Even the Nids Wore Green
One of my favorite color schemes for tyranids. This was nicknamed the “Salsa Nids”. They have a distinct southwestern flavor!
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At this moment in time all the kids are in bed. Only little Griffin is up keeping me company in the living room watching Land of the Lost. He is a sweet, bright and energetic little tyke and usually the last one in bed (though I usually follow up in the early hours to be sure he is tucked in).
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Flashback 18 hours. I was up at 3:30am. It starts with an almighty urge to take a piss, but then I can’t get back to sleep, so I answer some emails, have a bowl of cereal (Life) and then drift off to Frasier. This can’t be healthy.
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My wife managed to finish all the corporate and personal tax stuff, which needs to be in by March 15. That was the big thing of the day, that those were ready to pick up at our accountant’s office. It’s like a biopsy; will it be good news or bad news? It seems like a horrible waste. I don’t see how my money is the government’s business. It’s intrusive and wastes the time and careers of all those tax accountants who would otherwise be improving our lives in a non-contrived way. But I won’t get into that. I wonder how many man-hours are wasted on just the paperwork…
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I heard back from my “End the Fed” friend and I’ll be out on the street corner soon with some signs. Got to do something.
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I was greeted upon arrival home by my adoring fans. My wife had our traditional St. Patrick’s day meal ready: corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, carrots and various other fixins. We spent part of the evening out in the mild pre-spring weather doing some yard cleanup. I taught Jonah how to check the oil in the car.
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Things are proceeding apace at the studio, everything on track and on schedule.
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I am currently booking projects for April. I am at your disposal if you’d like to set something up.
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Limited Specials
I haven’t mentioned this before but I do have the better part of a Bretonnian army on hand. I can’t remember what exactly is in it, but I would provide the models at no charge if anyone wants to commission it. Contact me at bluetablepainting@gmail.com if you are interested.
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If you would like to commission a Hive Fleet Medusa army you can get 20% off on your painting. There is one slot open for this. You can get the discount on your next expansion of that same army, too.
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I am also opening up one slot for a Tau army with 20% off on painting if we get to pick the color scheme. I’ve been hankering to try one with dusky red armor, with grey and white as highlight colors. It will look something like this. But with a darker shade of red. You can get the discount on your next shot expanding this army, if you want.
Major Policy Change
Blue Table Painting will now accept personal checks as follows:
For a new client we will accept a check for the deposit on your project.
For old clients (ie more than ten projects) we will also accept a check for the final payment.
For any client we will accept a check for the final payment, but with a waiting period for the check to clear.
An Article about the Stock Crash
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=1
This reminds me of a program that NPR did about this same subject.
Step by Step
As usual, I started Sunday on “E” and ended on “F”. Sometimes I go to church with such a bad attitude, like “what’s the point?” but always glad in the end that I did. The best part is when church is just getting out and everyone is chit-chatting in the halls. Did I say this before? My three-year old son is slowly adapting to his new class. My wife or I always sit in with him. He needs a nap around that time.
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Sunday school lesson was on Pride, and a classic from the archives. This is always a horse pill for me because I am quite bone-headed in certain aspects of my life. A whole lot of lip-service but not much real change in the last 10 years. Holy crap, I’m forty.
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My children are healthy and sturdy-limbed. I love them ever so much. I really lucked out in the kid department, I’m really having a good time as a dad. I found a note written by my daughter (soon to turn 10): “Dear Dad, Thank you for all that you do like playing with us, being very funny and keeping us safe.” Wife, kids, home, God, community, and hobby. It’s all a beautiful recipe.
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My wife made a great dinner: potatoes, cheese, broccoli, and meat. And an ice cold cream soda.
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Really not much to say. Everything is groovy. I’m ready to get cracking tomorrow morning.
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I feel inclined to make my usual disclaimer, in case there are new readers. I do not consider myself especially good or righteous. I am always a little reticent to talk about church or spiritual stuff. I include it for the sake of completeness and also in hopes that maybe someone will be uplifted.
Response from a Reader
Hey there Shawn,
I just read your blog tonight “Step by Step”, I needed to hear something uplifting, so thank you! I am not extremely spiritual, but was raised a catholic and went to catholic elementary school… You don’t know my current living situation, but my wife, myself and my four boys live in one of my parent’s houses, it is a huge house and we have a downstairs apartment, we are living here while our house nearby is in the process of being built… Here is something I had emailed to a few friends of mine, and thought I’d send you a copy so you know why I felt uplifted reading your blog…
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Wow, I am thankful today… People don’t really consider themselves thankful when everyone is safe, they take it for granted…
To give you some background, the house we are living in right now is massive, probably close to 6,500 square feet and about 23 or more rooms… two exterior work rooms, 3 car garage, etc… Now we only live in a small portion of it though, and the downstairs where we are is not connected to the inside house, so most of the time we stay downstairs in our apartment. My studio/office is on the second floor and is isolated on one wing of the house. The rest of the house is largely unoccupied, especially this time of year…
I just read your blog tonight “Step by Step”, I needed to hear something uplifting, so thank you! I am not extremely spiritual, but was raised a catholic and went to catholic elementary school… You don’t know my current living situation, but my wife, myself and my four boys live in one of my parent’s houses, it is a huge house and we have a downstairs apartment, we are living here while our house nearby is in the process of being built… Here is something I had emailed to a few friends of mine, and thought I’d send you a copy so you know why I felt uplifted reading your blog…
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Wow, I am thankful today… People don’t really consider themselves thankful when everyone is safe, they take it for granted…
To give you some background, the house we are living in right now is massive, probably close to 6,500 square feet and about 23 or more rooms… two exterior work rooms, 3 car garage, etc… Now we only live in a small portion of it though, and the downstairs where we are is not connected to the inside house, so most of the time we stay downstairs in our apartment. My studio/office is on the second floor and is isolated on one wing of the house. The rest of the house is largely unoccupied, especially this time of year…
To give you an idea of the house, it is all made of logs, each log is about about 18″ thick, so it is very sound proof. You could stand in a room upstairs and yell as loud as possible and someone downstairs wouldn’t hear you.
We’ve been here alone for some time, my parents are at one of their houses in Jackson Hole and my Grandmother (who was living with us since the holidays) has been in the hospital going on close to 3 weeks now (they said she can come home in about 2 weeks!), it has been quiet and isolated here… just the way we like it.
Well, this evening I came up to my studio to get my art schedule for tomorrow ironed out. We are in a severe storm watch right now, with about 20″ of snow expected tonight at our altitude, it is about 20 below zero outside right now… So I get up here at about 6pm and start working.
At about 6:15 the fire alarm starts to go off… Now keep in mind that over the last few months, whenever my wife cooks something the alarm goes off because it is over sensitive in the kitchen in our apartment, so I hear it go off and don’t think much of it. I figure that she is cooking… I know it is a bad thing, but the smoke alarm going off is really kind of normal now and we have gotten accustomed to it going off and don’t react.
At about 6:18pm, with the alarms going off for about 3 minutes, my studio phone rings…. it is my wife “I’m not cooking anything…” is all she says to me. So suddenly it hits me that there is a fire alarm going off and I jump up and run into the house.
I start going room to room, I am kind of frantic, I cover the main floor and move upstairs, nothing… I get to a bedroom on the far end of the top floor and open the door… it is like something out of a movie, the entire room is ablaze with a massive fire. The smoke is thick and nearly impossible to see anything. It is really like something you see in a movie, just not real… it wasn’t hot like you’d expect for some reason, it was just there… the glow from the flames made an erie reflection around the room… I just charged into the room without thinking.
I didn’t want to take the time to go get the fire extinguisher down stairs, in my mind I knew the 45 seconds or so it would take me would be too long… I took a blanket from the bed and begin beating out the fire. It is bad and I am getting burnt. I kick out a window and begin picking up burning debris and throwing it outside into the darkness below. My wife is on the bottom floor and later tells me that she sees flaming debris falling down into the snow outside.
After a few minutes the fire is under control and I I finally get it all out. The bed is burnt, the oil stove is destroyed, there is a huge humidifier unit in the corner and the plastic has melted into an unrecognizable blob… the window that I kicked out is trashed. It is horrible in there!
Luckily all is well now, and the structural damage is extremely minimal, mostly cosmetics like the stove, carpet, window, etc. The main structure is ok and the log wall construction only has minor scorches that I think will sand out and can be re stained with no problem. After some minor investigation, I have determined what happened…Each room has an oil stove that automatically turns on when the temp in the room falls below 40 degrees. This is a necessity out here because of pipes freezing in the floors and walls. Even though that room is not used, it still has the heat. With the temp outside hitting twenty below, that room just got too cold and the oil stove kicked on. From what I can tell, a pillow from the bed had fallen off and laid up against the oil stove. One of the dogs must have gone up there to lay on the bed and when the dog jumped off she probably kicked a pillow down and it has laid up against it for who knows how long.
It was a very scary experience. Had my wife not called me, I may have not even really investigated the situation for another 2 or 3 minutes which could have been enough to have lost the entire house, the fire was almost out of control beyond my capabilities to put it out by the time I got there, so a few more minutes might have been the end!
The nearest (real) fire department is about 70 miles away… There are some volunteer guys in the town about 35 miles north, but they don’t even have a truck… there is no outside water right now, the outside pipes are drained and turned off for the winter months… We would have had PLENTY of time to get the kids out, clothes, photo albums, the two vehicles, etc., heck, I’d even have had enough time to get my computer equipment out of my office had it gotten that bad… but it really makes you think about “what if”… I’m going to be 37 years old this year and I’ve never had a house fire before, wheww…
So, with all that being said… I highly recommend everyone checks their smoke alarms and makes sure they are all up to speed and have batteries checked, etc… The smoke alarms in this house are hot wired into the electric, so they are constantly on and have mini battery backups in case of a power failure. I can’t tell you how many apartments or houses we’ve rented that had no smoke alarms, or just had wires hanging out of the ceilings where they should be, and you always say “it won’t happen to me”…
Having 4 sons and my wife, the responsibility to keep them safe is something that weighs heavily on me, constantly looking out for them and taking care of them is a full time job in itself (and one I am happy to have)… Someone up there was looking out for us tonight and although I am not extremely spiritual, I do pray and know that we were watched over!
My drama for the weekend is over! 
-anonymous reader
Ocean Eldar Update
Today is the big day! I started in earnest on the studio Eldar army.
I am working on six vypers and two night spinners. I have three war walkers, twenty dire avengers, four jetbikes, and two wave serpents in process.
We had a sort of mini-paint-fest down at the studio. Lord Anonymo, Sarah, Renn, James and I were all crowded around. Sarah is working on the Lizardmen.
Everything is working out just great. No pics yet, sorry. I had to leave the studio in quite a hurry. The only thing the vehicles need is some kind of freehand. I’m thinking it needs to be: elongated runes, a wing pattern, or glittering fish scales. Still looking around for ideas.
This is my dream army. It has loads of my favorite units. I picked units I like rather than what is necessarily competitive. I plan on adding a unit of Striking Scorpions (with infiltrate), three more Vypers, and wow I think that’s it. After that there will just be a two Elite slots left, every other force org. slot will be used.
Here is the army list as I have it so far. Suggestions?
2000 Pts – Eldar Roster – Eldar code: Ocean
HQ: Farseer (1#, 153 Pts)
1 Farseer @ 153 Pts
Unit Type: Jetbike Infantry; Psyker; Doom ; Guide ; Turbo-boosters; Ghost Helm (GH); Rune Armour (RAmr); Spirit Stones (P:SpStn); Eldar Jetbike (EJB); Shuriken Pistol (Sp); Singing Spear (SSpr); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat) (x1)
HQ: Autarch (1#, 130 Pts)
1 Autarch @ 130 Pts
Unit Type: Jetbike Infantry; Fleet; Independent Character; Master Strategist; Turbo-boosters; Forceshield (FShld); Eldar Jetbike (EJB); Scorpion Chainsword (SCs); Shuriken Pistol (Sp); Reaper Launcher (RL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat) (x1); Haywire Grenades (HayG); Plasma Grenades (PG)
Troops: Dire Avengers (11#, 272 Pts)
9 Dire Avengers @ 272 Pts
Fleet; Avenger S-Catapult (ASC)
1 Dire Avenger Exarch @ [44] Pts
Fleet; Bladestorm (BS); 2 Avenger SC
1 Wave Serpent @ [120] Pts
Energy Field (Wave Serpent); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat); TL Missile Launchers (TL-ML)
Troops: Dire Avengers (11#, 272 Pts)
9 Dire Avengers @ 272 Pts
Fleet; Avenger S-Catapult (ASC)
1 Dire Avenger Exarch @ [44] Pts
Fleet; Bladestorm (BS); 2 Avenger SC
1 Wave Serpent @ [120] Pts
Energy Field (Wave Serpent); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat); TL Missile Launchers (TL-ML)
Troops: Guardian Jetbike Squadron (4#, 139 Pts)
3 Guardian Jetbike Squadron @ 139 Pts
Unit Type: Jetbike Infantry; Turbo-boosters; Eldar Jetbike (EJB); Shuriken Cannon (SCan) (x1); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat) (x2)
1 Warlock @ [63] Pts
Unit Type: Jetbike Infantry; Psyker; Conceal ; Turbo-boosters; Rune Armour (RAmr); Eldar Jetbike (EJB); Shuriken Pistol (Sp); Singing Spear (SSpr); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat) (x1)
1 WP Conceal @ [0] Pts
Fast Attack: Vyper Squadron (2#, 150 Pts)
1 Vyper Squadron @ 150 Pts
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
Fast Attack: Vyper Squadron (2#, 150 Pts)
1 Vyper Squadron @ 150 Pts
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
Fast Attack: Vyper Squadron (2#, 150 Pts)
1 Vyper Squadron @ 150 Pts
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
1 Vyper @ [75] Pts
Bright Lance (BL); TL Shuriken Catapult (TL-Scat)
Heavy Support: Night Spinner (IA) (1#, 170 Pts)
1 Night Spinner (IA) @ 170 Pts
Twin Linked Shuriken Catapult; Night Spinner; Holo-Field (Vehicle) (H-F)
Heavy Support: Night Spinner (IA) (1#, 170 Pts)
1 Night Spinner (IA) @ 170 Pts
Twin Linked Shuriken Catapult; Night Spinner; Holo-Field (Vehicle) (H-F)
Heavy Support: War Walker Squadron (3#, 240 Pts)
1 War Walker Squadron @ 240 Pts
Scouts
1 War Walker @ [80] Pts
Starcannon (StrCan); Starcannon (StrCan)
1 War Walker @ [80] Pts
Starcannon (StrCan); Starcannon (StrCan)
1 War Walker @ [80] Pts
Starcannon (StrCan); Starcannon (StrCan)
Total Roster Cost: 1996
Created with Army Builder
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Lone Wolf Development, Inc. All rights reserved.
Privateer Press Plastics Confirmed
I could NOT get a decent picture of these guys. So, go to the http://www.privateerpress.com/ site and take a look at them yourself. They are on 40mm bases, bear in mind, so bulkier than a terminator.
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I hope there are plenty more plastics coming in from Privateer Press.
And the Megalith. More eye candy.
Ron Paul Fix- War Powers
Holy crap! A one-two post on religion then politics. Will it never end? I really feel sorry for you poor readers. I sometimes think about quitting it. But it’s just part of the journey. All of these things are related to the business. It’s all rolled into one.
I wonder if I have lost clients over political views. Well, oh well. I got to a point where I just couldn’t stay quiet about it. My workers are getting robbed to the tune of 10% of their income every month.
If Ron Paul runs in 2012 I am absolutely going to be over the moon.
OK, one more, about earmarks. This is illuminating.
The Day Dawn is Breaking
Up at 3:16am.
I would like to express my deep sense of optimism. The world is getting better.
Have faith. Be of good cheer. The dawn is breaking.
The Great Lord of the Universe regards the human entire family with tender paternal concern. The evils of this world are for but a brief moment. The good of this world is the first glimmering light of that which will come.
There is a living God who knows your name. The father of your soul.
Spicy Burger
More and more blisters are being sold as bitz only, reducing the discount given to retailers by 10-15%. This is a slow but steady squeezing of the Independent Retailer.
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I was up brighter and earlier than I hoped today, at a crisp 4am. I got to work, then went back to sleep. I spent some time with the missus talking money and politics over breakfast. I had sausage, toast and scrambled eggs. And ice cold milk. That’s the fat of the land.
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My main concern is getting projects set up. The crew now is absolutely great, so dedicated. We just want to be put to work.
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The big news of the day is that we did a battle report for War Machine (Cygnar vs Khador). I have set a rough goal to increase our business in the Privateer Press department to about one-fifth of all projects. They are a really great company. I also heard they are starting to do some plastics, can anyone confirm on that?
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Anyway, for the battle report I had two people come in, both experts with fabulously painted armies as well as Mike Dunn with his professional photography equipment (his family is in the wedding documentation business). So, I’m expecting something extra special in that department in about five days after all the footage has been processed.
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Over lunch I started teaching Sarah how to play Magic.
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Saturday (tomorrow) some of us are going to get together and paint. I’m going to produce a prototype for the studio Eldar army. Still not sure if I’m going to go hot or cold.
I have sold most of the studio armies. What’s left?
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A 750 pt Space Wolf force for $350
A bunch of Imperial Guard
Ice Elves for $1700 (nigh unto 3000 pts)
A horde of D&D figures and our terrain (I’d love to see all of that go to a good home, $400 sees the lot of 50 figures and 50 pieces of terrain). This is a temporary deal, I will probably change my mind.
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That Daemonhunters studio army didn’t even have time to hit the frying pan. Those are sold. That was a huge army. Ridiculous.
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We are also stoked about Adepticon. For one horrifying moment I thought I bought the plane tickets for the wrong weekend, but my wife took care of it all just right. My wife is so awesome. I really lucked out to get such a forgiving, frugal, and responsible woman. Not to mention a great cook. Oh man, that never gets old.
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Of course, with advent of baby home-cookin has fallen by the wayside, but that’s all right. Willow is such a good baby. Easy to get along with. I’m telling you I’m having a completely different experience with the last daughter than the first. I am much more mature is the big difference. Things don’t get on my nerves as much.
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So, Tamie brought home burgers, but she got a spicy one and I’m not very tolerant of spicy stuff. But a huge glass of ice cold milk put out that fire.