The Raz File

I finally finished off my Space Marine squad, so in the first half of January I've already accomplished nearly 50% of the painting I did in all of last year. Not a bad start; we'll see if I can carry momentum through all my upcoming obligations. I do think I'll try to paint the Predator next. The picture below shows a couple variants of the Terminator. I'll probably be doing the one on the right side of the photo. It's got an Autocannon and sponson-mounted Heavy Bolters as opposed to the Lascannons on the other one.


Hopefully that will go together well. I will possibly open the box up and look at the parts tomorrow. No pictures of my completed Space Marines as the cameras aren't nearby at the moment.

There is a new creature residing in our home now. There are quite a few regional Yahoo! Groups that go by the name Freecycle. Basically, people within a specific area join up and post stuff that they no longer need, and other people can e-mail them and arrange to haul it away. You can also post requests if there is something you are after. The catch is that no money changes hands. You're not allowed to sell the stuff you post. There are usually so many useless posts that I don't pay them much mind, but last night a message popped up offering a Russian Tortoise that the poster's kid no longer wanted to take care of. We'd been wanting to give Owen (our original Russian Tortoise) a companion for a while, but they aren't an extremely cheap animal to buy, generally around $80. So I e-mailed the lady and arranged to go over there after work and check it out. In order to take the tortoise I also had to take his cage, an extremely heavy 6-foot long enclosure. So I now have a huge terrarium in the back of my truck that I really have no need for. The tortoise doesn't have a name yet. He wasn't being fed proper vegetables or the mineral supplements he needed nor was he getting the UV light required for synthesizing his nutrients, so his shell is a bit malformed and I think it had a couple of soft spots. It should start to heal up and harden now that he'll be eating properly and basking under our UV lamp. Also included was a nice artificial pool/water dish that sells for $40-60 at the pet store. So it was a pretty good deal all around for us.

That's about all the news from me for today. It's exciting to be making some progress on my miniatures, hopefully I'll have more good news to report soon.

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 tried to do some painting on the Rat Ogre tonight, but I didn't get very far before I lost my motivation for painting. I put some clearcoat on the bartender and the barmaid. After that I fiddled around with planning for my WWII Eastern Front skirmish project. I'm still trying to decide whether I should go with Micro Armour scale or 15mm scale. So far I've been able to find all of the miniatures I need for my scenarios in Micro Armour scale, but I don't know the 15mm manufacturers well enough to find all the figures in 15mm.

Then I made up some stat cards for all of my pirate miniatures. I personalized them a little bit by cropping a headshot for each pirate and gluing it onto an index card. Then I used the tables in the Blood & Swash rule booklet to roll up the various stats for the figures. I may have my little brother over for a day or two this weekend, and hopefully we'll be able to play a game. I don't have a tavern built yet, but we can probably rig up some sort of scenario on the table using felt for terrain. If we end up playing I'll try to take pictures so I can post them here.

Well, I finished painting up the one barmaid, but the other one looks so bad that I may dunk her in some Simple Green and start over. This one looks pretty bad too, but not so bad that it'd be worth stripping the paint off and starting over. Besides, I'd like to run my tavern brawl game sometime this year. In the meantime, I'm working on another Rat Ogre for my Skaven and slowly assembling a unit of Warhammer Orcs.

In other news, we went to the pet store to get a rat to feed to our snake, and we ended up getting an addition for Herbert's cage. It's basically a big wire box with three levels and some ramps that clamps down over the top of a ten-gallon aquarium. We were going to get another rat to keep Herbert company, but all three pet stores we went to either had male rats only or no rats at all. Herbert will have to wait on getting a friend until Wednesday or Thursday when more rats come in.

I suppose it's a little strange for us to have some rats for feeding and some rats as pets, but Herbert is practically a family member now, as well as being a bit large for our snake to eat without trouble. I'm working on getting her to trust me enough that she can run around on my desk every day. I can't let her run too free because our Basset Hound wants to eat her. When we put her new cage addition on the aquarium, he stood by my desk whining for me to let her out so he could eat her.

The wife and I got a lot accomplished this weekend, which has been good for morale. We were able to go through most of the stuff in the house and throw out a ton of junk, find places for "keeper" items, take unneeded but servicable items to the thrift store, and move all of the furniture around to match our plan. I am still in awe of the sheer volume of what we were able to push through. The public areas of the house (living room, kitchen) are practically free of clutter, and it will probably take another day or so of work to get the computer/hobby room and the bedroom up to snuff. It's nice to finally have all of our space be usable. Once the house is all done up the way we need it, we'll able to go through the last three or four boxes in the storage shed and set that up as some sort of useful area as well.

Our dogs were pretty stressed out by all the changes, especially since we moved their kennels from the back room to the living room. Annie (the Labrador) has been even more on edge than usual, running around frenetically and being extra clingy around my wife. Buddy (the Basset Hound) peed on the floor, which is how he deals with stress. At least he did it on the floor this time, as last time he got stressed out he did his business on our bed, with most of the damage being done to my wife's pillow.

I think Herbert the rat is ill with some sort of wheezy, sneezing disease. That doesn't really bode well for her life expetancy, as sick animals don't make very good pets. Other than the wheezing, she seems to be quite full of energy and doesn't really make a nuisance of herself, so maybe she'll start feeling better after she settles into her new environment a bit more. A big plus is that she hasn't tried to bite me yet.

I want to get started on my WWII miniatures project, but it seems like the initial jump into a game or period is the most expensive part. I figure that to play the first three scenarios in my Skirmish Campaigns book I'll need an investment of about $200 for miniatures, terrain, and paints. I'll end up with a bit more infantry than I need for the scenarios, but the infantry isn't really all that expensive. That price tag will go up if I use actual plastic/resin/metal buildings instead of ordering one of the cardstock kits or paper kit downloads that are available. I think WWII may have to wait until I finish buying my Skaven army and perhaps a fair portion of my Orcs and Goblins.

I've made a few changes to my Skaven army lists, as I discovered during my games that some of the equipment on my Hero models was redundant or inneffective. There really isn't much change in the number of models I need, but the list should play a little better now. I also worked out a unit of Plague Monks as a potential substitute for the Giant in my 2250- and 3000-point lists. That way if I run into an opponent who objects to Dogs of War, I can pull out a huge unit of Frenzied Monks which are probably worse to fight than the Giant anyway.

I made a list of several things to do tonight, but the only thing I really made any progress on was painting the unit of Clanrat Slaves that has been sitting on my desk for a couple of months. Actually getting out and playing with my miniatures has led to a new motivation for getting the paints out again. I got a lot of compliments on my fully-painted army during my two games this week, so that was a nice little thumbs-up for my ego.

I've determined that Clanrat Slaves are awesome. Each unit of 20 only costs forty points, so they make very effective meat shields and can tie up many times their point cost for a turn or two. In the game I played on Wednesday, I think the Slaves really helped me keep the points close. If the Slaves had been switched out for regular Clanrats, my opponent would have ended up with an extra two hundred points or more. As it was, he spent a couple of turns killing two units of Slaves that were only worth 80 points to him. Then there wasn't enough time to finish the job on my more expensive units.

I've also decided that Plague Monks are insanely studly, especially when equipped with extra hand weapons. I'm pretty excited for my 3000-point list, because my Monks are going to get a big boost in numbers and power. That unit will be a hard-hitting beast.

I ordered my new computer today, so that's pretty exciting. Due to my military status, I got around a 25% discount. My wife also got a nice vacuum cleaner that she's had her eye on. The deal was that I could get a new computer once the house was set up they way we've been planning. We jumped the gun a little on ordering it and I won't be able to set it up for a while due to space restrictions, but it's good motivation for finishing up the reorganization of the house.

The Old West miniatures in the case at the game store have got me thinking about new projects. The store also has some very nicely-painted Old West buildings and terrain. I'm assuming that that stuff is well out of my budget, but I know there are some decent cardstock building sets out there that I could print off and build. The minis at the store are from Artizan Designs, and there are also a lot of figures from Foundry that are very nice. Someday it would be nice to buy a couple of the Foundry Horde deals, but it's hard to justify the expenditure as Foundry models aren't the cheapest around.

I should probably head to bed now, as I have to wake up and clear my remaining junk out of the living room. Then it's off to the bedroom to find spots for all of my clothes and White Dwarf magazines that are piled up all around the floor. Once that's done we should be able to start shuffling things to make way for my big desk and computer. We'll be moving the computers and hobby stuff to the current bedroom, the bedroom will be moved to the bigger room, and the dogs and junk in that room will be moved to the living room and shed, in that order. I made the suggestion that the dogs would be fine in the storage shed, but my wife used her veto power and sent it back to Congress.

Last week when my wife fed our python, Lucy didn't eat her second rat. That's never occured before, so we now have a rat living in one of our spare aquariums. I made the unfortunate mistake of naming him today, so I'm wondering if we'll be able to feed Herbert to Lucy when her next feeding time comes around. I've just gone over and had a look at Herbert. Herbert appears to be a female. What an unfortunate name.

Which reminds me, I need to work another condition into the cleaning of the house. Perhaps if we can clear out enough space, I will be allowed to have a tortoise.