My daughter wanted to stay in town tonight and I foolishly decided to stay in too. Three hours sitting in a cafe again waiting for her… bored silly now and knackered to boot. Therefore there will be a very, very slim chance of me getting anything done when I get home. I still have an hour and a half to wait and my Ipad is down to 38%.

If I am lucky she will get bored and want to go home, I probably have more chance of completing the fey before bed!

I ran my one shot today, the party saved a merchant from a thuggish person who was extorting money. Offered to take his message to a brother in a town 100 miles away. Fought a skirmish with some n’er do wells and made it to their destination and delivered the message. The main role of this session was to get them learning the various systems and rolling lots of dice.

I think they enjoyed the game, well they said they wanted to come back next time and carry on.

I have once again decided that I live in a bit of a nice place. The following photo shows it isn’t a bad commute to work.

Speaking of work, I am back tomorrow ( booo) starting with two days of training…problem is I cannot remember what the heck I signed up for, hopefully I turn up in the right place and that they have a list of the different options and also who signed up for what!

Just in case no-one told you it today…

Hopefully tomorrow I can get some paint onto the fey…I shall leave you with a little conundrum… evidently I had an extra hour in bed this morning, which to me is a little pointless as I was asleep and didn’t notice the difference.

Today I decided on a change of scale and genre…

I had based up a few 10mm orks from Pendraken and gave them a white bSe coat then set to work on them. I dithered about colour.. standard ork green or a More Tolkien style of colour… so I gave them both a try…

As you can probably guess by the photo above, the swarthy Tolkien version won.

so a quick spray later they are ready for their proper colour…

I got a bit of a scary phone call today, my mate had been admitted into hospital, he had gone in feeling crap and whilst there had a stroke. He has had a couple of minor ones of late and had been put on medication for diabetes. He thought the meds were making him feel poorly so went in to check…

He was able to talk to me to some extent, but has lost a lot of vocabulary.

Scary thing is, is that he is in his late forties.

I feel the need to shout Unclean loudly and paint a cross on the door, the Nasty cough has come back big time – so instead of trying to paint intricate details on something 15mm tall I decided to shove some paint on something nearer 100mm tall instead.

I threw a lighter grey dry brush on these. It’s a bit heavy to be honest, but I am going up a few lighter shades and then add some colour to the eyes, tongue and associated metalwork.

Car is in the garage, which according to my wife was a hoot. She phoned them up to ask if they could get it in, they said they could most certainly pick it up from where it was parked … then hung up before asking for a name, the registration number or where it was parked. Luckily when the keys were dropped off, they were accompanied by a note giving the necessary info.

Regarding the printer, it is probably the motherboard or something like the cables to the motherboard. I have contacted the manufacturer through Amazon and we shall see where that leads.

It has done really well up to yesterday and I have printed lots of things. I only wish I had done more German tanks earlier on. But as I said yesterday I have got just about enough German stuff to make for a game, or indeed, I could use some of the French tanks as captured equipment. I have got enough buildings to see me into the game and to be honest I can scratch build rooftops with card if necessary to add in any more.

Hills are easy peasy so all systems are go. Just got to paint everything next.

Out of interest, I have just staggered into the lounge and my family are looking like this…

Should I be worried?

Well technically there was some progress the Panzer 38T got about 6 millimetres high before the bloody printer went and died on me.

It is, to coin a German phrase, Kerfucktenbuggered! What makes it worse is that I had just found a source of short barrelled Early Stug III not to mention armoured cars, M3’s trucks and the like… to put it mildly I am a bit miffed.

Thankfully I have got enough stuff to run a game, but not enough to have a second set to give away.

To compound my misery further my voice keeps cracking I now sound like a child whose voice is cracking and then my Wife’s car broke down in Lerwick so I had to go and pick her up, popped into the shop to get some things and good old Dale the assistant had to chat, so Captain Helium had to explain what he had been up to today.

On the up side, the garage phoned me up today to say the part they evidently ordered errr before I went to Orkney (round about the start of August) has now turned up! It is booked in next Tuesday.

I now have to decide whether to investigate to see what went kaput on the printer or get it sent back to Amazon as luckily it is less than a year old.

I will let you know how I get on.

So tonight I did a smidge more painting, I painted 4 Lizardmen.

Basically the four grey ones. Whilst feeling quite pleased with myself, I suddenly remembered that I had all of the mesoamerican terrain to paint too. I don’t know why I hadn’t remembered the statues as I have to move them every time I open the paint box lid.

It was a nice drive over to work from a meeting in Lerwick today.

Tomorrow I intend to make a start on the tanks. It was my intention to print some more off this evening, but sadly my good lady forgot to bring our laptop home with her so I couldn’t get any sliced.

Well the weather here has been awesome up to this evening, it has clouded over as the day drew on. Yesterday we had some Neolithic and Viking/Norse shenanigans. Today we had more pre history with a visit to the Tomb of the Eagles followed by some more Viking/Norse remains, not to forget a run along the Churchill barriers.

No pictures as my phone camera is totally shot and their is no internet at the campsite to upload pics either.

Hobby wise I have been doing so more reading on the Sudan campaign to save Gordon. Eventually I will run the campaign to do so from Suakin on the Red Sea.

We will be using my 10mm Pendraken forces and terrain to fight. The idea is that players will be officers of her majesty playing against an Umpire or two. I like the Science versus pluck rules so will use them.

The general commanding will have to organise supplies and request troops etc prior to the campaign. They will aim to reach Berber where the campaign will end.

Anyone who wants a non combat role can be a reporter for the Times.

Sometimes the fact that my parents hung onto things for decades does have its advantages. Both have passed away now but these were kept by my father and now belong to me…

These are just some of the treasures I now have.

I have a number of other such booklets from WW2 not to mention a WW1 bayonet that was given to my father in round about 1926 to play with! It does go nicely with my WW1 Lee Enfield 😁. I was going to do First World War cavalry as a great uncle had been in the Northumberland Hussars, but my move to Shetland put pay to that. The rifle was purchased and deactivated before it became difficult to get such things.

Got the elves sprayed white and decided to give the new ones a Contrast paint job too.

I am really warming to these paints especially for the 10mm minis. This is the Plaguebearer Flesh over a white undercoat, I really like the way it is a very yellow green. I gave the faces a quick blast with the Guilliman Flesh. It really does bring out the detail. The red colour is the Blood Angels Red.

I will crack on with these tomorrow and hope to have everything completely finished by the end of the weekend.

Today I promised to take the kids to the loch. It is really shallow, especially when the tide is out.

Not a bad place to have on the doorstep.

It was a little misty to begin with today, but still very warm. When the sun came out it made really pleasing patterns on the water…

And on a totally different note, we had a massive visitor to Shetland today…

For those that watch ‘Shetland’ (never seen it myself) but Jimmy Perez’s house is second from the left.

Sadly I cannot remember who took this photo, it definitely isn’t mine.