Missing a Friend

 Mike texted the gaming group on Sunday around noon with the terrible news of Wayne's passing. Wayne has been a gaming and friend fixture for five years around here. I knew he had some health problems but nothing life-threatening. He was just 57. 

Wayne served in the Army for years, primarily in the Middle East. He completed his Doctorate of Education degree a few years ago and was certainly the smartest person in my peer group! Wayne re-married in February 2022, his first wife having passed away from cancer many years before I met him. Karen was his safe person and turned him into a softie.

Wayne loved rolling the dice, understanding the history of whatever we were gaming and cutting up at the table. He will be missed. He's the dark-haired gent with the mustache and glasses in the game-day pictures below.

Dammit. He was good people.

Recent Happenings

Hi all, I just haven't had the motivation to put up proper postings lately. A few pictures and progress of current goings on. For Memorial Day, a group of us played Alpha Strike then a large game of Check Your Six.

David and I barely hung on to a win with Clan Wolf preventing the Steiner forces from exiting enough units from the left edge of the battlefield. CY6 was a Battle of Britain scenario - He111s with escorts trying to get past Spitfires and Hurricanes.

It was a lot of stuff on the table, for sure!

Towards the end of the encounter, I had a Spitfire being pursued by what felt like the entire Luftwaffe!

But I bagged the bomber before getting shot down!
 

I finished up a handful of RCW Reds (Wargames Atlantic models) and some Etsy-sourced 3d printed vehicles. Afghans and other Russians are in the assembly and painting queue.

And the summer concert season has begun. The wife and seventeen-year-old accompanied me to Charlotte, NC for the Metallica M72 concert on Saturday. It was fantastic. Next concert is Ghost in July.

A Snow Day?

 Like many others across the southern US, we got a good bit of snow dumped on us last evening! It's been a few years since the last one, but four inches of snow in Savannah Georgia is pretty crazy. I hear New Orleans and those areas got much more!

And this poor egret looking for lunch in the ditch near our house.

So, working from home for a couple days because southerners + icy roads = bad situation. Be well everyone!

Travels and New Armies

Happy New Year all and I hope you had a fine Christmas.

 The wife and I had a terrific time up in Washington and Oregon. We needed a get-away after a 2024 filled with headaches and drama.

THE Coast of Washington. Windy, rainy and  just gorgeous.

A fine house porter at the Astoria Brewing Company.

We parked here to tour the Flavel House Museum. I immediately recognized the black Jeep from Goonies. Moments later I realized that the building is the jail that Jake Fratelli breaks out of at the beginning of the movie. 

BULLET HOLES!

I love the colored glass on this fixture.

And the detail on the central element.

Certainly looks haunted, right?

We of course visited the Goonies house the following morning. You cannot go in, but it's fun to visit such an iconic location from my childhood memories.

A 3-hour drive to Seattle for some more touristing. The Space Needle of Course!

While waiting to go up, there are a couple of scale models showing stages of construction. Appears to be about 1/100 scale judging by the people. Need to get this model into a game somehow. 

The views from up top are impressive. The weather was even starting to clear!

The trip was fantastic and aside from wrecking my right knee walking back to the parking garage on Sunday after the Space Needle visit, everything was easy and pleasant. There's a lot to be said for travelling without an agenda.

And awesomely, I had a new pile of minis waiting for me when I got back home. They were ordered just before we left on our trip.

Bolt Action Italians. Huzzah! An opfor for the Canadians for sure. I just couldn't do another German army. I painted a bunch for FOW, pre-blog days, painted plenty of 1/72s and just wanted something different. Canadians and Italians fought plenty in Sicily. The AB41 armored car is a 3d print ordered from XPForge via Etsy. Very nice model. 

The infantry are being organized as two 10-man squads of regular infantry and two 8-man squads of Blackshirts along with regular army support elements (mortar, MMG and ATG). 

Premium Cabana # 1 - 3

 OK, so maybe they're not as Premium as the ones at the waterpark, but they're much less expensive!

The three huts for my Xiti tribe were completed last evening. A hell of a job for me, knocking them out in 26 hours, which includes a full night's sleep and a trip to the arena for MONSTER JAM yesterday.

Look for the flying man! Twas good crazy fun. Loud as hell, but awesome.

Huts! Nothing fancy, but two steps up from serviceable. Dora says hello. I promise she's not about to torch the huts.

Headaches

Had a water leak in the house a week and a half ago. Water made it's way from the hall bathroom to the master bedroom, dining room and master bath as well as up the hallway a bit. Although demolition was begun, it had to be halted temporarily because the old linoleum in the bathrooms has asbestos. That flooring has to be removed because to remove moisture from beneath it. That means a terrifically laborious abatement process that has my family in a holding pattern of massive inconvenience for the time being. Hopefully, the insurance company approved the abatement quickly. Obviously no painting or proper gaming for a bit, which is OK because I have a lot going on at work anyway.

On the plus side, no furniture or other effects were damaged! Be well everyone.

Catch Up

 Hi all. Not much going on here from a gaming standpoint. There's just been lots of other stuff to fill the time. One the painting table, I've been working on some 6mm 3D printed Battletech buildings that Wayne brought me as painting commissions. 

Those are the first four. I think there are two more that I haven't touched yet. Those two on the left are one, the orangey apartment building is close to done and the refinery is exactly "in progress."

They're large models, something I'm notoriously miserable with. It's been a challenge for sure.

Last weekend, the bride, the 15-year and I drove down to Tampa for a concert. Filter, Ministry, Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie. 

Weather was amazing, the bands were amazing... a fine time if there ever was one!

This week it's been a lot of prep at work for Hurricane Idalia which swept through our area on Wednesday. We were fortunate and suffered no ill effects. Many people weren't so lucky. 

I had already put in for Thursday and Friday off in order to have a VERY long weekend, so that's me now... enjoying a Friday morning off... updating the blog and about to pick up a brush. Maybe I'll get a game in today or tomorrow. Be well!

A Recent Painting and GOT Thoughts

 I finished putting paint on a Hordes Trollkin yesterday. I've got a few of them and look forward to fielding an warband of them in KOW Vanguard one of these days. This guy is just a wonderfully characterful model that had to be included. It was one of those minis that was primed and got one or two colors then just sat for a few months. This week I had the urge to get him finished. 

Very militaristic and fancy. It's a big model, on a 40mm base. I'm happy to have another member of the Trollkin warband wrapped up. I've taken a picture of him with his new brothers in arms. They were finished in a much different manner, making them quite dark and grim compared to Gunna.

An imposing lot for sure! I scored a sweet deal on another group of models which will give me enough Trolls to fill out the collection and then some. Mode on that later.

In other news, my wife and I finally got around to watching Game of Thrones in the last couple of months. We finished it last evening. That's been a major contributor to my lack of painting production. My thoughts on GOT

1) Excellent show and I'm glad we spent the time on it.

2) I'm so happy we could binge-watch it instead of drawing it out over eight years. There is a lot to be said for wrapping one's head around the season-to-season continuity when there's no real-world gap between the end of one and the start of another.

3) We didn't hate the last season(s). I was quite aware of the popular opinion of the series ending. We though it was very much on-point with the rest of the show from a theme and tone standpoint. 

Spoliers ahead if you haven't watched it but might....

There are precious few situations in the show where "good guys" win. Our "good guy" characters are all killers with their priorities all over the place. Brandon is the only character that comes to mind who ends the show with a clean slate in my opinion. Sansa is too arrogant, Jon and Grey Worm are too honor-bound to make the correct decision. I didn't hate Jamie and Cersei's death. They got what they needed. Jamie got to die at her side and she was crushed to death being too stubborn and arrogant to leave. Daenerys was so wrapped up in her mental version of what's "right" that she was too blind to appreciate the bigger picture. Her heel turn landed OK on us. It brought her "my way or the highway" personality into laser focus Maybe overly dramatic for some but the series had to end eventually and her logical outcomes were 1) death or 2) dictatorship.

"Heroic" characters that are obvious favorites are Arya for starters. A weird fate to be sure, but she's a cold-hearted killer and to remain in Westeros would mean that she'd likely become a full-time assassin. Tyrion got to end the series doing something he genuinely enjoyed. 

The only deaths I really didn't care for was Varys the spymaster. It felt like he was the only one who really had an interest in the people of the realm. Perhaps selfish motivations much of the time, but I think we can all agree his actions were consistent in the interest of "the realm" over the course of the show. Daeny had already started tipping heavily at that point so it kept with the GOT-yness. Missandei's death was also quick and brutal, but unexpected and on-point with the GOT product. Every bit as shocking as Ned and the Red Wedding. 

I could go on for ages... be well!

Goings On - Summer 2022

 The blog has been light on posts lately because like many others, I've been busy with summer time. We took a short vacation to Jacksonville and St. Augustine a couple weeks ago and had a fine time. 

In Jacksonville we went to "The Stadium Tour" and saw Joan Jett, Poison, Motley Crue and Def Leppard. The show was amazing, even though the walk to the stadium was during a torrential downpour.

Poison

Crue

Def Leppard

The next day we drove down to St. Augustine to explore an old town we've never really visited. The last time I was there was maybe around 1984 or so.

It rained much of Sunday as we toured the town, I didn't take many pictures. We did a ghost walk in the evening which was fun, those things usually are. Our guide wasn't a great story teller so that detracted a bit. The weather was much better for the evening walk though.

Monday was July 4th and since we hadn't toured the Castillo in the rain on Sunday, we visited it that morning. The weather was hot but otherwise gorgeous. I haven't been to the fort in a long time. It's in great condition and has an interesting history.

So yeah, plenty of fun stuff going on. I have done a bit of painting here and there, I'll post some pics of that at another time. Y'all be well!