My National Guard unit is going through a transition right now, and as part of the changes, my job was changed from M1A1 Abrams Crewman to Cavalry Scout. So I had to spend the last couple of weeks going to a school about my new job. There are actually two branches to the Scout job, the Humvee side and the Bradley side. I did the Humvee course a few months ago, and this month I took the Bradley course. For those who are not militarily inclined, here is a Bradley:

The training was fairly typical military fare, with long hours and lot of boredom punctuated with a few fun activities. I got to play with some plastic explosive, a grenade launcher, several machine guns, and fire a bunch of rounds from the main gun of the Bradley itself. The Bradley gun is fun to fire, but it's a little different sort of fun than firing a tank. The cannon on the M1A1 makes a big boom that is hard to top as far as thrill factor.

The Bradley gun is more like a machine gun on steroids. It's fun to shoot because you can fire five rounds off in a matter of seconds and watch them all follow each other into the target. They're not huge rounds (a box of 30 probably weigh the same as one round for the Abrams, give or take 20 pounds), but they're still fun to shoot. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks.

Today at work part of the dock smelled like Barbecue-flavored chips, so every time I drove past that area I got hungry. I actually got to a point where I was salivating and having hunger pangs because I needed to be eating some chips. At lunch time I ran out to my car and went to the gas station to buy some chips. It wasn't the healthiest lunch, but I needed to have some chips right then or I was going to go nuts.

The Fantasy Baseball season is going okay. I have three teams in the top 3 or so spots and one team that is slowly making it's way up from 9th place. With a couple of good weeks I could get that team into playoff contention. The Fantasy Football magazines have started coming out, so I'm pretty excited about that. Fantasy Football is fun, but I find it more difficult than Fantasy Baseball or Fantasy Basketball. I think it's because each player only gets one chance during the week to produce stats. In the other sports, a couple bad outings in a week can be balanced out by some good outings. Players have more chances to achieve what you've projected for them. In Fantasy Football, whatever your player gets on that day is what you get for the week, good or bad.

I recently discovered that there is going to be a new MMORPG coming out called Pirates of the Burning Sea, and I'm cautiously excited about it. I want to be head-over-heels exploding with joy about it, but there is the off chance that it could not be very fun for a variety of reasons. I think the thing that worries me the most is that a historically-based Pirate MMO will be limited by the geography and timeline of the real 1700s. I'm not sure how the game will be able to grow beyond its original release and still stay "in character." But I'll probably buy it and pony up my subscription fee every month until it stops being fun.

I've been jonesing for a Mountain Dew, but we don't have any soda at all in the house. At this point, I'd settle for an off-brand, barely carbonated Sprite ripoff.

I meant to write a long post about my recent activities, but other stuff got in the way. Maybe tomorrow I'll post something significant.

My little brother came over for an hour or two this afternoon before I left for work. We hung out and played some games, so that was pretty fun.

I'm thinking about quitting World of Warcraft again. Getting to level 70 was fun, but once you hit the level cap most of the play revolves around groups of players going into dungeons to get better gear than the items available in the regular game-world. I spent three hours tonight in the Looking for Group channel and didn't find anyone to go through an instance with. The same thing happened last night. I could grind for PvP gear, but that gets boring as I spend most of my time dead because I can't get the gear I need to excel because I can't find a group in the Looking for Group channel. It would be nice to have an organized group to play with, but my brother-in-law and his friends play on a different server, my sister has a baby and can't play, and my wife works a different shift than I do. So I'm considering dropping the game again, maybe until they come out with another expansion. At this point you're probably wondering if I want some cheese with my whine, so I'll end my blogging for today.

I finally got my World of Warcraft character to level 70, so maybe I will be able to do something else in my free time. I've been stuck on the last two or three steps of painting those Clanrat Slaves for a while now, but haven't had the willpower to get away from the computer. In theory I will put the last bits of paint on the unit tomorrow after work and be done with basing and clearcoat by the end of the week. We'll see if I get around to actually doing it.

In other news, my little sister graduated from high school this past weekend. I think they could cut the graduation ceremonies by about two hours and no one would miss the omitted parts.

I've been thinking about selling my comic books off on eBay to raise money for a rifle, so today I spent a little while browsing eBay to see what sort of money I can expect to make. It appears that the comic book market is running a bit slow at the moment. I may have to wait for a while to see if it heats back up again before I try to sell my collection.

I still need to start painting my miniature for the May painting contest, so I may try to do that tomorrow after work. For now, I need to go to bed so I'll be able to get to work in the morning.

I haven't done any painting since my last post. I didn't win the painting contest last month. This month's category is Pirates, and I'm having a hard time getting started. I think I've finally got a miniature picked out, so maybe tomorrow I'll actually start on it.

I went fishing this weekend with my parents and my little brother. We stayed the night at the campground in my parent's camp trailer and played Chinese Checkers. In the morning one of my dad's friends brought his boat to the reservoir on his trailer and we headed out. We tried a couple of spots, but the fishing was slow, and we had to move around quite a bit before we found a dock with some Crappie underneath it. The two veteran fisherman were getting skunked on the Crappie fishing, so we went out to search for some Bass.

My brother had to answer the call of nature, so we pulled the boat over and he went off into the bushes to do his business. When he came back, he announced that he'd just peed on a snake. My dad wanted to go see what kind of snake it was, so we went up to look at it. It turned out to be a rattlesnake, and when it saw us it coiled up and started buzzing. My brother is lucky that he didn't get bitten, but not many people can say they've peed on a rattlesnake.

We found a pretty nice stretch of river for Bass, and pulled in quite a few. The veteran fishermen (my dad and his friend) did a lot better at catching Bass, and several of them were keepers. There were a lot of people on the water who didn't do so well, so even though it was slow, it was a pretty good trip. I even got a nice sunburn on my neck.

I got my Clanrat Slave unit painted up to about 70% complete, but I didn't have the stamina to finish them off. Hopefully sometime during the week I'll be able to finish them up. I just have to paint their weapons, do some detailing, and paint and flock their bases. Once I get that done, I'll have my 2250-point army finished and be just 22 figures away from my 3000-point army.

I've become addicted to watching PBS shows while painting. I suspect that my painting speed and quality suffers, but I've learned all sorts of things about technology, nature, and weird fitness shows with Willie Nelson soundtracks.

The Reaper website has many of the Warlord grunt sculpts available in the Boneyard section of the online store now, but there are several figures still only available in the army packs. Unfortunately, the figures that are unavailable as individual sculpts are figures that I only need two or three of for my army lists. I think I will scrap my Warlord plans for the moment and work on other armies until Reaper sorts out their Warlord miniature line.

Another Lesson Learned

Today I have learned that if you wash all of your pants at the same time, it pretty much limits you to staying in the house for a couple of hours.

My wife is approximately 2200 miles away visiting her family, and I am almost done eating the food she left for me to survive on this week. I suppose I should have rationed it out a bit, but it looks like I'll be living on Easy Mac and ice cream for the next few days. It is suprising that I survived the years between leaving home and the time my wife started feeding me regularly in college.

The good news is that I've mostly overcome my illness and I'm about 60% done with my unit of Clanrat Slaves. The bad news is that the sun is coming up and I haven't gone to bed yet. Hopefully I'll be able to wake up to wake up at a fairly normal time and do something with my day off. Then it's back to the grindstone for a few days of work and a long weekend with the National Guard.

A Case of the Crud

Today I spent most of the day drugged up in bed, as I've caught some sort of energy-sapping runny nose/sore throat bug. I'm hoping that I feel better in the morning because I can't afford to be missing work.

A couple of hours ago I managed to drag myself out of bed long enough to clean up and assemble the rest of the Skaven in my possession. Maybe tomorrow I will prime them and at some point actually put some paint on the figures.