I was unable to hold out until I had enough Honor Points for my PvP boots, so I bought the PvP cloak and had an Agility enchantment put on it. Then I found out about the daily fishing quests with all of their awesome prizes, so I've been leveling up my fishing skill instead of playing battlegrounds. Once I get my fishing skill up to a decent level I'll go back to the battlegrounds and just do the fishing daily quest every day.

My Goblin Warboss on Gigantic Spider arrived the other day, after some concern on my part about whether it would get here. I was notified by e-mail that it was on backorder a week or two ago and with Games Workshop it seems that backorder is one step away from discontinued, especially since this model is a collector's edition and Games Workshop has been making drastic changes to their catalog lately. The model is quite impressive, with no fewer than 16 parts. It should be a bear to assemble, and hopefully I can give it a good paint job.

I didn't make any more progress on the Easterlings, as we had overtime last night and I was tired. I was too tired even to bake some chicken nuggets and tater tots in the oven.

On the Fantasy Sports front, I won the TMP Hockey League championship. I've made it to the championship round in both of my Basketball head-to-head leagues and I should win one of my rotisserie leagues. The other rotisserie team made a good run at a trophy spot around midseason, but has floundered ever since and should finish out of the top three. The Fantasy Baseball season has started out fairly well, but it's too early to really analyze my teams much.

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.

I wasn't expecting them until the 8th, but my Field of Glory books arrived in the mail today. They look very nice, and I've read through them a little. Not enough to really understand them, but enough that I think I'd like to try them out. Of course, there's the little matter of about 750 million figures backlogged in front of my historical projects. And I've got at least until early 2009 before the Early Medieval army lists come out anyway. I am excited to give them a more thorough reading in the next week or two.

On the Lord of the Rings front, I basecoated a few shields and helmets on my Easterlings today while watching a movie on my computer. I did some housecleaning earlier in the day that led to an allergy attack, so with the medication I took for the allergies I didn't feel steady enough to paint the little scales on the armor with any accuracy. Hopefully I'll have this first batch of 20 done soon. I also picked up a box of Wood Elves at the hobby shop today, so that's one item off my checklist.

I'm finished with the Easterlings. They are not amazing but I think they look all right, and that's good enough for me. I could fiddle around with them until they're perfect but I'd rather move on and get some more figures done. Anyway, it's late and I need to go to bed so I'll leave you with the photos.