I have been in Utah now for 8 months and am amazed at how little I have accomplished and how much work has been involved. I found the last set of missing figures the other day, a group of Essex Assyrian 15mm figures. They had been packed neatly in a cardboard box which the moving ...

i am slowly unpacking, slowly because the local carpet installers are the worst on the planet and have yet to put in the new carpet, and sadly, nothing can really be unpacked till the carpet is down. The plastic figures seem to have taken the most hits. I find little plastic bases with nothing but ...

i am now in Salt Lake City. A trip to Japan and Taiwan kept me busy this summer but the move to Salt Lake City flattened me. On the positive side, the packers found things I had not been able to find like a range of 6mm artillery for the War of the ...

Retirement has turned me into a bearded recluse rifling through closets and the garage to see what is there. I find I am busier than I was when I was employed as an IT expert. I wake up in the morning, prepare and drive the child to school, do morning errands and shopping, ...

Time to spray. Figurehead, GHQ, and some 10mm Perrin tanks get their share. I read today that Model masters paints are gone. Put out by the Testors Corporation for many years, they were a guilty mainstay of the hobby. But as colors became scarce, new paints came to call. I had never ...

1957 and the biggest literary threat to merry olde England was a group of overgrown toddlers with the ability to say no and the means to back it up. Children were to be seen, not heard, and if they got hit by a car or attacked by an animal, who were they to complain? Of ...

School resumes tomorrow. For the first time in weeks, I painted a little. The above tiny group is a partial result. The figure in front was an unpainted holdover. Once again, I marveled at the deficiencies in my work. At the moment, I am priming with a white enamel undercoat. ...

When I look at these, I feel like I owe Tom Meier an apology. Where is all that gorgeous facial detail now buried under a layer of poorly applied acrylic paints? Well, they are not quite done. Leonardo Da Vinci said art is not finished but abandoned. Though not art, ...

I think I understand why people play golf when they retire, not that it seems anymore meaningful to me but I like to think I understand, the way I think I understand why the blue head wrasse produces a super male. It is not relevant to my life but nice to know why people ...

15mm SF left to right, Laserburn scout, Martian Metals EVA suit, RAFM/Citadel Tech 3 military, Laserburn spacesuit with rifle There is a nasty bit of fault finding in me. When browsing that dark pool of overpriced miniatures known as E-Bay, I sometimes come upon something obviously mislabeled (a figure from the Ral Partha’s ...

I suppose it is no surprise that someone with a sedentary hobby and a job that compels him to sit in a chair all day and who commutes several hundred miles each week and cannot recall where he is when he wakes up in the morning should find themselves held in a hospital for a ...

Some days I wake up and have no idea where I am. Sometimes it is an interesting sense of disorientation, sometimes disturbing. You cannot get used to anything when nothing is in its proper place long enough to allow it. My life has a certain inevitability about it. Part of that seems to ...

Still here, what’s left of me.  The highway has been a mess since the start of spring break.  I saw the remains of a great truck fire yesterday though yesterday seems like a week ago.  The summer appears to entail a lot of travel.  The trip to Taipei will likely entail another trip into miniature ...

Yes, I am still here.  Both cameras have disappeared as usual.  Due to my 2-hour commutes and advancing years, I find that I am falling asleep a lot more than I would like and in those few conscious moments, either eating, cleaning the apartment, or watching TV.  I feel like a retired person who has ...

Summer is gone very fast. The weather has cooled and Homecoming Day is only one day from now. The rainy days have ended and the blue sky days have arrived. I am making plans for Christmas but thought a recap of summer was in order. The trip to Prague went without any real ...

Looks like the annual summer conference season is upon us so it is off to Europe for a bit. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to bring back some amazing photos or perhaps some mediocre ones. I suspect with a toddler and mother-in-law on hand, there will be less footloose wandering than in previous times.

I seem to find myself involved in discussions that seem more and more pointless, meeting people that do not interest me, and finding myself in less and less attractive situations.  I comfort myself with the belief that such things are cyclic but find myself wondering if I am caught in a broader cycle that is ...

A few days late but then we come to the story of my life.  Lovecraft has somehow become the embodiment of horror as it relates to gaming.  Chaosium has certainly helped that along with a role-playing game and multiple card games.  More recently, there has been a spate of board games revolving around the eldritch ...

Seems like I just got here and I am moving again.  The insects and lizards roaming the apartment like some tiny ecosystem, the severe flooding, the neighbor who owns the private road to the apartment and insists on making it as difficult and dangerous to drive as it could be, and the difficulties of getting ...

This morning I drove by Winn-Dixie and wished that I was living somewhere I could not drive past Winn-Dixie. I miss snow. I suspect that snow is one of those things I will never see again. For some reason, the more I try to repair my life, the less time I have. ...

The weather is nice outside.   There are large and small angry dogs barking.  But no one is berating me for my stupidity or anything else at the moment so the day is a passable one. I have returned from a lengthy ocean voyage to find little changed.  There is sadly a bottle of milk in the ...

  Time for reassessment again.   Another new year in just over a month and this one involves monkeys.  I am not terribly superstitious but always check the horoscope for horses.  It is generally bad.  I have yet to encounter anything especially cheerful and assume that the cheerful news is for snakes or rats or some ...

I thought I might write something relevant for a change. Bad form to be sure but here goes. What to do if you stumble on this page and find any interest in the subject at hand? Heed the advice offered under Figures and consider using some base counters sans troops to start ...

I think we all grow up realizing we are only temporary residents here. Reaching the late 50s, I have begun to see more clearly the possibility of an end of lease. At a younger age, I would have thought a commitment to something great would have been the best possible thing. Now, ...

October passed without a whimper. Tonight, I get to drive 250 miles and then get some sleep. There remains a lot to do and ever decreasing amounts of time available to do anything other than drive and sleep. The goal this weekend is to move the scenery from Gainesville to Tampa and ...

According to the statistics compiled, there have been 1,892 malicious login attempts on this site, 588 spam comments, and only one legitimate comment. Good to sit back and keep score. PS. Just a few hours later and we are up to 2012 malicious login attempts and 591 spam comments. Anyone want ...

The local cable company seems incapable of providing an Internet connection here so things are off to a rocky start in my new home. All I have to show for 2 weeks of ‘service’ is a bill for $80. All the paints seem hidden away and I have taken the radical step of ...

Made the drive from Texas to Florida in time to rescue the baby from a daycare center that promises to teach her Spanish and basic math skills but apparently offers no guarantee that she will come home in one piece. In just 2 weeks, she received a large scratch breaking the skin along her ...

No need to ask, I survived. After being marooned in Dallas and driving back after midnight with the storm to the east facing me down, I abandoned my car in Houston and headed the rental back home. Just as well as the photos of Interstate 45 suggested it would have been a rough ...

It has been raining now for weeks. The ranches in the area now look like lakes with cattle carefully walking on the few dry areas left. This morning it rained. The lightning and thunder started around 6 just in time to get most people out of bed a little too early on ...

Here it is the end of April and the last week seems like the first.  In fairness, I did paint a large group of 15mm figures though a group of 4 appear to have been swiped.  I did finally realize that lining a plastic box with felt does help prevent figures sliding and crashing into ...

It is almost a year since I began this website and the year has seen profound changes as well as tiny ones. Time is about change. Time adds or takes away but nothing remains untouched. That is part of the magic of collecting. If we can hold onto the things, collections ...

Baby time is over and it is back to work. My wife saw a small box of Charles Stadden figures in the bathroom and asked me when I would stop buying figures. I suppose the real answer would be when I lose my memory of what has made my life a pleasure. ...

More and more stuff is coming out of boxes. And the pieces that have still not been found have taken on an aura of mystery. Where is the Archive Miniatures lower orcan and goblin army. Where are the odd Heritage orcs? Where are the remaining Napoleonette cavalry pieces? And what ...

MPC space men, the so-called ringhand figures. That is as far back as I can recall. These figures seemed to be everywhere for years molded in different colored plastic with different accessories to cover everything from the American Civil War to missions into space. Toys were violent at that time. Most ...

Somehow, returning from the holidays is never very pleasant and if not for Martin Luther King Jr., would be unbearable. The holidays saw the arrival of a new child. It also brought the opportunity to rifle through dozens of old boxes of stuff. I found some stuff I did not realize I ...

Happy New Year!

The website has been active now for several months selling nothing, promoting nothing, getting few visitors, and otherwise settling into a distant backwater of the Internet. Which is all well and good. An original expectation was that I would work on the design of a larger corporate website, something that did not materialize. ...

The Houston Quilt Festival just passed. It is an enormous festival dedicated to quilts and quilt making. It fills an monstrous convention center in the heart of downtown Houston. I visited in 2009 and the crowds were overwhelming. I have never been to a gathering of hobbyists as large. Miniatures ...

It is peculiar that even for a misanthrope like myself, wargaming does pull me out of my hovel into the daylight. When I have been able, I have routinely attended conventions, darting between booths, picking up whatever I could find for miniatures gaming. Once, out of desperation I attended a toy soldier convention ...

I sometimes think that with responsibilities bearing down, games are an escape. And as I make a last mad dash to the weekend, it seems as if life has become one long mission of avoiding responsibility. But the reality is that wargames are for when you can afford the cost, cost in time, cost in energy, ...

This is the question I would like to answer. Why are there cavemen, astronauts, cowboys, robots, and more peering out of every corner of this tiny apartment? After my grandfather died, I recall visiting the garage of his tiny bungalow and finding it packed with birdhouses, fashion wigs, and copies of Popular Mechanics dating back ...

OK, the photo lights are gone, a refund is not coming, and it is time to post something. The weekend is coming and by that time, I hope to have a more substantive measure of pages.

Finally getting around to getting some lights to allow me to take some decent photos and they were left outside by the delivery person.  So no lights for now.  Someone somewhere has some lighting.  I hope it serves them well.  In the meantime, I will try to get a refund on the missing merchandise and ...