GoldenPiggy

I live in central Texas, where there is no fall, only a slightly cooler version of summer (you know, highs in the mid- to upper-80s) until we get to generic kind-of-cool-weather season. Sometimes there are a few days or a few weeks of mild winter, and there is something resembling spring, and of course 6-8 months of summer. But there is nothing that can be reasonably be called fall. I don't really have a favorite fall activity, but I do generally enjoy both Halloween and Thanksgiving. Fall holidays are nice; if only they could more effectively fend off the appalling encroachment of Christmas. The holiday gets the whole month of December, it doesn't need November or October. (Or, increasingly, September.)

Can I get the DeLorean from Back to the Future? I don't mean the same model, I mean the actual time machine. That would be useful to have. If not, I am pretty happy with the car I have. I've never really felt a strong desire for a fancy car, though sometimes I think it would be nice to have a Ford Mustang convertible.

I like going to a movie theater, but I also don't mind waiting and watching at home, where the concessions are a lot cheaper. I don't think I have tried Pawpaw fruit. I'm not sure I have ever been offered it.

In graduate school I had no dental insurance, so I stopped going to the dentist for several years. And being young and lazy, my dental hygiene was only so-so. Eventually it caught up to me, and one of my teeth, which was apparently in very bad shape inside, finally gave up and practically exploded while I was eating one day. Nothing strange about that, except that the food that finally destroyed the tooth was... a salad. Specifically, a piece of lettuce. Nothing chewy, or crunchy, or sticky; my tooth fell apart chewing lettuce.

One of the Morbid minis has a length of cord in his hands, presumably to strangle an opponent, which has been a signature move of Meazels since the Fiend Folio version, so I suspect this is accurate.

Other than the coffee part, this is my lottery fantasy too. Used books on one side of the store, games and hobyy stuff on the other side, playing space in the back. If I started out with, say, $50 million in the bank, I could take annual losses of a million a year and still stay open for fifty years. But I feel like I could probably keep the losses a lot lower than that.

For work responsibilities, I try to schedule classes and office hours later so I don't need to get up early for work. Parenting responsibilities, on the other hand, generally have me up by 6:30 or so on school days. If it weren't for the kids, I could sleep in almost every day.

I love cheeseburgers. Similar meats, like bison, are fine too. I find most turkey burgers disappointing. As far as veggie burgers, it depends; in general, the more it tries to be like a burger the less I like it. I have had some very good black bean "burgers" that tasted nothing like burgers but were delicious. The one exception to this general rule was a taro burger I had at a tiny little local restaurant in Hawaii, which was one of the best burgers (of any kind) I've ever had despite being meatless. I'm flexible on the toppings; mayo and mustard are good, but so is barbecue sauce. Guacamole works well too. Lettuce, tomato, pickles, and onions are all good. You can keep the ketchup. One of the things I like best about ReaperCon is that there are real choices about how to experience it. Though I have focused on classes in my first two visits, next year I'm thinking I might focus mostly on gaming instead. One could go just to play games, and fit in a bit of painting between the games. I have found I prefer gamers who paint (or painters who game!) to run-of-the-mill gamers.

Yeah, they aren't very good at tracking packages. A while back I had a package that was supposed to arrive on a particular day, then went the wrong direction and headed further away. They pushed the delivery date back four days, if I remember correctly, but the package arrived on the original planned date. I'm not sure exactly what route it took, or whether any of the tracking steps were accurate, but in the end it was fine. And aren't all universes actually Douglas Adams Engineered Alternate Universes?

I have no fancy mini holders. I use several options. Mostly I use either a wooden candlestick holder or a pill bottle. (I acquired a bunch of the latter all at once when my Mom passed away last year; she had many, many pills.) Wooden spools will work too. Sometimes I will use a wine cork; I like holding them, but it is difficult to get them to stand up straight when I'm not holding them. If I am painting multiple similar minis, like a bunch of kobolds or something, I will attach them to a short scrap of wood; I use the wood scraps for larger minis and terrain too. And sometimes I will just hold the mini by the base. One day I aspire to try a fancy miniature holder, but so far the cost has held me back. I love this idea. I think I will have to borrow it.

No, I have nothing especially fun this weekend, and I'll borrow Chaoswolf's reason: As for hobbying, I did some painting yesterday. I finally finished the last few details on a bunch of kobolds (now waiting for Dullcote) that have been unfinished for a while. I'm also working on a dragon who will get his own post when he is done, but he has a long way still to go. Plus a few other projects that don't get pictures here.

I love this project, especially since you are using the first edition sourcebooks. I've been trying to do something similar, though much (much!) less organized: I made a checklist of monsters, and am trying to make sure I have at least some of every one. I have not been systematically going through them like you describe, but I want to make sure I am prepared for just about any encounter. I'm actually looking forward to the big bunch of zombies in Bones 6, because I intend to paint each set of four to be a different sort of zombie-like monster (juju zombie, Son of Kyuss, coffer corpse, yellow musk zombie) that should look just a little bit different from regular zombies (of which I already have many). But there are still plenty of monsters I don't even have. I look at it as a long-term casual project.

I think the stuff I have is just a generic store brand. I find it works quite well, except when it doesn't. It works best when the bottom of the base is flat, which unfortunately is all too frequently not the case with Bones minis or terrain pieces. I actually find it tends to work better with metal, though if I hold the metal minis upside down gravity will sometimes prove to be stronger than the tack. But about half the time, it holds the mini on very well, and it usually works all right most of the rest of the time. Then again, I'm a lazy painter, and not a great one, so sometimes I will just hold the figure directly if I need to get into those hard-to-reach places. It's a bad habit, but I don't care.

I never, ever misbehaved, of course. The only things I hid were minor infractions that were easily defensible, like staying up well past bedtime to read books. Honestly, there were lots more things I could have gotten away with but still didn't do.

Really? Now I need to go measure miniatures, because those heights make them seem rather tall. EDIT: So I measured Sir Forscale at 32mm from feet to head, and everybody knows that he is average height, by convention. By comparison, the elven bard from the tavern set here is 34mm, slightly taller than that. The human thugs, while hunched over, are just a tiny bit shorter than our beloved knight. The barkeep is 34.75, and most of the human-sized minis are right around there. I'll admit that is closer than I thought (I apparently misremembered Sir Forscale as being a little under 30mm up to his head), representing more scale creep than a full size up. I guess I haven't carefully measured these supposedly-28mm-minis for a while. (For the record, I've always hated scale creep. Bring back true 25mm!) I don't have a handy WizKids mini to measure, so I can't compare that at the moment. But I'll take another look at these slightly taller people.