Today was a pretty decent day. The wife and I took turns tending to the boy in the church's nursery. He isn't quite old enough according to the rules to be in there by himself, but younger kids can go with a parent. My sister was in the nursery with her little boy as well. I think the couple who runs the nursery is glad to have more adults in there anyway, as a dozen or more kids aged 18 months-3 years can turn into quite the overload. My shift went pretty well aside from a life-and-death conflict over the Lego bin. One of the little girls became focused on putting the lid back on the Lego bin, while my boy wanted to play with the Legos in the container. With the battle lines drawn up they pulled the bin back and forth for a good ten minutes, both crying tears of despair and refusing stubbornly to give up.

After church I had to get caught up on some reading for school; a book on the Japanese repatriates who came back from Manchuria after World War II. The last fifty pages or so were very dry, so I fell asleep two or three times trying to get through them. I've still got some homework to do tomorrow.

I've got to go see a knee doctor tomorrow morning to fill out some paperwork confirming that my knee hurts. It's been bothering me since I went to that Army school in January and the issue isn't going away. I hope it is something relatively minor that I can get fixed and healed in time for the rumored deployment overseas. It's a touchy thing to get joints looked at, especially since my day job is directly tied to my fitness for military duty in the National Guard. But I figure it's better to get it fixed than to try to tough it out and have it explode on me at an inopportune time.

I spent part of the evening clipping parts from Space Marine sprues and refreshing my bits box. I can already see that I'm going to need more parts. Once that was done I selected a bunch of bits to make up every special weapon option for a Terminator squad (Assault Cannon, Cyclone Missile Launcher, and Heavy Flamer). I also picked out some parts for some Terminators with Chainfists and a Sergeant with a Power Sword as well as a couple of vanilla Power Fist/Storm Bolter guys. The Assault on Black Reach Terminators have helped me to make good use of the extra parts from the regular Terminator boxes. I can build a second squad of Close Combat Terminators using just spare arms from the Terminator box and bodies from the Black Reach figures. That saves about $40 off of buying two boxes of Close Combat Terminators.

I also dug out the Ziploc baggies containing my unassembled Imperial Guard command squad, complete with Regimental Advisers. I had a lot of fun picking parts from my Imperial Guard bin for this squad, but I was so focused on Space Marines and Orks at the time that I never got around to gluing the parts together. In playing around with an Imperial Guard list I found myself struggling with what to include and how to divvy up the various roles. My natural inclination with any army is to put as many boots on the ground as possible. Apparently with 5th edition the popular thing to do is run mechanized lists, which means fewer guys on the table but more mobility. My Space Marines only have one vehicle. In the one game I've played with them, the vehicle was destroyed on turn one and they hoofed it the rest of the game. I would like to get some of the cool toys out on the table (Valkyries, Leman Russ variants, Chimeras) but I would also like my Guard army to have more soldiers on the table than my Space Marines. It just seems to fit better with the fluff. I am undecided so far, but I know for sure I will get at least one Valkyrie in the list and at least one Sentinel because I want to field my Elysian Drop Sentinel from Forge World.

I also tooled around with my Ork list. I had even more trouble defining roles for the various Ork units and gave up for the most part before really nailing anything down. The core of the army is a couple large units of Boyz and a unit of Nobz. Everything else is up in the air. I'd like to field my Battlewagon, but that's a lot of points that could be devoted to putting more Boyz of various types out on the field. They do need something heavy-hitting, though, and a Battlewagon seems to fit the bill, especially if I pack it with something nasty.

All in all it's been a decent weekend for hobby fun. I really enjoy going through my bits and putting models together. Generally while putting them together I come up with a little back story or an explanation as to why they look the way they do, even if it's just a couple of sentences or even a couple of words describing the look I'm going for with that particular model.