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.

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.

We went camping this weekend and it was probably the worst vacation ever. We came home early from the camping trip because we were having a terrible time. There were some plusses to the weekend, but I was in such a terrible mood that the vacation weekend wasn't very relaxing or fun at all. I think from now on I'll just save up my vacation days to cash them in every year at the spring deadline.

We took our Lab to the vet today because she's been having a recurring skin issue. Our Basset Hound got so worked up about all of us leaving without him that we decided to let him tag along and sit with me while Annie went in to get checked out by the vet. He got really nervous and started pacing back and forth and climbing up on the bench to sit in my lap. After a couple rounds of that he climbed up on my lap and stayed there. A few seconds later I felt an extremely warm, wet feeling all over my lap. Buddy had lost control of his bladder and peed all over me. I had to go sit with him in the back of our wagon until my wife and Annie were done. It probably wouldn't have been such a big deal if Buddy was a small dog, but when big dogs pee they can move some large amounts of liquid in a short period of time. If that wasn't bad enough, Annie has a food allergy and we're going to have to give her food that will pretty much double the cost of feeding our dogs.

Last night I cleaned up and assembled a bunch of figures. Today I primed them, and at some point I will actually start in on painting them. I had to do some conversion work on a Rat Ogre with some green stuff. It doesn't look that good, but hopefully I'll be able to work with it and get it looking better. I was going to do some cleaning up work on the rest of my Warlord figures and assemble my next unit of Clanrat Slaves tonight, but I got caught up in other stuff and didn't get around to it.

I did make up a list of all the figures I need to buy for my Warlord armies, so I can check the little boxes as I add to my collection. I was going to make some sort of list that involved several check-boxes for each unit so I could track a few categories like Purchased, Primed, Painted, and Based, but if I let myself go too far on lists, I end up spending more time on lists than on miniatures. It's a slippery slope, and once I'm on it I can produce an entire notebook based on 25 miniatures. I am planning on making a painting notebook, though. I will be painting the Warlord units in stages as I buy more figures, so I'll have to remember my color choices.

It always amazes me how much priming my figures cuts down the intimidation factor of painting them. I was looking at my Warlord figures last night and wondering how I would paint all those little indistinct details. But once the primer hits the figures they become so much more defined and I am able to see what and where everything is supposed to be. I'm hopeless when it comes to bare metal, but on primed figures I can see what I need to do. It's similar in concept to what they say about writing projects. The blank page can be intimidating, but once you get some ink down ideas will start flowing.

I dragged my wife to Hobbytown today and picked up a couple of Reaper blisters. We have worked out a little arrangement. There's a Jo-Ann Fabric store across the street from Hobbytown, so I drop her off there and then go on to Hobbytown. She buys yarn and beads and craft stuff, and then she walks over to Hobbytown. It's good for me because she gets excited about the craft store and spends some money, so I get to make more trips and not get a guilt trip about buying a couple of figures or some paints. I also picked up some foam at the fabric store so I can make a transport case for my Skaven army. If this foam works out, I will have a fairly cheap way to keep my armies safe when I move them.

I am taking my little brother to the Monster Truck show this Saturday. I think he will like it. I remember going to see the Monster Trucks with my dad when I was a kid, and it was a pretty good time.

At drill this weekend I was somewhat surprised to hear them call out my name as one of the people to be promoted to Sergeant. I'd expected that it would be at least one more year before I got up on the promotions list, but apparently enough people above me failed their PT tests and I got bumped above the promotion line. Depending on how well my unit can wheel and deal, I may have to transfer to another Troop to keep the rank, but I'm hoping that I can work something out to get the promotion and stay in my current Troop. Either way, it's a little more money coming in every month, and that means more fun for me.

I've started a bad habit. I've been letting my Basset Hound get up on the couch with me at night. He's getting a little older, so he spends more time sleeping and isn't as much of a nuisance when he's in the house. We have to help him get up on the couch because his stubby little back legs can't quite make the step. Earlier today he solved the problem by hopping up at an angle and then rolling onto the couch, but he's already forgotten that method. Our Lab is jealous, but she's too huge and energetic to sit on the couch.