We didn't do much this weekend, a conscious decision on our part. We took the dogs to the river for a little while and Annie chased a stick in the water while Buddy sniffed the shoreline. On Saturday I washed and waxed my motorcycle. My youngest sister and her husband had a few fireworks for our niece to watch, so we did that with them.

My oldest sister and her husband stopped by to borrow something and I took the opportunity to force them to look at my motorcycle. I still haven't ridden it; I think I'll probably wait until the end of the month when I've taken my safety and riding course. It sucks to wait, but I already made the beginner mistake of buying a literbike instead of something reasonable in the 250-500cc range. I probably shouldn't make another one by jumping on the beast and trying to teach myself how to ride it.

Today we had church and gave Buddy a bath. He's had some eye and ear problems so we've been applying various ointments and attempting to get him feeling well. So far it's working quite well. His eyes haven't been nearly as goopy as they used to be and his ears don't seem to be hurting him anymore.

I tried out the gesso primer on the crews of my Snotling Pump Wagon and Goblin Spear Chukka. I'm not very impressed with it. It fills in too many details and anywhere that has recessed details has a good chance of forming big cracks as the gesso tightens around it. I could try thinning it some more, but that supposedly weakens the polymer bonds and makes it practically useless as primer. I'll have to do some more reading. I'll probably wind up dumping this lot of figures in some Simple Green and try to find another priming solution. At least I was smart enough to try it on a small sample of figures this time.

I may finally be done with World of Warcraft for good. It hasn't been much fun for a while now, although I still persisted in playing it out of habit. I thought maybe joining that guild would be a good way to spark myself into enjoying the game more but my odd hours and antisocial nature kept me from really interacting with any of them, and on the few occasions that I joined up with them to play I found myself frustrated and making excuses to log off. I'm just not a very social animal. Anyway, that's $15/month I can put toward my truck and motorcycle.

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.

My little brother came over for an hour or two this afternoon before I left for work. We hung out and played some games, so that was pretty fun.

I'm thinking about quitting World of Warcraft again. Getting to level 70 was fun, but once you hit the level cap most of the play revolves around groups of players going into dungeons to get better gear than the items available in the regular game-world. I spent three hours tonight in the Looking for Group channel and didn't find anyone to go through an instance with. The same thing happened last night. I could grind for PvP gear, but that gets boring as I spend most of my time dead because I can't get the gear I need to excel because I can't find a group in the Looking for Group channel. It would be nice to have an organized group to play with, but my brother-in-law and his friends play on a different server, my sister has a baby and can't play, and my wife works a different shift than I do. So I'm considering dropping the game again, maybe until they come out with another expansion. At this point you're probably wondering if I want some cheese with my whine, so I'll end my blogging for today.

I finally got my World of Warcraft character to level 70, so maybe I will be able to do something else in my free time. I've been stuck on the last two or three steps of painting those Clanrat Slaves for a while now, but haven't had the willpower to get away from the computer. In theory I will put the last bits of paint on the unit tomorrow after work and be done with basing and clearcoat by the end of the week. We'll see if I get around to actually doing it.

In other news, my little sister graduated from high school this past weekend. I think they could cut the graduation ceremonies by about two hours and no one would miss the omitted parts.