How's this for a Box o' Bits? Available from most any home improvement or do-it-yourself store, it's a great way to consolidate all of those left over figures, bits, and pieces of stuff that wargamers and figure painters accumulate over the years.
Sounds like one of those 1960s Eurospy James Bond knock-offs, doesn't it? On the mend here, and as such, I was sent on an errand by the Grand Duchess yesterday evening to our local Lowe's home improvement and do-it-yourself store. What do you think caught my eye as I walked down the nail and screw aisle after finding what I had been sent for? Yep, you guessed it. A stack of those plastic organizer boxes for nails, screws, nuts, and bolts. Also ideal for all of bits, bobs, and pieces of stuff we wargamers acquire and hang onto for some eventual use.
Long displeased with my various boxes of bits here in Zum Stollenkeller, I've had a vague idea floating around in the back of my mind for that the situation would need to be addressed at some point. So, as I ambled down the nail and screw aisle at Lowe's yesterday evening in my over-the-counter cold medication induced fog, it was almost like a bolt from the blue struck me when I happened upon the stack of boxes like the one shown above. At reduced prices even.
"This is it!" I shrieked to no one in particular, save the slightly shocked looks of passers-by. Playing the Mondo Dismo card to the hilt, I grabbed one of the plastic organizers from the shelf and limped through the throngs of evening shoppers toward the check-out counter like Chakka the monkey boy in those old Sid and Marty Kroft Land of the Lost episodes on Saturday mornings, answering those oft imagined voices and swearing audibly at them. If people are going to stare, let's give 'em a real show.
My approach to clearing a path through the crowded Lowe's worked like a charm. Good thing too since the only way to step it up a notch would have been public evacuation, and that would have meant police involvement and future banishment from the store. Fortunately, people parted like the Red Sea before me as I lurched toward them, wide-eyed, red-nosed, grumbling to myself, and drooling with a visible slick of mucus on my upper lip. When some poor woman with a furrowed brow said in a hushed scream to her small son, "Timmy? Timmy! Hurry! Don't look! Come to Mommy and run away from the bad man!" I knew nothing could stop me from reaching the check-out counter before everyone else.
Safely home, I retreated to the confines of my underground lair, also know as Zum Stollenkeller, following supper. Turns out that I had more "stuff" floating around here in one of several receptacles than I thought. But the organizer works very well for holding all of those extra odd drummers, artillery tools and buckets, wheels, barrels, and the like. I ought to head back over to Lowe's tomorrow or the next day and pick up another, since this one is almost full.
Now, none of this may be news to most of you GD of S visitors, but it's a windfall to me. And it helps consolidate everything nicely. I'm now down to the above box o' bits and seven largish, plastic pencil boxes that contain the small pile of lead and plastic -- mostly RSM95 Prussian musketeers, dragoons, and hussars along with a regiment of vintage plastic Spencer Smith charging dragoons, officers, and a couple of metal Holger Eriksson figures (standard bearer and trumpeter). Short of ordering some wheels and draft horses with riders from the Dayton Painting Consortium later this year for the planned baggage and pontoon train, I think there's enough here to keep me busy for a while.
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-- Allan