Hills and Trees Continued.....

Pine trees -or what will hopefully become pine trees. The girls made two of them while I played a computer game.

My first attempt at a hill on Monday

My second attempt on Tuesday

Painting with some leftover paints I found in the garage,

This is a whole new area for me and I suppose my first attempts at building landscapes and terrain will always be a little childish. Still... Even though this is my first week of the profect I think I have done pretty well. the trees look a little scruffy and the hills look like a Year 2 art project but they are still works in progress.

Hills and Trees

Since I have run out of soldiers to paint until the next shipment from the "old country" (which could be as long as 3 months away) I have been forced to turn to other pursuits.  I have been researching how to make trees and I have been paper macheting two hills for my imagingary boardgame. Photos will follow but I have got to disappear down to work now. Suffice to say that my skills in paper machet haven't improved much since my primary school days.

Sunday Morning Painting

New French dudes next to my unbased Russian Hussars

Busy morning at Berthier's camp

Adjutant

Same dude

Cool little Berthier + Staff officer

After a very pleasant weekend, my French Napoleonic General Staff have finally gotten off their sprues. Only a few more hours of touchups and they will be ready for basing. This set has been really enjoyable to paint.  I love the copious amounts of gold braid that these guys wore. They must have been a real sight on the battlefield.

New Statue Unveiled in North Korea

The new king finally gets his statue next to dad and gramps.

A new look for the blog

Well.... I have nothing to post. Work is stressful but I can't blog about it. The next few months are going to be stressful to say the least. Full blogging about the crisis in June (I hope).

I haven't painted anything tonight but I have played shops with Vic.

Russian Hussars

Well I finished painting the Russian Hussars that I got for Christmas and now I am moving on to my French General Staff.  The painting was pretty olympic today as I had most of the day to myself because Mari was away at her meditation group for most of the day.  I did do other things like clean out the garage and the sunporch but most of the day was pretty sedentary. I am looking forward to getting stuck into the General staff and I am pretty confident that I will get them finished quickly. That leaves me with no more painting! With winter coming up I think I will need to order more sets from Britain, I couldn't imagine long winter nights without a paintbrush in my hand!

So...Ponyclub died...Or did it?

The kids were suspisiously quiet in the evening. This was the creation that I found in Victoria's room. The Williamson Ponyclub!

Down Sizing

With the cost of petrol the way it is these days the small car is becoming increasingly popular. For our family we have been bucking the trend because a van is just so damned handy. I don't know how we would have survived withoout our trusty old Estima. But alas, times do have to change and the trusty van is now going to live out its days as an English Advantage student conveyor. We have joined the rest of the flock in purchasing a small fuel efficient car in the hopes of stemming the flow of money from our pockets. We are now the owners of a little Mitsubishi Colt Plus. Long may serve us without a service.

The Aging Couple

Last Night's Effort

Close up view of my Hussars. I am having quite a lot of fum with these little guys. As usual I am using my mixture of acrylics and enamels.

If you look closely you will see my Peninsular Briish snug in the painting box. I did about 160 and need to about 700 more to form the core of the army. About another 800 with make up my Portuguese/Spanish allies.

Up Early

Well I decided to get up early to do this blog update... well kind of. Actually I am going to do some painting as well.
 Josie is safely off to Columba and our bank accounts are massively lighter because of it.  It cost over 6 grand to get the first term off and I assume there will be regular outgoings for the other 3.  Josie came back telling us that she had decided to join tht tramping club and the volleyball club and the athletics team. All of the above have fees which automatically get added to the monthly bill that comes home. I am not really complaining but it never really occurd to me before just how expensive children are.  At the same time Victoria wanted to join the local ponyclub. That would have ended up being about the same price as Columba! After so much bank freefall, I made the command decision to jus tgive her lessons in Palmerston over a few weeks rather than trapse dowm to Mosgiel and hang out with "the horse set."
Back to really life now.  I haven't finished any of the painting that I had set out to do.  This weekend I am going to put a real dent in my Russian Hussars. I will even post some pictures.  I managed to base my Peninsular British and they are looking fine so maybe I will post a picture of those at the same time. Under the Shako ruleset that I am basing for, I well need about 32 battalions of British and Portuguese in order to finish the Peninsular army across all the the periods. Hat Industrie is starting to come out with Spanish figures and I am going to paint the British line as Portuguese line because the cut of the uniform was identical.  This will mean that I will end up with about 12 boxes of British Infantry to paint over the course of the coming year. Hopefully, that will mean complete British. French and Russian armies.  The sadness of it all is that I have never actually played a wargame since I was at university. I just stack box after box in my cupboard!
Other things of note;

1)  We decided to dump the TV for the year so that the kids can structure their time better.
2) I am deciding at present whether to renew my lease of the school or move to bigger premises.
3) I have been biking down to work rather than walking.  This has been fun but not that good for my fitness.  Now that I have got the bike back from Hampden I have promised myself that I will go for longer rides in the weekends so we will see how that pans out.

I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.
I am a poor blogger.

the end.