"Well, happy day after!"

This post-Christmas illustration reflects how many of us must feel today.

The title of this post is something my maternal grandfather always said as he stirred his scotch and water with an index finger and flicked the moisture from it into the kitchen sink, and I always think of that and smile on the day after Christmas. Happy Boxing Day in any case!

I hope everyone on had an enjoyable day yesterday filled with family, friends, good food, and the odd wargamerly gift. Things here at Stollen Central were a bit trying to say the least. We spent Christmas night in the emergency room of our local hospital after the Grand Duchess slipped and fell down the steps to the basement, with scissors in her hand no less, hitting her head on the way down. She is fine now except for several nasty bruises and a big bump on the back of her head, but the visit required a cat scan and waiting around in a treatment room while they doctors and nurses asked her lots of head injury specific questions and observed her carefully. We finally made it back home at about 9pm. Let's just say it was not the most carefree, cheerful way to spend Christmas.

Sigh. We haven't had much luck the last couple of years. Last Christmas Eve, in 2008, we applied some spray insulation around our basement windows, and the vapors from that caused yours truly to break out in hives all over. That too required a visit to the emergency room, an inoculation, and sitting around a treatment room for about 3.5 hours while the doctor and nurse checked on me periodically. It was after midnight by the time we returned home. Groan. It's almost enough to make one consider spending Christmas somewhere else next year. :-(

But today will hopefully be a bit calmer, and we'll have Christmas dinner this evening. We have about two inches of new snow on the ground -- it has actually drifted quietly to the ground all day and into the late afternoon -- so it's nice and bright looking after all of our torrential rain on Christmas Eve in this part of Illinois. It's been a quiet and cozy Saturday here at Stollen Central, and life is good. I might even be able to squeeze in a little soldier painting time at some point this afternoon. Keep your fingers and toes crossed! And I've told the Grand Duchess not to run up and down the stairs anymore because Young Master Paul and I love her and need her here.

On a slightly more positive note, the used copy of John Mollo's Uniforms of the Seven Years War 1756-63 (1977) that I ordered before Christmas, as a gift to myself, arrived in the mail earlier this afternoon. And what an amazing little book it is! Lots of wonderful illustrations and considerable text should provide colorful inspiration for years to come where the painting and modeling of imaginary mid-18th century tabletop troops are concerned. You know, a bit of this and a bit of that, combined to create a whimsical though plausible uniform of my own devising. Parenthetically, the price for a copy in very good condition was astoundingly reasonable. About a week before Christmas, I did an Amazon search for the title on a whim, not expecting to find anything I could justify or afford. But sometimes you just never know what might turn up!

And what of wargamerly Christmas gifts? Well, the Grand Duchess has hinted that some additional reading material, which I might enjoy, is on the way from somewhere, a wee bit late, but on the way nevertheless. And her parents sent a check which will fatten the Grand Duchy of Stollen war chest nicely at some point in the future. In other words, I'll squirrel the funds away until such time as my remaining stock of RSM, Garisson, Holger Erikkson, and Huzzah miniatures have been painted.

In all honesty, that will be a true test of patience because Rich at the Dayton Painting Consortium produces a very pretty Hungarian Pandour figure in a shako and braided dolman/pelisse combination, firing his musket, which is very, very tempting. He sent me a sample earlier this month. And who among us doesn't need a unit or two of Pandours in his or her army? In addition, there are some really nice French heavy cavalry in bearskins that DPC also produces. Then there is that Hinchliffe bridge and pontoon set, of course, that Hinds Models produces now. Oh, it's almost to much to think about, yet it's fun to daydream about the possibilities at the same time. And I guess that is part of the child-like wonder of this time of year.