End of February Updates

Well, first off I am sure by now that you have heard about the passing away of Leonard Nimoy.  What a shame.  I really liked his voice and he seemed to have been a very nice guy.  I saw his last twitter message to everyone in the news and it was very moving.  Unlike many people, my first real exposure to Leonard Nimoy was not through Star Trek, but the TV show, In Search of…, which I enjoyed greatly as a kid.   I was too young to have seen the original series when it was the first run, never really got into them either, but I did watch about a dozen of them.  It was the movies that got me into Star Trek, but I am by far not a Trekkie in any means.  The closest I can say to being a Trekkie is that I did watch all of the movies and the first four seasons of the Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as that series final, plus the dozen or so episodes from the original series.  Oddly enough, the same holds true with my introduction and liking William Shatner came not from Star Trek but either in a rerun of the Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 feet, or  the movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet or Big Bad Mama (I am not sure which one I saw first) and later, TJ Hooker.  

Below is a YouTube link to the Bermuda Triangle episode of In Search Of...

In the area of books, I have knocked out some more James Bond books since my last entry.  I am now just starting, You Only Live Twice.  This is the third to last book in series, so I will be finishing the series soon.  Overall, I really am enjoying the series, but I didn’t really care for The Spy Who Loved Me.  So, it looks like I will be starting up the Bruce Nichols’ four volume set, Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, sometime in April or early May at the latest.

I also just finished the unabridged audiobook, Gallipoli, by Peter FitzSimons.  It is very good.  While it is mainly over the ANZAC, it does touch quite a bit on Turks too, and to lesser extended the rest of the Allied powers.  The narrator for the audiobook, Robert Meldrum, was also very good, including doing accents to narrative accounts in the book.  I am really forward to listening to more by this narrator.  Luckily, he does narrate one other FitzSimons’ book, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution, about the revolt at the Eureka Stockade in Australia.  Next up on the listening queue is the ‘Alien Voices’ radio plays Star Trek:  Spock vs. Q and Star Trek:  Spock vs. Q: The Sequel performed by Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie in honor of Leonard Nimoy.

I have been getting some figures together to send off to be painted and will hopefully have them sent off in the next week or two as I am typing out the painting instructions.  Now with the house paid off plus I am not planning not to spend much of my regular hobby allowance on new stuff, I will be shipping more figures off to be painted on a regular basis to get some projects done.   This first batch is going to be odds and sorts.  But after that, I am going to focus on one project at a time on what I will get painted.  I probably will start with my 15mm French & Indian War project again.  I probably should send in my 15mm Canadians for the Ridgeway project instead, but I really want to paint those myself.  I plan to get back to painting them next week as I probably will not have much time tonight and Thursday night I have to go through a CPR class in the evening until 8pm, then I fly home for Friday and the weekend.  With any luck, by the end of next week, I will have the figures done for the 13^th Hamilton done and needing to be based (and which I still have not completely decided on how I will do yet.)

This weekend, I hope to work a little more on my basement to clear off my table.  The last time I was home, I didn’t put stuff up but instead threw more stuff on to the table to sort through.  This time I am just going to start boxing stuff up and not worry about sorting for now.  I have seem to have mis-placed my excel file that created to list all of the stuff that I plan to depart with soon.  I have to search around for it as I really don’t want to have to recreate it and recount every all over again.  I plan to start putting stuff up for sell this summer.  I plan to offer stuff to my closest gaming friends first, then on my blog next, followed by TMP’s (The Miniatures Page) Market Board, and then Ebay.  I might try to get rid of some of it at a local game auction or maybe at a local con if they have reasonable table rates.  Otherwise it they will most likely go to the landfill after a year of trying to get rid of the stuff.  I hate to do it, but I need to clear stuff out.

Cheers,

Joe