Over the Memorial Day Weekend

[Editor - I actually typed most of this on Memorial Day Monday 5/26, but due the crappy internet service at the hotel I am staying at, I could never log on to Google so I could post this, and I have tried several times since!  I finally got this posted the first time that I was able to have a good connection.  Sorry that this entry seems out of time, but it would have been right if I only had been able to posted it when I wanted to have done it.]

I hope that everyone had a good weekend and got a lot of
things done that you want to do.  Well, I was sort of luckily as I got to have 2 of the 3 days off for the holiday weekend, which is better than some others by far, so I can’t complain too much.  I didn’t do too much over the weekend, but enjoyed most of my time.  I spent a good chunk of Sat. afternoon with two of my friends Steve & Curtis at a restaurant talking gaming (see below about another new project…sigh) and life in general.  Then that evening went to visit my RPG gaming friends.  Sunday, I had my family’s traditional Memorial Day weekend German meal of the ‘best of the wurst’.  Sadly, I could not find German potato salad anywhere, as the various delis claimed it was out of season!  As if there was ever was such thing as a season for potato salad!  Nor could I find any rotwurst either, but I had curry sauce for my currywurst.  I had some teewurst & liverwurst that I had bought, but we didn’t get to eat those as we had too much Braunschweiger to finish up.  Next to Oktoberfest, I always enjoy Memorial Day weekends for German dishes.

Anyways, I didn’t get much done for gaming, but I did do some.  1) I spray painted a bunch of my Litko mass horde bases black for a base coat and added the magnetic stickers in them.  I am using these bases for various games to cut down the number of things that need to be moved during a game.  I got 10, 8, & 5 holes bases, but need to pick up some 4 holed ones now.  Plus I got them with 20mm & 25mm holes, for both my 20mm & 25mm figures.  2) I started to go through my 20mm figures and placing the Litko flexible steel sticker on the bottom of their stands so that they magnetically hold on to the horde bases.  Plus, since I was doing that, I also separated out of the large 4L Really Use Boxes for storage and started putting a platoon size force in the smaller 1.7L Really Useful Boxes (see the picture below.)  I am doing this so I can easily grab what I want for a skirmish game; i.e. a platoon of British Paras for the Falklands or a platoon of British line in ’44 helmets & No 5 Battle Dress.

20mm SAS to assault the airstrip at Pebble Island

3) Empty out more crap on my tables to sort through, when instead I should have finish cleaning up what was on the tables first (see below.)

God, I have too much crap

I am almost finished with my current book that I am reading and it is very interesting supplement to the other books that I have read on the Winter War.  The title is misleading as only about a quarter of the book is really about the experiences of the Swedish volunteers, but covers a lot of political decision making, the conditions of the Swedish military, etc., that it really clear that Sweden really had no choice but to follow the route that it did.  What is more interesting was that they really did view the Allies as the real threat and believed that the Franco-British forces really were going to invaded Norway and then northern Sweden and took steps to prepare for it like ripping up 150 miles of railroad tracks towards Norway.  I think that I have two chapters left which covers the Swedish involvement in the peace agreements between the Soviets and Finland.  So I am starting to think what book I plan to read next.  I am leaning towards something on Price’s raid in 1864, but I might break the “military history” streak by reading a crime book, either fiction or non-fiction, or something different.  I did break down and ordered on Amazon several hardcopy books because I don’t believe that they will be made available in the electronic version any time soon.  But I will not get them before I finish this book and I will not be home to pick them up for a while also.  But the books that I ordered are:

Pebble Island: The Falklands War 1982 (Elite Forces Operations Series), by Jon Cooksey

Vulcan 607: The Epic Story of the Most Remarkable British Air Attack Since WWII, by Rowland White (It is about the Black Buck raid during the Falklands)

Phoenix Squadron: HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s Last Topguns, and the Untold Story of Their Most Dramatic Mission, by Rowland White (It is about the 1972 mission to defend British Honduras from a possible invasion)

Storm Front: The Epic True Story of a Secret War, the SAS’s Greatest Battle, and the British Pilots Who Saved Them, by Rowland White (It is about the 1970 Oman rebellion)

The Thing (Devil’s Advocates) by Jez Conolly (A study of the classical film, John Carpenter’s The Thing)

Also, since I am driving more, I decided to pick up some audio books to listen to while I drive:

Horrible Histories: Frightful First World War by Terry Deary & Martin Brown

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

Too Many Have Lived by Dashiell Hammett

Dad’s Army Vol 1 (BBC Radio) by Jimmy Perry & David Croft

Forgotten Voices of the Falklands Vol 1: Fatal Miscalculations: The Killing Begins by Hugh McManners

While it sounds like an expensive buy, it really was not as I tend to buy most of my books used and the audio books were discounted as I have a membership discount that drops the price, plus a couple of them were on sale as well.  The three Rowland White books were each only $0.02, but the shipping from the UK was a bit more, but they still come out being under $12 total for all three (Yea!)

I plan to start listening to Midnight Rising first since I am in the heart of the Bleeding Kansas area, but since have to decide what I will read next.

Finally, as mention above, the talk among my gaming friends, and others that they game with, is to build a 1000 - 1500 pt force to game GW 40K (yes, the spawn of Satan).  Most of them already have a force or more to game with and Steve is starting one.   Lonely old me is still on the fence about it, but I am feeling the tentacle of rotting flesh with poisonous bards of GW starting to tug me in to that soulless pit of damnation.  A few years back, I sold off my Tau army that I had started (some 13 years ago) and never got anything done with or played with for all of those years. (As Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, surprise, surprise!")  

Don't mock me!  This time will be different!

While I have never restarted a project that sold off, at least in the same scale, this might be the first one…sigh.  This also probably explains my mix feelings for getting back in.  But why the Tau?  Of all of the races in GW’s fluff history that I have read back then and on the internet, the Tau is the only one I can honestly respect.  How can you not like a force that fighting for the “Greater Good”, promotes tolerance among the other races, and where everyone has worth in the society?  But I am just waiting for the hammer fall by GW to turn them into some evil, hell-bent, genocide monsters that eat babies and tortures puppies like everyone else in their game world (they may have already and I just haven’t read it yet.)  I still have not bought anything, so this maybe a passing fad that will fizzle away or there may be in the near future a blog entry where you maybe hearing about my conflict on how I want my Tau painted.

Be seeing you

Sapper