Have you ever found long forgotten cash in a pants pocket?

They really ARE finished now, honest! Here is that final company of Huzzah Prussian musketeers -- painted as Wurtemburg's Garde zu Fuss -- as their first coat of Future/Klear acrylic floor finish dries. Next on the painting block, twelve Garrison Prussian artillery crew and a mounted officer just off camera to the right here. A few odd RSM and Minden figures loiter in the background.

Well, then, you'll appreciate my surprise a little while ago as I was rooting around through a drawer here in the bedroom, looking for a long forgotten and misplaced giftcard when I decided to check my leather passport wallet. Among scads of unspent Mexican pesos and some euros (Sigh. Wish they were old German Marks), I discovered $80 US!

This has obviously been in the wallet since our trip to Germany during the summer of '09 before Young Master Paul arrived. This is far better than discovering $5 in my jeans pocket a few times as a teenager when I began doing my own laundry. At any rate, the newly (re-)discovered money will go directly into the warchest here at the Grand Duchy of Stollen to replace a few bottles of dried up paint and/or purchase some additional figures at an undetermined point in the future. Almost like winning a lottery, huh?

On other fronts, I FINALLY finished those last 16 Huzzah Prussian musketeers late yesterday afternoon. Two coats of Future/Klear acrylic floor finish after dinner this evening, and tally ho! Then, it's onto the 13 garrison artillery crew, all prepared with two coats of black acrylic gesso basecoat and affixed to their temporary painting bases (that is, plastic bottle caps), which I'll be painting more or less as Schaumburg-Lippe-Buekeburg crew in light blue coats and breeches with black facings and white vests. I might have time to paint the figure bases green and apply the flesh to faces this evening. We'll see how that pans out. Look for a photo or two of the entire Huzzah unit here shortly, as soon as I take a couple.

Next, I have stumbled recently onto a few blogs and websites that some of you Stollen regulars might find interesting. First is Wargaming for Grown-ups, which focuses on combining wargaming aspirations with the pressures and commitments of real life, something most of us can relate to in one way or another. The blog is entertaining, engaging and, to be perfectly frank, unusually well-written.

Another blog you'll want to check out is called Wargaming Amateur. This particular blog has a fairly broad focus, including a recent SYW-era battle, The Battle of Otterlitz, a refight of Austerlitz but in a mid-18th Century setting. The precise scenario comes from a recent issue of Phil Olley's Classic Wargaming Journal.

A dangerously enticing website comes to us from Schreiber-Bogen Kartonmodellbau. This is a German company that produces wonderful card buildings and other structures that will work nicely on the tabletop with 15, 20, 25, or even 30mm figures. You can see just how nicely these "buildings" might fit in with your own set-up by visiting Pauly Wauly's Wargames Blog. The Schreiber-Bogen half-timbered, southern German structures are really tiny works of art. So too are some of the North German townhouses. If I didn't enjoy making my own structures as much, I'd order a bunch of the latter right now to go onto the table here in Zum Stollenkeller.

And finally, for those of you with more than a passing interest in 18th Century clothing and fashions, there is The Costumer's Manifesto, which features all kinds of information on what people (the middle and upper classes at least) wore between 1700-1799. Very easy to waste an hour or two, clicking and reading happily through this particular website. But I figure, if we're going to waste time (time that might be better spent reading, painting, and gaming) online -- an activity that risks becoming as time-sucking as TV once was for me -- we might as well waste it looking at interesting stuff. . . Until later then!