I've Been Tagged

Jamie tagged me, so I get to answer questions about myself. Theoretically, I could tag someone else, but I don't know many people with blogs well enough to ask them these questions. On to the answering...

Jobs You've Had

1. Moving Sprinkler Pipes
2. Milking Cows
3. Idaho Army National Guard (Tank Driver, Humvee Gunner, Bradley Gunner)
4. FedEx Freight Dockworker

Movies I Watch Over and Over

1. Stuff I find on YouTube, mostly.

Places I've Lived

1. Wichita Falls, Texas
2. Aviano AFB, Italy
3. Springville, Utah
4. Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio
5. Eagle River, Alaska
6. Boise, Mt. Home, Emmett, Moscow, and Meridian, Idaho
7. San Diego, California
8. Kirkuk, Iraq

Places I Want to Visit

1. Maybe Europe again, so the wife will have a chance to go.
2. Some National Parks and whatnot here in the States.
3. Australia

Places I Have Visited

1. Most of the U.S.
2. Canada
3. Amsterdam
4. Germany
5. Switzerland
6. Italy
7. Austria

TV Shows I Watch

1. None

Websites I Visit

1. These can mostly be found in my sidebar, although I do spend a lot of time on the Yahoo! Fantasy Sports pages. The majority of my online time is spent on The Miniatures Page, Fantasy Sports, various blogs, and the sites of miniatures and miniatures rules vendors.

My new computer got to my house today, although it almost didn't make it. Even though the box had my address printed correctly on it, UPS put it on the doorstep of a house down the street. Luckily, the lady who lives there was honest enough to come tell my wife about the mistake. The box wouldn't fit in my wife's car, so she had to take it all apart on the lady's porch and load it up piece by piece.

Once I got home from work I set it all up and got ready to transfer my files from the old computer to the new one. That was incredibly frustrating. First the new computer wouldn't connect to the wireless network. Then the old computer wouldn't read the Shared Files folder anymore. Then the old computer wouldn't burn a cd. Finally I had to go over to my brother-in-law's house to get out of the house before I tossed both computers out this window. He had a cable that I was able to use to get the files from one machine to the other, and now all that's left to do is get World of Warcraft up and running. I think I'm going to have to get a wirless keyboard, as my desk is missing it's keyboard tray and the cable from the keyboard to the computer is very much in the way.

My Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom is: Ginny Weasley kills Ron in the study, with the lead piping. Get your Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom

I spent my evening painting this stern-looking barkeep from Reaper.

I didn't do much work on any miniatures this weekend, instead focusing on working out my army lists for various Warhammer armies and then figuring out what I need to purchase to fill out the lists. I still need a few Skaven, a large number of Orcs and Goblins, and quite a few Space Marines. My Witch Hunters Sisters of Battle army is going on the shelf for now as the models are fiddly and I don't enjoy painting them all that much.

I also visited a bunch of non-Games Workshop sites and made a list of figures I would like either for specific projects or just because I like the models. Some of the vendors include Impact!, Foundry, Artizan Designs, Superfigs, Pulp Figures, Newbold World, and Hasslefree Miniatures. I also have a rather lengthy Reaper wish list, and I need to figure out some lists of Micro Armour that I'll need for my WWII project. It's a lot of miniatures, and it should take me several years (perhaps over a decade) to acquire and paint them all. Of course, as time goes on I'll be adding to the list, so hopefully I'll never actually paint my last miniature and risk certain death.

I also discovered a new ruleset to help me use all of the figures on my wish list that don't fit a current project. I found the rules via a link on The Miniatures Page. They are called Song of Blades and Heroes, and for $4 are a pretty good value. The game is a small skirmish-level game with fairly simple rules. I'll probably end up using these rules in place of the Reaper Warlord rules. That way I'll still be able to build up my Warlord armies, but without feeling obligated to follow my army lists so closely. And I can use a whole assortment of barbarian miniatures for another warband option. There are some simple campaign rules for fighting other warbands and building your forces up over the course of several battles. It is designed for 15mm minis, but includes conversions for 28mm measurements.

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.

Immediately after I finished my last post, I found the motivation to finish painting that last Night Runner. That means my 2250-point Skaven army is done. Tonight I'm going to start working on the Bartender and Serving Wenches for my Pirate tavern brawl scenario. I also need to find a miniature to represent the Governor's daughter, as kidnapping her during the ruckus will be worth some victory points and more than likely lead into the next scenario I run. Once the tavern crew are finished I will have to build the tavern itself.

I couldn't get motivated about painting tonight, so I played World of Warcraft instead. Not much else is going on at the moment, although I've been thinking about making a master list of miniatures I want to purchase over the next few years. It seems like a cool idea, but it also seems like a lot of work. I could probably apply my time to better endeavors.

I have been slowly working on the last figure I need for my 2250-point Skaven army. The reason for my slow progress is that I've spent most of my time daydreaming about all the miniatures projects I want to do in the future. I wrote them all out on a piece of paper, but I lose papers all the time, so maybe a blog post is in order, as it's somewhat difficult to lose one of those. They are somewhat in order of priority near the top of the list, but in the middle and end parts of the list it is whatever I happen to have the motivation and budget for.

1. 3000-point Skaven army (with some extras)
2. 3000-point Orcs and Goblins army (probably with extras by the time I'm done with it)
3. 28mm Pirates, along with Tavern employees, the Governor's troops, the Governor and his daughter (for kidnapping), and various civilians
4. Skirmish Campaigns WWII Eastern Front scenarios in 15mm or Micro Armour scale
5. 28mm Old West
6. 28mm Gladiators
7. Super System superheroes, villains, bystanders, and whatever odds and ends I can add to them
8. Space Marines, not sure on the point size yet
9. Various figures that catch my eye but have no discernible use for me at the moment. This includes figures from Hasslefree, Impact!, Reaper, GW, and a multitude of other companies. I imagine I can work them into Mordheim warbands or HOTT armies.
10. Mech combat, probably using Reaper's CAV figures and perhaps their rules as well

It seems like a lot of stuff, but compared to the lists of some Miniatures Page regulars, I am a relative lightweight. I guess I should go to work now, so I may remain among the gainfully employed.

We had some tentative plans to attend the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle with my sister and brother-in-law, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. It's a shame, as it looks like an extremely nerdy good time. Maybe next year.

I've decided to let my EVE Online trial account lapse, as I don't feel there is enough gameplay for the money in the game. It seems that you spend most of your time mining asteroids while waiting for your skills to level up, rather than actively working on something exciting.

Pirates Based

I finally got around to finishing off the bases for my pirate miniatures. I started out just using the white sand, but that was extremely boring. So I added some stuff on top of the sand and I think the bases look pretty good now. I don't know how accurate they are for the beaches of the Caribbean, but I'm not really going for historical accuracy here anyway. I thought about doing some sort of wooden planking for the bases, but that seemed difficult to pull off. I plan on running scenarios both indoors and outside, so either way I'm going to end up with minis whose bases look out of place half the time. For my first scenario I just have to paint my tavern employees and build the tavern itself. It shouldn't be too difficult, it's just a matter of assembling the materials and making time to work on it. For now I'm going to set the pirates aside and work on finishing up my Skaven army.