I still haven't found the Dwarf book, but I found a lot of other stuff while looking for it. I was able to put together a list based on the figures I have and the Army Builder software. The list is pretty basic, but at 1000 points it seems like it will stand up pretty well against Skaven and Orc & Goblins. And I was able to fit a small unit of Slayers in there, which is always good. Nothing like a bunch of half-naked berserkers with orange hair and an oath to die in battle to make up for past misdeeds.

While I was at it I wrote up a new list for Skaven at 1000 points. I could have written it out using models I've already got painted, but instead I wrote in the Plague Furnace and a unit of Plague Monks to push it. The rest of the list is from models I've already painted. I don't know if this Skaven list will be able to match up against the Dwarfs. It basically relies on Skaven Slaves to absorb fire for a turn or two while the Plague Furnace advances and then the war machine and magic will hopefully kill the Dwarfs enough to win the day. It's not a very reliable plan, but at least I'll add a neat model to my collection. I'm looking forward to it.

I forgot to mention yesterday that the boy has begun to walk. He still prefers crawling for most applications, but he'll walk from point-to-point if he feels like he can make it, and his range is steadily improving.

The wife sent me out to the garage to find the Christmas decorations earlier this evening. While I was out there I couldn't help myself and I started up my motorcycle and gave the throttle a few twists. Then I got dizzy from the exhaust and had to go get some fresh air on the back deck. But the bike fired right up and sounded good.

Some of the treasures I found while looking for the Dwarf book included the $150 gift certificate I got when I bought my bike, a $30 check from the credit union, all of my Flames of War stuff, and several boxes of miniatures I'd forgotten I had. I can't seem to find one of my Screaming Bells, though. I have the latest model, I have the first sculpt, but I can't find the middle one. I'm almost certain I own one, though.

Roadblock

Of course, as soon as I decide to work on some Dwarves I find that my Dwarf Army Book has come up missing. I can find every single Warhammer book I own aside from that one. I have no idea where it is. Meh.

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 did a little bit of work on my Orcs tonight; just starting on painting their weapons. I probably could have finished the weapons but I lost interest and set the figures aside while I watched some more Olympic coverage.

It looks like I'm going to take the job out at the military base. It will be at the lower pay rate, so I'll be taking a $0.62 per hour pay cut, but I'll be getting ten to twelve more hours per week and that should result in me pulling in about $600 extra per month. My current job will also keep me on part-time status with another 10-15 hours a week, so we should be able to save up some money for the arrival of the baby. I'm a bit nervous about changing jobs; my wife can attest to the fact that I don't take changes to my routine very well, but this should wind up being a good move for us.

Part of tonight's Olympic coverage was the Men's Team Gymnastics finals. The US took the Bronze medal which was apparently a lot better than they were expected to do. I didn't find the competition to be very exciting and the US team seemed a little bit cocky for how outmatched they were by the Chinese and Japanese teams. All of their soundbites made me less interested in seeing them do well. And what is with volleyball teams group-hugging each other after every point? It seems a little excessive to be hugging each other up to 25 times per set. The winning team for any match will have to hug each other a minimum of 75 times; more if they are beaten on one or two sets. It wastes time and it's annoying to watch. Swimming has become my favorite Olympic sport by a long shot at the moment. There seems to be more action than in the other sports that have been getting airtime recently. It doesn't hurt that the Americans are pulling in quite a few medals in the water.

Hobbytown has a copy of the upcoming Warhammer 40k: Assault on Black Reach starter set in the display case with all of the components laid out for looking at. There is definitely a lot of stuff on the sprues, and I'm pretty pumped up to hopefully snag one of the boxes.

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.

Orc Warboss Finished

I finished up my Orc Warboss tonight. I think he turned out pretty well. I will be adding a shield to him at some point, but I haven't got that painted yet. Now I just have to find an agreeable way to prime my figures so I can paint the rest of my 1000-point army.

Moving Along...

I've made some more progress on my Warboss, but I think it's about time to close up shop and head to bed. I still have some detail work to do, as well as making the metallics a little more interesting. I'm not sure what color to do the details in. I'm leaning toward red, as I've already got blue, white, and green prominently featured on the mini. I don't think that will make the figure too busy to look at, as the red will just cover the wrappings on the weapon and boots, as well as a wristband. I don't think the boots were meant to have fur on them but I was able to paint the bunched up cloth to convincingly mirror the wolf-head cloak. I guess that's about all for tonight.

I've been working very slowly on my Orc Warboss. His cloak is done, so I'll probably be moving on to various parts of his weapons and armor. In the background you can see some of my Savage Orcs. The darker ones were stained black in my gesso experiment. On the Warboss I decided to go with white fur on the cloak to bring out a good contrast with the skin. I want the Warboss to stand out from the rest of his unit.

So far the Liquitex gesso hasn't worked out too well. When I got home from work the Savage Orcs had pinholes all over the primer coat, and the faces were very obscured. I thought that the pinholes may have come from shaking the bottle too much and getting air bubbles in the gesso, and the gesso may have been spread a bit too thick on the faces. So I tried it again, making sure that there weren't any air bubbles in the gesso and taking more time to spread it out. It looked a little better, but there were still pinholes in the finish. And rather than pulling tight against the metal in some areas it tended to stretch out between the details like a webbing. I'll still have to try working with it, but so far I've had three batches of miniatures in the Simple Green. At least the gesso scrubs off a lot easier than primer. Not sure how it works on plastic figures. I may just have to relent and go back to the spraycan.

The Gesso Experiment, Part 2

I found the local Liquitex Gesso distributor, so I went in and purchased a bottle of their black gesso. I've applied it to a couple of Savage Orcs and will check back later when I get home from work.

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 didn't get any work done on my Orcs and Goblins tonight, possibly because I didn't feel like watching a movie. I think I'll probably go to bed (relatively) early rather than work on any figures. I've been having trouble getting my Savage Orc Shaman to fit into the Savage Orc unit. It's a common problem I have with character models in my armies. My Skaven Warlord only fits in his unit of Stormvermin facing to the rear, and I had to trim the Army Standard Bearer's tail so he could rank up with the other Skaven. The character models in Warhammer just seem to take up a lot of space outside the confines of their bases. I'm thinking about removing the Skaven characters from their current bases and placing them on elevated terrain bases so they can be easily located and rank up properly. I may wind up doing the same with my Orc and Goblin characters.

I went to the DMV today expecting a long wait since I had several tasks to complete while there. Luckily I got there just before the noontime rush and only had to be there for about thirty minutes. By the time I left the place was standing-room only, so I was pretty lucky. After I got my license plate I had to wait to take the test for my Motorcycle Instruction Permit, and the guy next to me asked me what kind of bike I have. I was very happy to show him a picture of it on my phone. He told me about his Honda Shadow, which he apparently just got running after a year or two. It's interesting how your hobbies can spark conversations with people you'd never approach in day-to-day life. It's always interesting to see who approaches me when I wear my World of Warcraft t-shirt or carry a White Dwarf magazine around. I think tomorrow I may actually ride my bike around the trailer park a few times, depending on the weather. I picked up a motorcycle cover tonight, as the wind has been picking up and there are rumors of rainstorms. I wouldn't want my baby to get dirty and wet. The consensus seems to be that my wife is either very cool or very misled to let me buy a crotch rocket. I don't think I misled her all that much, so she must be a cool gal. Either that or the pregnancy hormones have altered her judgment. She did think that once I bought a bike I would shut up about motorcycles for a while, but my commentary has just become a little more focused while possibly increasing in quantity.

Here's another bike they had at the shop that is absolutely mean-looking. Try not to get goosebumps while watching the movie. There's another video on the BMW motorcycles site

I didn't wind up going to bed early, so I decided to add this video that one of the guys in my Guard unit showed us.

Change of Plans

The other day I went to the Cycle Gear shop to look at helmets and jackets. I didn't really find anything I liked, but there is a Yamaha dealership next door and I figured I'd go and look at bikes since I still had a few minutes before work. I hadn't really ever stopped at that place before, as Yamaha doesn't really make starter bikes and their sportbikes are way out of my price range. But, as I was perusing the used bike selection I saw a 2004 Yamaha FZ1 with only 2800 miles on the odometer priced right around what a new Buell Blast would cost. I wasn't planning on buying a bike until next month as I don't even have my license and technically can't ride it yet, but I went home and looked at insurance rates and bike reviews and decided at least go in and see if a deal could be made. Long story short, I bought the bike and they threw in a free helmet and some gloves. The picture isn't very good, but here it is:

It's a pretty crazy bike. It's so big and powerful (140 Horsepower!) that I am actually kind of nervous to ride it, so I'll probably wait until I've finished my STAR safety course, which is an entire month away.

I haven't got a lot more done on my Orcs and Goblins. I generally work on figures while watching a movie, and I haven't watched any movies in the last couple of days.

Today at work I dropped a decking beam on my toe. I tried to walk it off, but it is huge and purple and I'm not entirely sure if it's broken or not. So in the morning I'll have to waste a bunch of time going to the doctor to find out. Hopefully it's just horribly bruised and I don't have to break our year-long injury-free streak. I have no desire to be the guy who breaks the streak, especially in the current economy as there has been talk of drastically reducing the hours of less-productive people.

After struggling with superglue for an hour last night without actually getting my Goblin Spear Chukka to stay together I went out and got some two-part epoxy. It's messy and smelly, but the parts went right together. I've just got to put together some Forest Goblin Spider Riders, a Snotling Pump Wagon, and finish cleaning up my unit of Savage Orcs and I'll be done assembling my 1000-point force. Then I get to try out my gesso primer and get to painting.

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.

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.

Painted Rat Ogre

I finished painting the Rat Ogre. He looks decent. He'd probably look a lot better if I had some real camera skills. But another box is checked, and that's what really matters here.

I assembled a couple ranks of Orcs today, but I will need another box of them to finish off the unit. I was going to work on the Rat Ogre I've been painting, but I ended up only fixing a few spots I'd missed with the initial ink wash.

My wife bought me some Hogan Energy drinks today, and while the concept and packaging are awesome, the product itself leaves a lot to be desired. All energy drinks are extremely bad for you, but some of them taste good. Hogan Energy is not one of the good-tasting ones. I think they may have actually included some actual Hulk Hogan fluids in every can.

I've started work on the tavern crew, and it's reminded me how much I hate painting humans. The skin tones and faces are just terrible to paint. With rats I just have to slap on two base colors and a brown ink wash. With humans I have to work through endless layers of Tanned Flesh, Dwarf Flesh, Elf Flesh, and various mixes of all the above just to get them looking somewhat decent, and half the time the paint ends up all chunky and chalky anyway. It's enough to drive me into a life of crime so I can sell the stolen goods and hire Fernando to do the painting for me.

I am having mixed feelings about the approaching weekend. One the one hand, it's the weekend and I won't have to go to work for two days. On the other, I will have to pick up where I left off as far as organizing the house so we can get the final couple of rooms all cleaned up and organized. I think that once we get the house all cleared out I'll feel much better about the work I had to do to get it done. On the topic of housecleaning, my wife's new vacuum arrived today, and she was pretty excited about that. I have no idea how someone could get excited about a vacuum, but there are many things I do not understand.

I have to go back to school this Fall, and I think that is causing some stress in my subconscious mind. I don't usually remember my dreams at all, but the last couple days I've had some ridiculous nightmares. I'm only taking two classes, as my attempts to go to school full-time since I got home from Iraq haven't turned out so well. My attention span and information retention is not what it used to be, and that makes it difficult to study. From conversations with my fellow soldiers it would seem that this is not really an uncommon problem. I don't know if it's a result of training or stress or anthrax shots or some combination of the whole wartime experience, but sometimes I can barely remember my name. Reading used to be a favorite activity for me, but I can hardly make it through a magazine article anymore. I actually have to take breaks while reading battle reports in White Dwarf, and it's not just because of the glaring grammatical errors. I've got a couple of books that I'm going to start reading in an effort to get my mind back together for school. Hopefully I survive this semester and can take a couple more classes in the Spring.

I really want to get started on my Orcs and Goblins army, but I have too many projects going on right now to fit them in. Besides that, I need another box of Orcs before I can build my first unit. I don't want to paint some of them now and some later, as I'll run into the same problem I'm having with my expanded Plague Monk unit. I painted them so long ago that I can't remember how to replicate the paint job on the extra figures.

This has been a long and winding post. It would've been even worse but I cut out several parts that didn't even make sense to me.