Now it's time to set some goals for 2009. Most of my aims for 2009 are not hobby-related, so I'm going to try keeping the gaming stuff to something manageable. I'm going to focus on small playable forces for a couple of game systems. This is primarily intended to be a hobby blog, so I'll stay away from the non-hobby goals.

1. Get 750 points of Space Marines painted up to oppose my friend's Tau army. I'd like to get this done as soon as early February so we can get some games in and learn the 5th Edition rules.
2. Follow up with 750 points of Orks, so we can have a little variety in our games. Ideally this would happen within a month or two of getting the Space Marines to 750 points.
3. Continue to expand these armies at approximately the same pace as my friend's army, so we aren't waiting on each other to get a bigger game in. Eventually this should lead to us having enough points to challenge other people at Tuesday game nights.
4. Paint my Flames of War U.S. force. It's rather small, so it hopefully will not take long. I must admit to being rather intimidated by the 15mm figures. I suppose it is just because they are different from the heroic-scale Warhammer stuff I'm used to. I don't have the list in front of me, but I think it's 80 or 90 infantry and 8 or 10 vehicles. It's basically an understrength infantry company with some armor and anti-tank support. I've got the start of a similar German force, but don't quite have all the components. Since there is no real presence for the game in this area it's not as high-priority as the 40k stuff.
5. Assuming I get through most of what's lined out above I'd like to work on some other projects as my whims move me. These projects would include 1000 points of Warhammer Fantasy Orcs & Goblins, a handful of Foundry Pirates that I picked up from somewhere, some odds & ends for my Skaven army, and maybe even a couple boxes of Lord of the Rings figures.
6. I've got plenty of figures, but no terrain for them to fight over aside from a flat grass mat. I want to focus a bit on adding some terrain to my collection. Hobbytown has quite a selection of terrain for various genres, including quite a few pieces on clearance. It wouldn't take much to attain a fair collection of stuff over the course of several months. I also should look into terrain that I can build myself.

That's probably plenty to take me through to next year and then some. My priorities for this year revolve mostly around school, work, and family. I'll have to try keeping a balance so the hobby stuff doesnt take priority over the more important things. It's going to be a pretty stressful year, but hopefully I'll be better off at the end of 2009 than I was at the end of 2008. I think I regressed a bit last year and I'm certainly very far behind where I wanted to be at this stage in my life.

Terminators and Mumaks

I've been working on a Space Marine Terminator to see how my tentative paint scheme will look. So far it looks about how I want it to. It's not very close to being done, I still have to paint a lot of details and figure out how to do the highlights. The right knee, which I was going to paint in the company color, has some sort of skull device on it so I'm probably going to use the shield-shaped bit on the left shoulder to designate company color and squad number.

I was at the hobby shop today and noticed that many of their Lord of the Rings boxed sets were marked at 50% off, including the War Mumak of Harad, also known as an Oliphaunt. A discount coupon I had brought the price to 60% off, and I got the largest Lord of the Rings model there is. The box contains one Mumak and 13 infantry models.

I finally got to look through the new Space Marines Codex and build an army list out to 1500 points. I have nearly everything I need for the army already, save for a squad of Space Marines and their transport. Of course at some point I'll be wanting to add some Assault Marines, some Scouts, a few Terminators with non-standard kit, a better Captain model, a Forge World Dreadnought or two.... But the main core of the army is essentially complete. I need a few more models to fill out my Ork list, as the Ork models tend to cost fewer points than Space Marines.

I don't have much to talk about, but I can't sleep for some reason and I'm pretty tired of looking at my Fantasy Baseball rosters today. I've already made all the changes I can without imploding my teams, so there's no point in comparing stats yet again.

I didn't get any painting done today as Saturday is usually the day the wife and I run around and do all our errands together. Of course, running errands usually involves visiting one or two motorcycle shops to look at bikes. We saw a couple of cool vintage bikes today. That was pretty fun. And the wife asked me if I thought we'd let our kid get a little 50cc dirtbike when he gets older. I'm looking forward to taking my motorcycle class next weekend, as my bike is mostly just a fancy driveway ornament until then. I am still sticking to my stance that I won't ride it until then. One of the guys in my National Guard unit is a military motorcycle safety instructor and several of the other guys ride, and they all thought I had a good plan to wait until I had the course under my belt before riding a bike this big. Anyway, I'm looking forward to doing more than sitting on the bike in my driveway making vroom sounds.

Today I looked around at all the figures and books and magazines I've got stashed everywhere in the house and I think it's about time to go through and find everything; then get it organized again. I really don't even know what all I have anymore hobbywise, so that's probably a good sign that I need to reorganize. I'd like to make some progress on the Orcs I'm painting this week as well as get some form of primer on the rest of the 1000-point list. We'll see how it goes.

Also, on nights when I don't have a movie to watch I've been listening to podcasts. The one I've been listening to most is The D6 Generation, which seems to focus more on Warhammer/Warhammer 40k and the Privateer Press games. They do reference board games and a little bit of historical stuff, but not much. Another one I've listened to a couple of episodes of is Podhammer, which focuses entirely on Warhammer Fantasy. There are a couple of others I've been meaning to check out, but haven't got around to. We also discovered a new webcomic. It plays off the premise of the DM of the Rings webcomic, using screenshots from the Lord of the Rings movies to explore what would happen if someone tried to roleplay The Lord of the Rings with players who had never heard of Tolkien. This one is called Darths & Droids and is set in the Star Wars universe. It even comes up with a much better explanation for the existence of Jar Jar Binks than anything George Lucas could cobble together.

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 had a bunch of vacation saved up and really didn't want to go to work anymore, so I decided to take Friday-Monday off and have a four-day weekend. I have a few plans as far as what I'm going to do with my time off, but nothing is really set in stone. I cleaned up a little in the computer room this evening and watched a movie with the wife. I was hoping that the big envelope in the mailbox today was my copy of Battlegames #11, but instead it was my wife's pattern book for crocheting Care Bears.

I also got a surprise package in the mail. I always think about mail bombs when I get surprise packages but I'm not really important enough to be the target of anything but a random attack, so I ruled that out. It was from Beckett Media, and I couldn't for the life of me recall ordering anything from Beckett recently. So I opened up the box and found that I'd won a Molten Core Raid Deck for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game from Beckett Massive Online Gamer Magazine. Last year when I was playing World of Warcraft regularly I bought a subscription to the magazine, and in every issue there is a survey you can fill out and send in to enter yourself into a contest. Apparently my survey got chosen and I won a prize. So that was a nice bonus for me today.

Tonight I plan on going through my Lord of the Rings army lists and figuring up exactly which boxes and blister packs I need to finish all of the armies. That way I can make sure to only buy the things I need and hopefully acquire everything before this legal battle between New Line and the Tolkien estate gets too crazy. I'd really rather not have some fight over money leave me with a bunch of partial armies. I really should have rented a movie to watch while I work on that, and I still may make a run to the Red Box later on.

And the big news is that my wife is pregnant. She's only about a month along now, so hopefully everything goes well and I can look forward to being a dad right around late October-early November. Of course, that means I will probably not be attending the Tactical Solutions wargaming convention on October 17-19, but there will always be other conventions to attend. I should probably not be playing games ten hours away with my wife so close to having a kid. We've been trying to have a child for around two years now, so we're pretty excited at the prospect.

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.