a couple of Reaper blisters. We have worked out a little arrangement. There's a Jo-Ann Fabric store across the street from Hobbytown, so I drop her off there and then go on to Hobbytown. She buys yarn and beads and craft stuff, and then she walks over to Hobbytown. It's good for me because she gets excited about the craft store and spends some money, so I get to make more trips and not get a guilt trip about buying a couple of figures or some paints. I also picked up some foam at the fabric store so I can make a transport case for my Skaven army. If this foam works out, I will have a fairly cheap way to keep my armies safe when I move them.

I am taking my little brother to the Monster Truck show this Saturday. I think he will like it. I remember going to see the Monster Trucks with my dad when I was a kid, and it was a pretty good time.

At drill this weekend I was somewhat surprised to hear them call out my name as one of the people to be promoted to Sergeant. I'd expected that it would be at least one more year before I got up on the promotions list, but apparently enough people above me failed their PT tests and I got bumped above the promotion line. Depending on how well my unit can wheel and deal, I may have to transfer to another Troop to keep the rank, but I'm hoping that I can work something out to get the promotion and stay in my current Troop. Either way, it's a little more money coming in every month, and that means more fun for me.

I've started a bad habit. I've been letting my Basset Hound get up on the couch with me at night. He's getting a little older, so he spends more time sleeping and isn't as much of a nuisance when he's in the house. We have to help him get up on the couch because his stubby little back legs can't quite make the step. Earlier today he solved the problem by hopping up at an angle and then rolling onto the couch, but he's already forgotten that method. Our Lab is jealous, but she's too huge and energetic to sit on the couch.