New Arrivals

Not much to show on the gaming front. That is not to say that nothing is happening, it is just that nothing is finished. Three battalions of New Hampshire infantry for the AWI are nearing completion, but not yet based. They should appear a little later this week.

But on Wednesday this bundle of goodies arrived from the Perrys - my first purchase since May.

It contained five infantry command frames for the AWI American infantry, along with their associated mounted officers, artillery sets and limbers and four FPW gun sets. Also included are three boxes of Napoleonic Allied plastic cavalry, plus 8 frames of horses and three sets of Allied cavalry command frames that will allow me to build three regiments of Russian and three of Prussian dragoons. 

The boxes of cavalry stayed on the shelf for a day and a half before before the temptation became too great and I had to assemble the first batch. Such a lovely set these are, permitting the creation of four cavalry types from the one box: Prussian dragoons and volunteer Jägers, and Russian dragoons and mounted Jägers. There are so many legs, bodies arms and heads on the sprue that if you buy enough spare horse frames and a command frame you can build two regiments from the one box and still have lots of bits over to join the multitude of spare heads, hats, arms, weapons and other accoutrements already in little boxes for future potential projects.

Of course I didn’t really need to assemble these. I already had two full battalions of AWI Americans plus two of Turcos - that is thirteen days painting - assembled and in the queue. Now normally I would not have as many figures pre-assembled, because assembly can be a tedious process and my rule of thumb has always been ‘just assemble what you need to paint next day’, which for me means six foot or three mounted figures - a manageable quantity. But in this post-COVID work environment I am working from home two days a week now to try to save some commute time and gas (one team of three in my area at work has been working so efficiently remotely that they have been into the office no more than five days in the last two and a half years), and last week there was a particular series of online meetings to solve an IT issue. This involved three one-hour sessions of making a change, wait fifteen minutes for the server to update then test, then repeat…so after the first couple of fifteen minute waits we had exhausted the conversational subjects like the weather, the war in Ukraine, sport and the upcoming royal funeral and there were long periods of silence which became the perfect time to assemble plastic figures - with the mute on of course. But I digress.

Anyway on Friday afternoon I’m in the middle of assembling the Russian dragoons and the phone rings…the landline. What you say, you still have a landline? Yes we do, in part because there are still some people we know who prefer to use it - the mother-in-law for one (and I have used this as a point of discussion as to why we should get rid of it) and in part because her indoors doesn’t like cell phones (although this is a senseless argument now that we have had three COVID shots and have the 5G chip firmly implanted in our systems). But again I digress.

So the phone rings just as I have started to glue the head on a horse and I have applied a little too much glue and it is taking forever to set…you know what it is like to hold it in place as still as you can until the glue takes and that 30 seconds seems like an eternity. So I put the figure down and answer the phone which is in the other room and isn’t hands free. I should have known better that a call at 4:00 in the afternoon was not going to be anyone I know. It is of course a scam caller. 

“I am from Windows,” says the liar on the other end. Now despite the annoying interruption I am in a good mood because it is the start of a long weekend, so I string him along for a full ten minutes pretending to be a computer dummy, but being very cooperative. Then I ask my favourite question, “is your mother proud of you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I am just interested how any mother could possibly be proud that their son is a lying, cheating, scumbag thief like you.”

Call ends and I am happy to have robbed him of ten minutes of his life that he will never get back.

I returned to my figure assembly and I now have one 12 figure unit of Russian and the same of Prussian dragoons assembled and in the queue.