It lives...

Just as we were ready to pronounce it dead and buried, the ancient beast
shudders, sloughs off layers of dust and sleepily opens one eye to peer at
the world outside. Yes, TTM still lives.

Due to a variety of reasons, some personal, some not, I haven't posted
anything here since the first half of last year. Lots of things happened
since then, some of which conspired to stop the regular flow of posts here.

That said, I'd like to kickstart things again with a 'what are you working
on' type of post (that phrase is not chosen at random, see further on).
I've
recently started painting again after several months' inaction (long enough
to forget most of my 'paint recipes'), and these are things I've recently
finished or am working on at the moment:

* A GHQ Modern British combat command (1/285th) (essentially a reinforced
infantry
battalion) - these are all finished. The idea is that we start some kind
of a 'Cold War turned hot' project soon(ish). Frank is doing Germans,
Koen is
doing Russians, and Alan has been making noises about acquiring some
Russians
too. I'm looking at [Cold War Commander](http://www.blitzkrieg-commander.com/cwc.aspx) for this project.
* 4 Romano British cavalry command types (Foundry 28mm) (1 leader, 2
standard bearer, 1
musician) to round out my RB cavalry units. These are finished but for
the
bases.
* I just started the first batch of 8 [Artizan
Designs](http://www.artizandesigns.com) [Carolingian spearmen](http://www.artizandesigns.com/catalogue.asp?sub_range=19). These
are my next Dark Ages army and might feature in a Carolingians vs Vikings
in Leuven game sometime in the future.

The last two painting sessions I did went very well (a bad painting session
is one where I break out all the stuff and than twiddle about doing not
much
at all, putting everything away after painting just 1 layer on three
figures
or so), which I attribute to a [tip of Phil's](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000280.html) - listening to podcasts
while painting. I went through the latest episodes of [The Naked Scientists
podcast](http://www.thenakedscientists.com), [What are you working on](http://waywo.podbean.com/)
(aha) and [All about miniatures](http://allaboutminiatures.libsyn.com/) while painting the latest batches of
figures, and find it works very well. It is an unintrusive enough way of
keeping your mind occupied while painting, yet not intrusive enough to
distract from the painting (as TV tends to do). I think I'll be doing this
a
lot more - thanks for the suggestion Phil.

Finally, the biweekly Schild en Vriend games have been going on strong,
with
an ACW game (the Henry Hill action of [1st Bull Run](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run) ) and a Blitzkrieg
commander game (German invasion of Belgium in 1940) having featured
recently. Photos of the latter can be found [on Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157603766251744/).

That's it for now, and let's try to get some more posts up.