It's interesting how productive nothing can be

So I'm still here and alive. I know it's been a few days. As I'm so fond of saying "Life happens" Though I do have to say, I had this past Thursday off and I managed to do something I have not done in probably five years: nothing. I mean nothing productive. The most productive thing I did all day was get out of bed and shower. I didn't have work, I didn't do any work on my school projects, I didn't have any calls with clients, I didn't work on any models, I didn't work on my movie listings, absolutely nothing. all I did was sit on my butt and play video games. Here's my life lesson of the day folks: Every once in a while, you just have to do nothing. Just like every 3 or 4 months just take a day off from everything. Arrange time off from work, get it on a day you don't have class, in a period where you're not prepping for something, and just do nothing.

But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on stuff the last couple weeks. I'm taking a little break from the Thunderbolt due to finances. I'm not broke but I need to reconsider my spending a little bit. When I went full time at work I immediately applied for benefits. So now I have a 401k, Tuition reimbursement, Health Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision coverage, a Stock portfolio, and a bunch of other nice little tidbits that come with working 35+ hours a week. So yeah me! Buuuut.... I have to pay for some of those benefits. It's not like crippling huge, but you notice that $90 being take out of your check. Plus I'd like to take a trip out to Arizona and actually meet some folks face to face that I've been talking with online for what seems like ages and eons now.

So have I been sitting idle? Yeah right. I said I took one day off and did nothing. But I'm the living embodiment of  ADHD, I can't sit still and not work on something. So what have I been working on? Well a couple things actually.

First thing, a Nurgle demon prince/Greater daemon. It's the Forge World Mamom model I got from a lot auction on Ebay. I bid $100 on the lot of "40k stuff" and got a Hell Blade fighter, a hand full of Chaos Renegade torsos, the Mamon daemon prince, several auto-cannons, a hand full of lascannons, some Space marine torsos and legs, the top section of a Rhino, and a bunch of other stuff. The Hell Blade was complete and I built it... and I gotta say I dislike the model even more now. I'll go into more detail about it later.

But I also built the Mamon figure. With the exception of one tube the model was complete but it was partially deformed in some spots and left gaps that I just wasn't comfortable with leaving unattended to. So I went at it with the sculpting putties. I used 2 types of putty on the model based on where I was using it. Around the elbow of the club fist, and the neck line I used milliput because those were largely flat areas where if the putty failed to hold it would simply appear to be skin flapping off the muscles. Around the shoulder, and where the tube connects to the arm I used Kneadite (Green stuff) to fill in the gaps. I also rolled out a tube of kneadite to replace the missing tube on the back of the arm. I'm going to go back with some more kneadite and add decay and rot to the tube.

Beyond the Daemon prince I'm still working on some scratch building in the form of a drop pod. As I explained previously, the template I have I think makes a drop pod that is just too small to serve as a transport drop pod, but I do think it's the right size for a death storm drop pod. So that's what I'm gonna try and build this pod as:

 

Here you can see the first wing master I produced in sheet styrene. I'm working on the other four now:

Here you can see the four segments of 2mm thick styrene attached with super glue and held in place with a clamps. This allowed me to take a file to the edges of the parts to make them all match. It's a slow process, cutting through 2mm of styrene is a slow process. And then sanding all the parts down... yeah a bit monotonous.

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My hand wants to murder me now...

So with the whether kind of sort of maybe in a weird reverse sort of way starting to head in the springy direction, I've started getting ready for the days when the temperature will be warm enough and the humidity low enough to make priming my models doable. Toward that end I've partially assembled 3 attack bikes, 3 land speeders, and a drop pod and mounted the parts on tooth picks mounted in sections of wood I'm going to use as painting sticks.

 

And you see the... that's a lot of parts and pieces.  There are three 2' sections of wood filled with holes that are mounting the parts of the landspeeders, attack bikes and drop pod. I've also got a unit of Assault marines that I'm in the process of preparing to be painted that will like wise be added to the priming party. And a 5 man unit of Terminators. And to think, I drilled all 76 of those holes with my pin vice.

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Have I got my work cut out for me

So, I've had a rather bizarre series of luck the last couple weeks where I won a bunch of Ebay Bucks and used them to buy a couple kits and then I won a raffle that netted me another kit and then I got a discount at the hobby store that netted me basically a free land speeder, honestly I've lost track of it. But I took all the kits I have sitting in my cabinet waiting to be worked on and stacked them up and was rather shocked at my haul of waiting to be built kits:

Let me count out what this is getting my Blood Ravens forces:
3 Land Speeders
1 Attack Bike
6 Biker Marines
1 Land Speeder Storm
2 Drop Pods
5 Assault marines.

With the whether beginning to change toward the warmer temperatures I'll be somewhat short on time to get all of these kits built and ready for priming before the "Too-Hot" to prime weather hits. I still have those three attack bikes I built a few weeks ago ready for priming too.

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