The summer was far from tranquil. I had hoped to avoid travel but wound up in Liverpool and London. If you take a train out of Euston station, do not take the cheapest seat. Reserve a seat. You will have a nicer trip. And ignore Rick Steves’ remarks about cabbies. Not all are genial tour guides.

Returning home, I received a call to jury duty for a fairly lurid murder case. This is my third jury and I have yet to find one with Henry Fonda. We might have well been a family reunion at Thanksgiving. Still, it was a difficult experience. There is always a sense that you are not being told the most important facts and this invariably turns out to be true.

so, I am back home and painting mostly 3mm and 10mm stuff. I am amazed at the variations in size and girth for different manufacturers. I have not recovered most of my rule books after the move. Very painful to lose them. At least, it focuses me on the rules I have available. It has become painfully apparent that it is going to be a race between losing my eyesight or dying, and finishing painting everything. I will likely end up like my father, lying in a hospice bed ordering miniatures even then.

To anyone curious, that is a photo of the British Library and just beyond, St. Pancras Station.

It is almost July and I have not written a thing since winter. I attribute it to age. I now have a tendency like some shelless tortoise to stop where I am and brood. Little gets accomplished.

Utah has escaped the heat dome enveloping the country to the east. It is cooler than normal. No sense of living in the desert except for a distinct lack of rain. In the south, fires are raging. Here, life has taken on a placid warm weather emptiness.

i have come to the conclusion that the movers did not move most of the rulesets. I had stored them in an archival storage box which i found was stuffed with old plastic hangers and various things from the bathrooms. Moving was mysteriously hit and miss.

A trip to England comes up shortly. I have yet to find a store there to visit though I am certain one will come up. All in all, a low key summer ahead.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day fittingly marks a return to sanity. The holiday season is finally over, the traveling is done, and I did not pet the capybara.

I have finally pulled out every last box of figures that I have. I have found stuff I had completely forgotten. I am glad I wrote out a list of the various things I expect to find. One thing I have not done is approach the plastic stuff with the same concern. There is stuff from Hat Industries that has never been removed from the box.

Still missing are the rules. Originally stored in one box, the movers decided to move them to a series of boxes while filling the original box with bathroom materials.

On the painting side, I continue to paint 3mm Napoleonics, Austrian and French. The two pieces above contain 60 individual figures, plenty to drive someone up the wall.

Today is tree removal day here so I have a lot to pay attention to. Still, I am glad the holidays are over.

Halloween is some great boundary marker into the insanity that slashes its way through to the day after New Years. It is a marker of years flowing by far worse than birthday since death and taxes are on the way. I cannot think of a bright side.

This week offers a rich variety of reality clawing its way into my life. I must get papers notarized. I must transport my daughter to her various engagements. I must review my expenses. On the up side, I did complete my annual medicare exam. Yes, I am still alive and moving of my own volition, my mental facilities debatable but still existent.

All this follows an effort to sort through the smaller things that had migrated to bookshelves. I rediscovered some very old catalogs including a charming but brief one from McEwan Miniatures. I had been looking for the Jack Scruby catalog but, seeing it again, I realize that he offers neither drawings or photos of his figures. The variety is fascinating. He seemed to want to cover as much as he could.

Beyond that, I finally listed all the metal stuff that i had by scale. It is helpful to me if no one else. There was an odd moment several years ago where it seemed to me I had crossed into that mythic region where I own enough lead to make a move challenging. I hate the idea of another move but I find it hard to believe we are here to stay

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 men inexplicably decided to pack sideways. Repairs are ongoing.

Everything is now in one place and all that is necessary is to find a better way to store than as an enormous stack of boxes in the closet. No surprise those boxes i had the foresight to keep in the bathroom back in Florida along with all the musical instruments came through unmarred. I discovered to my chagrin that hamsters are not allowed to fly on most commercial airlines so brought her and everything else left in the house to Utah in mid autumn.

There is still a lot of work to do to straighten out the house but I hope to find the time to revisit and start painting the unpainted.

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 feet and later footless infantry scattered through boxes. Some of the bigger sets i drove back but I am not sure everything made it. It is good to leave Florida as it falls apart but it is cold here and getting colder.

i received 2 expansion sets for Hero Quest from the ever dependable Hasbro people. I also purchased a few figures as well just to convince myself I have not fallen off the edge of the world. I hope to be back up and running though the carpet installers are threatening more delays. We will see. At least i have my books.

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 Spanish Succession that had become buried in small unlabeled boxes.

Even now, I remain subterranean in the basement level of a house and wish for better. The painfs and brushes have yet to emerge. I have little to show for the last half year. I did finally make some modest purchases but I expect it to be a couple of months before I am back on my feet.

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 been a fan of Krylon but now I have cans. And I have begun trying out Tamiya lacquer spray.

When I travel to Asia, I am always confronted with how much better they have things over there in regards to plastic model building. They seem to have everything imaginable and some things I never thought of all at a fraction of their price in the US. Want 1/700 scale WWII tanks and trucks? They have got them. Plastic 1/72 figures? Easy to find.

Which brings me to Tamiya. They offer quality materials and studied assistance that is never available in the US. Paint pens and markers, extensive weathering and masking supplies are easily found and not only from Tamiya.

But I feel bad about Model Masters. Just like I feel bad about the Mecca of modeling in Carrollton, Texas, Squadron, Inc. strolling through the warehouse was a dreamlike experience. Changing times. I guess we all change with them. Squadron was bought up by a company in Georgia and I sprayed my first batch of tanks with Tamiya dark yellow.

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 course, the children grew up and gave the world abominations like the Mersey Beat and the British Invasion. We had been warned. The warnings went unheeded. Without death and destruction to thwart them, children make demands.

in 1957, the response was obvious. Smuggle a brief case full of dynamite into their classroom or test fire a new super cannon with nuclear shells on the town where they live. Precocious toddlers must learn to play by the rules.

Did we? For the most part, I remember staying quiet when we went to the movies, keeping a respectful distance when the elders were talking, and having such mundane hobbies as model building, stamp collecting and of course gathering small plastic armies who patrolled the living room and were occasionally missing in action.

So what was the problem? Well, no one else was following the rules. They hated Jews, hated smart little kids, and did not look kindly on any child who knew the difference between a Spad XIII and an S.E.5-a. They did not come after me with sticks of dynamite but did put me in a class for slow learners and memorably to sessions with the school counselor. Which is to say that childhood was a difficult experience papered over with the illusion that it was a normal childhood.

So how does my child fare? She explores the minefield of childhood at a distance. The pandemic has kept her a step removed. Is she too bright for her own good? Doubtful. Will she say no? Hopefully. Will they bring her a suitcase full of tnt? They better not.