Well here I am

Greetings once again all. So some good news/bad news time. Since I prefer the approach of "Bad news first that way the good news sounds that much better" I'm gonna start with with that.

I lost my regular job, yeah the one where I made about $2k a month.

I wasn't fired, the company went through a re-org to stream line a lot of things and my position was one of the ones that got eliminated. Because of my pay rate at the time I wasn't able to take any of the job openings at the time with out a major pay cut and the company was obligated to offer me the same pay rate I was presently getting. So why pay a guy $2k a month to do a job when we can pay someone else $1250 a month to do the exact same job? Yeah, I can't say I fault them. Given the situation I would likely have made the exact same choice. So since I was laid off, as opposed to terminated, I got a pretty nice severance package so I'm not exactly hurting in the money department right now. But I am without regular income. I still have my side jobs and free lance work so I have money coming in, but yeah.

So what's the good news? Got more time for my hobby stuff. Which is kind of a good thing actually because I'm coming down to the wire on getting ready for the Apocalypse game. I've been working with a friend to get the large scale terrain materials completed but her schedule and mine hadn't been syncing up terribly well previously do to school and work between the two of us. But with my schedule freeing up the way it has been it makes it easier to sync up now. I've still got a fair amount of work to do on the terrain. The war wall needs to be finished being built and then painted, the orbital defense laser needs to be built and painted, the orbital lander like wise needs to be built and painted. The annoying problem with these projects is that there are sections where all you can do is wait for the glue to dry. And by large sections I mean like 1-2 days. So yeah... makes it interesting.

Now, has you all know I have an incredibly bad case of ADHD when it comes to projects so yes I will be working on the stuff for the apoc ga... SQUIRREL!

Sorry what was I saying? Oh right, what I'm working on.

Well a while back I did a HelBrute conversion with a Twin-linked Lascannon. You'll remember that this was back when all we really had was the HelBrute from the Dark Vengeance set. And then later I rebuilt another Helbrute to have two power fists. Well I've been working on painting them. Oh and the standard HelBrute from the DV kit as well. I mostly finished the Dark Vengeance Helbrute already, minus the tentacles on the side that is.

The Dark Vengeance HelBrute in Crimson Slaughter Colors

I need to get a good base color for purple on the tentacle. Surprise surprise I don't have one. But with that one largely done I was ready to start on the other two:

The three Crimson Slaughter HelBrutes!

The other two helbrutes are only base colored so far but I am working on them in spurts.

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Post-Christmas Update

Hey everyone. I know I know, I haven't posted in almost a... *looks at last post*... in quit a while. It's that time of the year. You know the one, where your basic work load doubles, customers tempers fray needlessly, everyone is in a rush and everyone must get the answer/item they want no matter what anyone else thinks, says, or does. Or what the reality of the situation is. Oh wait, that's only if you work in retail. Yeah, for all of you who work in retail you know what I'm talking about. This time of year is harder then any other segment of the year with out question. And I have to deal with it. So that's why I haven't posted in several weeks. On a brighter note, all that work is paying off.

When I took my current position my department was ranked as 1106 out of the company with a total of 1116 spots. At that level there really isn't anyway to slip further down the scale unless you are honestly and sincerely trying to fail. That was 3 months ago. As of the beginning of December we were 221, and has of this past Monday, we were 302. Now that sounds like we're sliding back down, a fluctuation of 79 spots is very common with the department rankings. Our rankings are based on client and customer reviews that are submitted through an online survey. The client is presented with a series of 20 questions and a scale of 1 to 10. And then asked to rank how they feel we performed based on each question.

Of the 150-200 customers we deal with in a given week, perhaps 3 or 4 will actually take the survey. And of those 4, maybe 1 will actually think about their answer. More often the rankings are totally arbitrary and are all 10s or all 1s. So with 8 reviews with all 100's on the record, if we get a review that is all 1s, we just dropped from a 100% ranking to a 87% which can easily translate to a drop of 40 spots in the ranking. Imagine how much we drop if we only have 5 reviews and one of them is all 1s?

That being said, the new year is right around the corner. And with the new year comes new opportunities. I'm sure many of you have seen the leaked images of the new Dark Angle models. I'll withhold judgement until I can get my hands on the models and do a proper review of the kits.

As an aside, the digital camera I had been using for my posts is no longer mine to use. So for the immediate time I will be limited to taking pictures with my phone.

Though one brighter note. I got the audio drama "Horus Heresy: The Dark King/The Lightning Tower" for Christmas. I haven't had the chance to really sit down and listen to it just yet, but it did lead me to organizing my media library a little bit. Getting a rather nice collection aren't I?

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