There's not much to talk about today. I fiddled around with a couple of Lord of the Rings figures but didn't really get anything done hobby-wise aside from reading most of the latest issue of White Dwarf. I found a really nice airbrush compressor at a good price and fortunately got outbid on the airbrush I want to get, because it went for a whole lot more than I wanted to pay and I found a supplier for the same model at a lower price than my maximum bid had been. So that worked out pretty well. I also found a few sites with some beginner exercises so I can figure out how to use the darn thing once I get it. I'll have to look into building a spray booth, because commercial spray booths are way expensive, especially considering that they're essentially boxes with a ventilation hood on them. Hobbytown has a little turntable thing for airbrushing, but I think a larger version of the same thing could be scratchbuilt for a lot less than they're asking. I'm still trying to finalize a color scheme for my Space Marines. The half-squad I did before look fairly decent so I may stick with the green and brown look, probably with markings taken from American WWII armor.

I've been meaning to post for a while, but it always gets to be too late and I wind up going to bed before I get around to it. Even after a month of working at this new job I'm having a hard time getting used to the new schedule.

I got part of one of my Assault on Black Reach sets cleaned up and put together. I wasn't happy with the gesso priming experiment, so I went to Wal-Mart and got some primer there as some folks on TMP swear by the Rust-Oleum stuff. I'm not too happy with the results of that, either. I'll be able to paint over it fine, but it doesn't look very good and there are cracks on many of the seams. So far the best primer I've used has been the Games Workshop stuff, but there's always the chance that I'll get a bad batch or spray when the conditions are wrong and mess up some figs. I think what I'll have to do is get a bunch of figures ready and prime a sample batch, then immediately prime everything I can get my hands on. Part of my holdup currently is that I've got a bunch of figures ready to go, but I don't have anything to prime them with.

Hobbytown had their big 10% off customer appreciation sale last weekend, so I went to see what I could see. They were sold out of Assault on Black Reach sets, so I wound up getting a couple of opposing units for my Ork and Space Marine armies. The Space Marines get a Predator, which was purchased mostly because it loosely resembles a Bradley CFV. I know I have professed a dislike for vehicle in a Space Marine force, but they've grown on me recently. The Orks got a unit of Tankbustas, so the Ork army won't be entirely helpless against the Predator. I'm looking forward to the release of the new Space Marine Codex. I've also been eyeing some of the Forge World Dreadnoughts; I can't afford most of the stuff that Forge World sells, but one of their Dreadnought variants would be a pretty neat thing to have in an army.

My wife and I were actually discussing the Forge World the other day. I mentioned that someday I'd like to be rich enough to afford a Mars Pattern Reaver Titan ($1021.15 at today's exchange rate) and she told me that if she dies and I get the insurance money she'd be okay with me spending part of it on a Titan. Then we wondered if the Titan was indeed large enough that I could hollow it out and use it to hold her cremated remains. An odd conversation, but rather humorous if you're a geek and his loving wife. I imagine somewhere in her mind she knows that if she were interred in a giant miniature I would be more inclined to visit her final resting place than if she were buried in a more traditional manner.

With these Warhammer 40k vehicles and my budding WWII project I have been thinking about the benefits of painting my vehicles with an airbrush. I think it would save a lot of time as well as aid in painting the large flat panels more smoothly than would be possible with a brush. I've been looking into it. A quality airbrush and compressor will be a bit spendy up front, but it will probably be worth it for painting larger models. I know there are even some people who paint WWII German camouflage on Micro Armour with airbrushes. On that subject, I highly recommend logging onto the GHQ miniatures forum and checking out the "Show Us Yer Stuff!" thread. Some of the photos on the early pages are broken, but it's definitely worth browsing through to see the amount of detail good painters can get onto a vehicle the size of your fingernail.

I've got over 800 miles logged on the motorcycle and am becoming more comfortable and having a bit more fun riding it. I'm still trying to be responsible and keep the speeds approximately legal. I have to admit it is rather satisfying having a greater power:weight ratio and a much smaller profile than any four-wheeled driver out there. The commute is a breeze when I can get around in traffic so easily. It's getting cold so I may have to start looking at heated gear so I can ride as much as possible into the winter and then start early next year. We save over $125 in gas for every month that I ride instead of drive, so it makes sense to ride as much as weather and road conditions allow.

I got a $10 coupon in the mail from Hobbytown, so I went out and bought a second box of Assault on Black Reach. Then I put the rulebooks and templates up on eBay. They sold pretty quickly and after shipping costs I'll have about $15 and a $5 coupon to put toward another set. Then I'll just need a couple of special units for each side and I'll have complete 1500-point Space Marine and Ork armies. Not a bad deal, really, especially with the emphasis on standard Troop choices in the 5th-edition rules.

My little brother and I went to the Gunfighter Skies 2008 air show on Mountain Home Air Force Base this past Saturday. Plenty of interesting planes to look at, and they also had a Bradley IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle) there so I got to show him essentially what the vehicle I gun on looks like. The main difference between the IFV and the CFV (Cavalry Fighting Vehicle) is that the IFV has more seating in the back and the CFV has missile racks in place of some of the seats. There were some good demonstrations of several current fighter planes, the most comprehensive covered the capabilities of the F-18. We also got to see a P-51 in flight as well as an F-4 Phantom and a whole bunch of F-15s, which pretty much made my day.

I suffered a couple of crushing defeats in Fantasy Football this week as well as a couple of victories. Most importantly I pulled out another win in the office league, making me one of two owners to be undefeated thus far. It's important both for bragging right and because the league has a traveling trophy and prizes for the owners who finish in 1st and 2nd place.

Not much to talk about at the moment. I don't really ever get around to doing much on National Guard weekends as I spend a couple of days doing whatever the mission is for the weekend and by the time I get home on Sunday all I want to do is take a nap. This weekend my allergies hit me pretty hard on Sunday morning and I was pretty much incapacitated for the rest of the day and didn't sleep very well last night. I'm glad today was an off-day at my job because I don't know that I would've made it in this morning. I had to do a urinalysis Sunday afternoon before I could leave and I just could not pee. I drank enough water that my stomach actually began to hurt and finally was able to get the job done, but it was pretty ridiculous. I think the allergy pills I took were a factor.

We drove our Humvees from the desert back to the armory on Sunday, and on the way home we passed a big motorcycle club out on a Sunday ride. Almost every biker extended a wave or a thumbs-up to us, as did many individuals in other vehicles throughout the trip. It's one of those things that makes a guy feel good about wearing the uniform.

I got my Assault on Black Reach set for 40k, but haven't had much time to look through the components thus far. There are certainly plenty of models on the sprues. They don't really come with a lot of the optional bits, but I can't really complain much as the price point is so low.

My Fantasy Baseball season has taken a bad turn. I failed to realize that the playoffs started last week and didn't manage either of my head-to-head teams very well until it was too late in the week to play catch-up. I wound up losing both games and falling to the fifth-place games in both weeks. So hopefully I can at least salvage a couple of fifth-place finishes this week. My roto team that was in first place when I left for guard weekend was in third place when I got back. I'll be working on getting those points back so I can hopefully pull off one championship this year. My other roto team has fallen pretty far back in the standings and I'll be pretty lucky if I can get it into even a third-place trophy.

And the Fantasy Football season started on Thursday. After the two games tonight we'll see how I did. I feel all right about my teams, but Fantasy Football is so hit or miss from week to week that it's hard to know how you'll do. Luckily the big Tom Brady injury only negatively affected one of my teams, as for the most part Patriots players were too overpriced in drafts for me to grab them.

Not a very productive weekend, as my sister went into labor Saturday night and had her baby Sunday morning. We spent a good portion of the weekend going back and forth to see the kid and interact a bit with the family. My wife made a blanket and a nice framed poem/picture as gifts.

Saturday night we had dinner with the family of a gal my wife works with. We've had dinner with them a couple of times now; the husband is a gamer nerd but due to the fact that neither of us is very social we don't really get much talking in. I lent him my 4th Edition D & D books as he hasn't had a chance to look through them yet. Today I finally had my brother-in-law over to play Madden 09. We managed to get two games in. The first game was pretty close; I ran a kickoff back for a touchdown in overtime to win it. The second game wasn't as close; as I got ahead early and he had some bad luck in the passing game as well as some random penalties.

I get to go play army next weekend, so I probably won't be doing much hobby-related stuff for a while. I'll miss out on getting the Assault on Black Reach set on release day as it comes out on Saturday, by which time I'll be out in the Idaho desert somewhere.

I guess that's all the news I've got. Not exceptionally exciting to read about, I imagine, but at least it's an update.

A few exciting things this week, I suppose. I think I must be the only one who reads Beckett Massive Online Gamer and sends in the survey every issue because a couple days ago another prize from them arrived in the mail, this time containing an entire booster box of the WoW Trading Card Game. So my wife and I got to bust open 24 packs of the Servants of the Betrayer set. It's too bad actually trying to keep up with and play the WoW TCG would cost so much money. I'm trying to stay away from collectible games as the sales model is designed entirely to suck players' wallets dry with a new and essential release every three or four months. Our two loot cards, redeemable for items inside the computer game, were both Papa Hummel's Pet Biscuits, which cause pets to grow when you feed the biscuits to them. I was hoping for a rocket mount, which would almost be enough to get me playing the computer game again, but we didn't get lucky enough to pull it.

The new issue of White Dwarf has a couple of free figures packed with it; a Space Marine Terminator and an Ork Nob. I think the starter set releases on September 6th, so it's only a few days away now. I stopped in to get the magazine on Tuesday, which happens to be game night at Hobbytown. There were three or four guys there playing Warhammer 40k.

Not much to post about tonight. I guess the new job is going well. The pace of office work is sort of a shock to me, as there are lots of gaps between tasks and it feels a bit cheap inventing things to do to fill those gaps. My other jobs have all been the sort where you rush until the work is done and then you go home. I'll probably be trying to learn some of the other people's jobs a little bit so I can help them out when I run out of work.

I haven't had much time for anything gaming-related. I've been trying to get used to the new schedule; and my wife and I have been cleaning out the shed so we can shuffle stuff from the house to the shed and cut back on the piles of junk we've got everywhere. We've put it off for about two years now, but it's getting a bit ridiculous. So far we've sorted out quite a bit of stuff and consolidated several cartons of books onto a bookshelf we found on Craigslist. It's amazing the junk that follows a person around. I also am going to make an attempt at getting the yard looking a bit better. Tomorrow I get to pick up some weed barrier and maybe some wood chips. I'll probably talk to the folks at Zamzow's and see if they have anything that can help our front lawn. The back yard doesn't matter quite as much as you can't see it from the road, but I may try to get something started there. It'll probably take a year or two for it to be more than random patches of weeds, but you don't get anywhere unless you start. It'll be easier to keep up on stuff like that with a daytime schedule, as running the lawnmower in the middle of the night is frowned on around here. The trailer-park managers have been driving by on their golf cart and scowling at us a lot, so maybe doing a bit of upkeep in the yard will build a little bit of credit with them. I was riding my motorcycle out of the trailer park the other day and the manager stopped his golf cart on the road specifically to glare at me until several seconds after I went past him; perhaps he was trying to ensure I didn't exceed the posted 13 mph speed limit?

We've started in on our birthday/Christmas presents for each other early this year so we can make sure to have enough to get each other something. I got Madden 09 for my PS2, probably the other half of my gift will be the Warhammer 40k: Assault on Black Reach set. The Warhammer 40k set should be discounted a fair bit from the MSRP and I've also been saving a $5 off coupon in anticipation of its release. I think my wife wants a serger (some kind of sewing gadget) but she has been noncommittal about it the last couple of days so we'll see if that's what she ends up getting. We've decided not to try surprising each other as it makes more sense to get things we actually want rather than taking a gamble on a guess. When you have a focused sort of hobby it's difficult for people to really guess exactly what you want; ask for miniatures and you're likely to get a bunch of well-meant gifts of figures in scales or armies that you don't play. I think it's the same with any hobby, whether it's a niche hobby like wargaming or something more mainstream like golf.

I started my new job this week; so far it's been okay. I'm getting the hang of the work and hopefully not screwing it up too much. I got into the office fantasy football league that drafts tomorrow. I'm not sure how hardcore all of the people in the league are, so that makes things interesting. One good thing about the new job is that about half of the people I work with are people I've worked with on the National Guard side of things, so it's a little less awkward socially than just leaping into a new group of people. Probably the worst part of the job is making phone calls. I have a pathological hatred of the telephone; I'd almost rather do anything than make a phone call. But I've been able to make the necessary calls and even deal with some very irate people. And in other job-related news; this morning I rode my motorcycle to work, which is the first time I've had the bike out on the interstate. It was a bit anti-climactic, as things weren't nearly as crazy as I thought they'd be. I also got to wear my awesome reflective vest with the removable Velcro ID badge pocket. And I got a tank bag to carry my base pass and various small items in. And I stuck a bunch of reflective tape on my backpack. So in theory I'm at least a little bit more visible out on the highway.

I think I posted a while ago about getting a miscast jeep in my Flames of War Tank Destroyer Platoon. Today I got an envelope in the mail containing a blister pack of three jeeps, so Battlefront's US contact certainly gets a thumbs-up in the customer service department. This jeep pack has some nice little bits, like optional soft-tops for the jeeps or machine guns that can be mounted on the vehicles. I'm pretty happy about that.

And here's a scary story that happened to us yesterday. I got home from work about ten minutes before my wife. When I opened the door I was greeted by the sight of a rather lagre pile of dog poo on the floor. Then I looked around the living room and saw that it was all over; on the floor, on the couches, and trailing into the kitchen. There was more in the back corner of the kitchen. Our Labrador was staying close to me, but our Bassett Hound still hadn't come out to greet me. I called him a few times and he slowly came out of the back room with his head down. I sent the dogs outside and called my wife to warn her before she got home. The poo trailed off down the hall and into the computer room, where there was a big deposit under my desk. Worst of all, Buddy had stood on top of my pants and left a big load directly on top of them and then run across a bunch of baby clothes, leaving a trail of ooze all over them. It took us 1 1/2 hours and a couple bottles of cleaning products to get it all mopped up, plus several loads of laundry and we'll probably have to rent some sort of high-powered cleaning machine to really get it all. I have no idea how that dog could produce so much waste. I think the main reason for the explosion was that he gets very worked up whenever our routine changes. The first time we really left him in the house without kenneling him, he climbed on our bed and peed on my wife's pillow. At the vet's office he climbed on my lap and peed on me. When we moved the furniture around he peed on the floor. When he was a very little puppy I went into the bathroom for a few minutes and when I came back out a few minutes later he had left a dookie on the floor and run back and forth through it, covering the entire hallway with nasty little footprints. And when I didn't emerge from the bedroom in the late morning or early afternoon he must have panicked and run around the house letting his bodily functions go. I think he's over it now. Supposedly having a pet adds seven years to a person's life expectancy, but I think owning Buddy is exactly the opposite. Still, he's my dog and I can't really fault him. We should have anticipated that he would be stressed out by my absence and brought his kennel back in from the shed for a few days while he got used to the idea of me being gone in the daytime.

I planned on posting something tonight but got caught up in watching clips of TV shows on Youtube and forgot what I wanted to blog about. So I'll probably just go to bed.

The U.S. finally got gold and silver medals in gymnastics last night, and the finish of the Women's All-Around event actually had some tension to it. It seemed like the judges were being overly biased and giving extra points to the Chinese team (and really I think one of the Russians should have taken the bronze over the Chinese gymnast) that the other teams weren't getting. It was to the point that the commentators actually started discussing that maybe some gymnasts were getting a little help from the judges, as the judges were ignoring very obvious mistakes that the Chinese made while really nitpicking the other teams. I'm not talking about little errors in form and whatnot, but balance checks and stumbles that even an uneducated oaf like myself could see. But the Americans turned in a couple of very good rotations at the end and came out with the gold and silver medals. One of the best things about the women's competition was that there wasn't all of the trash-talking that the men (especially the American men) were doing. The competitors all shook hands and hugged after routines, and kept up a friendly banter throughout the event. It appeared that they had genuine excitement after a good routine and felt genuinely sorry when someone had a bad routine, no matter which country the other person represented. A little sportsmanship goes a long way.