May Hobby Update

05.21.2014

To make up for the lack of pictures lately, I now present too many pictures that look alike.

My hobby focus of late has been painting the SSU faction for the Dust Warfare game (that game I've been getting ready to play for the past 2 years, but still have yet to play). I had started an assembly line process of picking 1 color and going through 20-30 primed minis and painting that color where applicable. I found that's not a good way for me to paint. I tend to get sloppy after 5 minis, plus there's no real feeling of accomplishment until everything is done. After getting the basic green all the uniforms use on all the figures, I've gone back and started to grab 5 at a time and finish them up. It takes about a day to complete 5 minis counting the time to go back and touch up spots I always miss. Some days I'm not as productive - I'm supposed to be doing this for fun, so I try not to force myself to paint when I'm not in the mood. I can quickly tell how much of a difference this makes in my painting quality.

These squads have the minis as detailed as I'm going to get, but I still have to flock the bases (hence the stark whiteness of the primer, blotched with how I slap on the color for boots).


Since the SSU are Russian/Chinese, I've given them red armor. Hopefully it's not too much of a Christmas theme with the green uniform.


Hard to tell a difference between squads... The guy on the right has a molotov cocktail, which is the first time I've ever painted fire.


This is actually a 3rd squad.


Squad 4 is still in progress. The one on the left is complete, but the rest have only had their 1st pass of paint. It's easier to see here how much of a difference a dark wash and drybrushing can make.


I never added flags to my first attempt at flag poles, so I went back and added flags. Since I already had flags for the Dust factions, I decided that I'll eventually add some custom factions - GI Joe, Cobra, and SHIELD.


I also finished up the road sections for the battle tiles I've been working on. Maybe I'll set up a little photo shoot with them later. Just a bunch of grass flocked styrofoam/cork is kind of boring.

Along with painting the SSU squads (still have 3 more squads and 3 hero figures to finish) I've been making hills out of cork to add some depth to the battlefield. That's turning into a slower process than I thought as there's more touch-up work than I originally planned.


gaming miniatures

Sniffing Asphalt

05.12.2014

This afternoon after lunch I ran by Publix for my early-week restock of bananas and milk. Thanks to diet and exercise I have an almost daily post-walk banana and run though 2 gallons of milk for protein shakes in less than 4 days. When I pulled into Publix I saw, and smelled, that they were in the process of re-paving the parking lot.

It's weird, but the smell of fresh asphalt brought back memories of my old trailer park days. Back when Mom & Dad managed the trailer park outside of Florence, I think they used to repave the parking lot in front of the clubhouse annually. Thinking back, it sure seems that way. My scent memory didn't just lead me to the trailer park in general. For some reason, I vividly imagined living across the parking lot from the clubhouse, then walking in and getting a Susan B Anthony dollar in exchange for my dollar bill. The Playboy pinball machine (which was just a cool pinball machine, I never paid much attention to the lingerie clad women decorating the cabinet) would award 5 games instead of 4 if you used a Susan B Anthony, so the clubhouse cash register was well stocked.

I don't know the last time I thought about the trailer park, old pinball machines, or even Susan B Anthony dollars. A whiff of fresh asphalt is all it took, though.


random

The Pictureless Update

05.08.2014

After wrapping up last month I've been busy, but I have no pictures to show for it. Disappointing in this visual age, I know.

I spent last weekend fighting a combination of bad modem, bad router, and virus/trojan infected computer. I don't normally run any anti-virus software as I tend to not do things that make me susceptible to viruses. I know, that's cocky for someone who develops websites for a living, and it bites me in the ass about twice per decade.

My browser has been acting a little flaky, most of which I chalk up to not re- installing a fresh copy of the operating system in over 3 years. Over the weekend things got worse. At first I blamed it on the cable modem as it kept resetting, and I haven't had any problems with Charter in a year so I was about due. Once the modem stayed on, I thought I was having problems with my router as the Mac I'm trying to convince myself to use more often was also having a problem getting online. Eventually, everything was working except the browser on my main PC, so I downloaded a couple of anti-virus programs and discovered 1 bad virus and 144 trojans. Since cleaning those up, everything's been working fine.

I've also made the switch from Firefox/Mozilla to Chrome as my browser of choice. Along with a couple of plug-ins to block ads and other annoyances, I've been greatly enjoying the change. The only thing I have to get used to is the Home button is on the left side instead of the right. After automatically going to the same spot for years to click that button, this is going to take a little getting used to.

Away from the computer, I've started the next round of making map battle boards for miniature wargaming. After 16 sections of grassland I knew I would need some type of road next. I played around with a couple of methods for making roads and found one I liked. Making these is a multi-day process as glue and paint has to dry between steps. Next blog will have some pictures and more detail than most people will care about, but who's writing this thing? Me, that's who! Whom? Whom!

With my vast video library, and thanks in part to a slow new release schedule for the past 2 months, I've been going back and watching some older movies. Mainly movies that I've only watched once but have had a hankering to watch again. Some have aged pretty well (although they're not that old). Some have not.

Lots of movie watching going on. I've queued up some special movies to watch.

Wow, the queued up list is shorter than I anticipated, although it is 6 movies within 2 bullets. I've still got a stack of other movies to watch (some of them unseen by me still) for those times I'm in the mood for a particular type of movie - drama, comedy, etc. Non-action sci-fi is a hard category to fill (something like Sunshine or Moon, a movie more cerebral than shooting) so I wander off in that direction sometimes.

Whew, after typing all of that I feel I have lots to do now.


random

Close enough to end of the month wrap-up

04.30.2014

Ah, the end of April. What has this month brought?

The last 2 days have been fraught with tornado warnings, watchings, and whatever else should be associated with spinning, twisting destruction. Luckily, I was unaffected by this bout of weather. I never even lost power - I had that flashlight by the bed for no reason. I had plenty of text messages and phone calls to check on me and warn me to be weather aware, so it's nice to know people out there are helping to take care of me.

I'm still slowly working my way through painting my miniatures for Dust Tactics/Warfare. I went a little crazy and put together some flags to use as objective markers/scenery, all from scratch!

I've been wanting to make some flags for a while. I lack the skills to properly make them out of modelling clay/putty (I tried, it did not go well). Instead I used my mad skillz with manipulating 3D files and textures and whipped up my own flags and printed them out. Thanks to using a 3D program that could render the flag as if being blown by a light breeze, the printed flags have a little bit of a 3D look to them - actually more than I thought they would.

The flag poles are small wooden dowels from Hobby Lobby that I cut to a length that seemed to work. Yes, that is meticulous measuring on my part. They're topped off by little wooden balls that were hanging near the dowels in the store. I have no idea what they would normally be used for, but they work. Top it all of with some chrome spray paint that somehow manages not to be all shiny and sparkly, which is good in my case, and I end up with a teeny-intsy flagpole.

I've been trying to figure out a good way to attach the flags to the poles for weeks. Gluing the flag to the pole would be easiest, but I wanted something that would look a little nicer. While wandering through Hobby Lobby I came across Hemp String in the Beading/Jewelry section (I will wander all over that store). It looked the right thickness that would work as rope for the scale of the minis, so I picked some up. While playing around, I decided to try drilling some holes in the wooden dowels with my "precision modelling drill" (screwdriver with a drill bit). The hole was big enough for the Hemp String to go through, so I had the bright idea of gluing the flag to the string and looping the string all the way through the flagpole. The bonus result - I can raise and lower the flags!

Although there's no picture to prove it, I've managed to drop another 5 lbs since the beginning of the month and weighed in at 306 lbs this morning.

Thanks to motivation from Gina, we surpassed last month's walking total:

Right when I thought 61 miles in March was a long way to go, this month we got in 71 miles of walking. I remember when the pedometer app on the phone rolled over 100 miles total in early March. We've more than doubled that in less than half the time. Now that we're walking ~5 days/week our monthly average should be right around 70 miles. In a month. That just boggles my mind.

I have a post-walk routine now. After we walk, I take a much needed shower, then lay on the bed with ice packs on my knees for at least 45 minutes while I watch tv or read. The ice helps (mainly on the following day) - I'm not sure if I'm walking harder or if the bone spurs that showed on knee x-rays back 20 years ago are starting to make their presence more pronounced now that I'm not just sitting around all of the time. Either way, the ice appears to take care of most of it, so I'm going to keep doing it.


That's all that's on my mind for now. I think I'll go ice my knees while painting flag poles and watching out for tornadoes.


diet gaming miniatures gastric sleeve rambling

Joy of package delivery in the Boonies

04.27.2014

This past week my normal Amazon order contained a programming book. It's not something I was in a rush to get, but my timing of the order allowed that it would be delivered seperate from the rest of the order and should arrive on Saturday. Saturday deliveries are rare, and I'm curious about deliveries and the logistics of Amazon so I looked up who would be delivering the book. It was marked as "FedEx Smartpost", so that FedEx hands it off to the post office at some point. This should work in my favor, as FedEx packages seldom find their way to my house without ending up at someone else's house first.

The USPS mail runs late on Saturday. I honestly think they skip Saturday most of the time. Saturday evening around 7:00 I thought to check the shipping status of my order.

Incorrect Address? My address hasn't changed in 15 years. I get almost-weekly orders from Amazon. How could my address suddenly be wrong? I went on to "See Complete Tracking History".

Carrier could not locate the delivery address. Ok, that makes a little more sense. My house is hard to find (just ask the FedEx guy). Although I can normally get packages delivered to my front porch by the USPS carrier, maybe the Saturday person doesn't normally follow the route and doesn't know that the gravel drive 10 feet to the right of the 4 mailboxes leads to 3 houses. I can allow for that. I wouldn't try too hard to find a missing house after making stop-and-go trips to mailboxes all day on a Saturday. Just because I was curious, I went on to the USPS tracking webpage to see what they had to say about the details of my parcel's route.

Notice Left (No Secure Location Available). Since they couldn't find a house to leave the package at, they left a note in the mailbox to come to the post office and pick it up. That sounds different than unable to locate delivery address. How would I pick up a note telling me they couldn't find my address if they leave a note at my address? The logic of it all doesn't make sense. I went on to see if there was more information about this last step.

Ah, it's not the Amazon definition of not finding an address, it's that they couldn't find anywhere besides the mailbox to leave the package. That makes more sense. I think.

At some point I'll venture to the post office and pick up the book. Maybe not, as I've found there's a more recent edition and this may be a way to wait 15 days for the post office to return the package to Amazon without me forking over the shipping fee to return the book. Since it would be my choice to return an item with no defects it would fall upon me to pay shipping fees for an item even though shipping to me is free - I know how Amazon works!


Amazon

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