A Little Bit of Housekeeping

Christmas lights sparkle at the Hesse Seewald train station this evening.

I will be traveling north to Brown Deer, Wi (don't you just love that name?) next Saturday December 6th to play in our group's annual Light Troops SYW game using the Batailles de l'Ancien Regime ( or "BAR" rules). We do this every December so that we can put the heavy cavalry away and test our tabletop skills with nothing but light troops. It always results in a fun game, with that traitor Lady Pettygree just narrowly escaping capture by the Black Legion of Lady de Winter.

The game has given me something to look forward to as I have had to pack a lot of boxes of the new Minden Austrian artillery for the recently funded Kickstarter campaign. Add to that the fact that Mrs. Fritz has booked me for a number of parties and fetes as well as the need to deck the halls with boughs of holly and, well, you can see that I've been too busy to get anything done on the painting table for awhile.

We had terrific Winter weather over the weekend, with temperatures in the 50s Fahrenheit so everyone on the block was out stringing up Christmas lights while the weather was nice. I managed to frame the front doorway with a garland of evergreens running up the side and across the connecting thingie (the lintel?) and back down the otherside to the ground. The top portion is about 9 or 10 feet high and I had to accomplish this with only a 6 foot ladder and a hope and a prayer that I wouldn't take a fall from the ladder. I also had the presence of mind to string lights through the garland before hanging it on the doorway ( as Michael Caine might have said, "I did manage to think of that").

So with all of that done by Sunday evening, I managed to find a little bit of time with the brushes churning out some Eliteminiatures 1805 Russians that I owe to one of the participants at the Light Troops game this weekend. I had sold him all of my 28mm Napoleonics about 5 or 6 years ago and figured that I would never see them again. Then I had the bright idea of doing a barter deal with the gentleman to have him solder some pin swords for me and to cut some wooden movement trays.

And what did I have to do in return? You guessed it, I had to finish painting the regiment of half painted Russians that I started back in 1990. Talk about eating the sins of the Sin Eater! A year or two later, I still hadn't painted the figures and so I decided that it was time to remove this obligation from my back and get them done. So far I've painted 72 Russians with 24 more to go.