I Have A Hobby!
If you've been following my Live Journal then you've heard the news -- I now have an official hobby, complete with all the trappings: expensive tools and supplies, blindingly tedious puttering, and a sense of accomplishment orders of magnitude out of scale with the actual finished product.
I'm painting miniatures. Here's a picture of one.
This Dire Troll Mauler from the sculptors at Privateer Press is named "Cocoa" (he is minty-chocolate flavored), and he stands roughly 2.5 inches tall.
It's nice having a hobby again. It's been something like 20 years since I picked something up that I enjoyed, and then did NOT try to turn it into a career. Since I now have the career I want, and since I seem to have located some of this mysterious "free time" I hear people speaking of, aquiring a hobby was more attractive than the three competing alternatives: 1) watch television, 2) play video games, 3) work more.
Workaholic that I am, sometimes I need to kind of trick myself into thinking that painting miniatures is actually professional development, and therefore qualifies as #3. But that's as far as I'm taking it.
Oh, and a big shout out to two people who made this happen: First, Al Griego down in San Antonio -- I won a game of Frag, and as a prize he gave me a box that had some miniatures in it. Of course I HAD to find a way to paint them. Second, Drew at Dragon's Keep who was painting stuff the day I came in with those Frag minis, and who loaned me a brush and some paints, and then heaped on the advice.
Thanks, guys. Al, I've only painted two of those PvP Frag minis. Sorry. The trolls distracted me. Drew, umm... I just found out that there's a fire-breathing troll releasing in December. It's December now... are you getting one? Can I watch you paint it?