A while back I posted about my subscription to White Dwarf. To recap, I ordered the subscription through Paypal, the order got processed, but Games Workshop never did whatever they're supposed to do to finalize the payment. So I was getting the subscription for free. When I wrote about it last I had e-mailed them but hadn't heard anything back. They finally got back to me and we worked it out so I could pay them and clear my conscience.

On Saturday I hadn't quite finished my paper when the scheduled time to go to our friends' home arrived, so I dug out the dusty old laptop that I had in Iraq to see if it would run. It was noisy and a little bit slow, but it ran. So for the first hour or two E.A. and I did our homework, then we pulled out our miniatures and had a bit of a hobbying marathon. I assembled nearly all the remaining infantry for my Space Marine force. For the most part it went well. The Assault Marine Sergeant borrowed a Lightning Claw from the Space Marine Commander kit and it didn't go on exactly right. Most of the problem had to do with getting the arm to look right and still be able to mount the shoulder pad. I was able to get it on there, but there is a gap. Once the jetpack is on the gap should be fairly well hidden, though. I am also having some trouble getting the Space Marine Scout with Heavy Bolter to actually hold his weapon, as the Scout torsos have these pouches on their chests that block the left arm from grabbing the handle on the front of the gun. I'll have to work with it a little more. The Scout Sergeant with a Power Fist from the Commander box looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I'm pretty excited about him. And the Commander himself looks to be one bad mother with his Storm Bolter and Power Sword. I'm still considering what sort of pattern to paint on the Sniper Rifle Scouts' cloaks. I'm leaning in the direction of something urban with a lot of greys, dull blues, and black. I'm also trying to decide what to do with the inside of the cloaks, whether they should be done up as a flat color or as dual-purpose cloaks with another type of camo on the opposite face. I also clipped out the parts I'll need for my Predator CFV and separated them into major assemblies for painting. E.A. cleaned up some figures and spent most of the time working out his paint scheme on a Fire Warrior. He wound up with a nice desert red color for the armor and a tan color for the cloth bits. I think his army will be quite nice-looking on the tabletop.

My wife starts work again in a few hours after a couple months off for the birth of the slug-baby. We are still trying to figure out how our scheduling is going to work as there already didn't seem to be enough time in the day or sleep in the night. The kid has really started interacting with us in the last couple of weeks. It's been pretty neat. He will laugh in response to us talking to him or touching his face. He spends most of his awake time watching things around him and making baby talk. He has also been developing a smidgen more independence, meaning that we can occasionally set him down or put him in his baby swing for a bit of a break from holding him. He will occasionally even sleep on his own without being in contact with someone.

I can't think of much else to write about. I heard a rumor that the Imperial Guard are in for a new codex and some new figures in the March time frame. That may be exciting, but as far as I know it's still just a rumor.

I'm not sure how many of my readers ever visit my wife's blog, so I thought I'd summarize her recent post on the name of our kid. The short version is that we're going to name him Benjamin Grimm after a certain ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing; most well-known as the big orange rocky member of the Fantastic Four. I used to be a pretty big comic book fan. I still like comics, but I don't buy them anymore as the cover price is a bit much for 21 pages of story every month and the crossovers became a bit overwhelming a year or two ago. Anyway, the Fantastic Four is my favorite comic book team and the Thing is my favorite comic book hero. Benjamin Grimm also isn't so weird that the kid will have to be embarrassed about it later in life. In professional situations he'll be able to go by Benjamin G. or something that sounds fairly normal. You couldn't do that with a name like Norrin Radd or Oatu. It's also a good excuse for me to buy tons of licensed comic book merchandise. I guess we'll see how it goes.

If you don't read my wife's blog or talk to us in person regularly you may have missed our big news. On Thursday we went in and had an ultrasound to look at the baby. The really good news is that the baby seems to be healthy and have all the proper pieces. The other good news is that we're having a boy. So that is pretty neat.

I've been cleaning and assembling my 1000-point Orcs and Goblins force. It's actually a rather small-sized army with only three units of infantry, a unit of cavalry, a couple of chariots, a Spear Chukka, and a couple of characters. I wonder how it will stand up against the numbers of the Skaven army. I've been reminded of how much I dislike working with metal models as compared to plastics. They are a pain to clean flash and mold lines off of and customization takes so much more effort. I am glad that Games Workshop seems to be moving toward producing more plastic kits. I need to pick up some two-part epoxy tonight so I can finish assembling my figures. I am too suspicious of spraycan primer to use the stuff I've got, so I went out and bought a bottle of gesso as that's been talked up on The Miniatures page quite a bit. I think the effort to brush it on is worth the extra time if it means avoiding the chance of having the spray stuff ruin twenty figures.

For miniature wargaming I've acquired a few things over the last month. I picked up a unit of Savage Orcs at 50% off and this week I picked up two of my favorite Games Workshop recent releases, the Ork Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun and the Ork Trukk. I really like the greenskin models both in Fantasy and 40K. They have a lot of character and humor in them, probably moreso than any other army in the Warhammer universe.

D & D 4th Edition got released, and I've had a chance to look through the Player's Handbook a little bit. There are plenty of reviews on the internet that go into more detail than I can. I was a little underwhelmed by the character creation process. It's been simplified quite a bit, perhaps too much. Multi-classing is gone, as are a lot of Feats and abilities that were present in 3.5 and allowed players to make characters with some variety. It feels like each class has only a few viable options and paths to take, so every class is going to be one of two different branches and have extremely similar powers. Gnome PCs are gone, as are Half-Orcs. They've been replaced by Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Eladrin. The Dragonborn are pretty cool and Tieflings are moderately interesting, but with Eladrin, Elves, and Half-Elves all being playable races the Elven races are extremely over-represented. I'd like to have Half-Orcs back. Druids aren't in the book, but the Wizards website promises that they'll be in a future sourcebook. Rangers lost their ability to have animal companions, which is annoying, although the Wizards site also mentions that perhaps a future feat will give them the option to obtain one. Barbarians also didn't make the cut. Overall it seems like a lot of fun options were cut from the last edition to make the game more accessible to the lowest denominator. But I wonder if I feel that way just because there aren't any sourcebooks outside of the three core books on the market at the moment. Wizards promises to release approximately 3.2 million D & D sourcebooks per year, so I'm sure character variety will be opened up to players with the pocketbook to absorb the cost. I guess we'll see how it all works out. The new combat system is a lot less frustrating to sort out, so that's a good thing.

I guess this is the week that we find out the gender of our kid as long as the necessary plumbing is visible in the ultrasound. I still think it should be a surprise for when the kid is born, but that's not a battle I'm going to win.

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.

We went and saw the baby today, or at least we saw something that the nurse said was a baby. To me it looked a lot like an x-ray of a chicken nugget. Since I couldn't make out any of the details I have labeled the photo below as it was explained to me. The good news is that everything seems to be going well.

Edit: On second read, it appears that the red label doesn't appear very well on the photo. The red label says: BABY. So the blob in the red square is the actual baby. The umbilical cord is not actually visible in this picture, but it's in the general area indicated by the blue line. The yolk sack is apparently a food source for the nugget baby until the umbilical cord and the p-word that rhymes with magenta complete the formation process. And that, my friends, is how babby is formed.

Not much else to post about at the moment, so I'm off to bed. I've got my final Fantasy Baseball draft of the year tomorrow and I don't want to sleep through it.