For whom does the bell toll?

I've been carefully cutting out pieces of heavy cardboard, making mistakes, and trying again the past couple of days. The goal? To produce something that looks like the Lubeck Rathaus, or part of it, at the far right in the photograph above. One of the tricks is getting the five little vertical feaux-towers right. Another is keeping the "footprint" of the building small, so it does not take up too much room on the tabletop. I'm thinking about 3 1/2" by 2".

Well, for me. Kind of. Summer vacation is sadly OVER, and my first class of the fall term is in a little less than three hours at 9am. On the bright side, I have a new pair of shiny black tassled loafers (I know, I know) to put on with a newly cleaned and pressed suit, so it's not all bad I suppose. ;-) And it's a film class, so I'll get to talk about movies in very general terms this morning before we get down to real business on Wednesday.

It has been a wonderful summer, but not as much painting as I'd hoped or intended. Still, there were a couple of tabletop games (and another is in the making) and lots of time with the Grand Duchess and Young Master Paul (ten months old in a few days), so I suppose that's a reasonable trade-off. The painting gears are, however, clanking slowly back into motion here at Stollen Central, I've been writing some wargaming-related stuff, and experimenting with reproducing in miniature one or two delightfully Gothic buildings from the North German Free Hanseatic City of Lubeck. I thought that another couple of official looking structures, built along Grantian lines (i.e., a lift-off shell with balsa ruins that can be occupied by half a company of infantry), might be a good thing to have on the table.

Other developments? Ah, yes. Clive over at the Vintage Wargaming blog has asked me to mention this for him. Seems he has a large number of the plastic 1/72 Revell Seven Years War Austrians and Prussians that he'd like to sell off. If any of you Stollen regulars or irregulars are interested, please contact him via his blog at: Vintage Wargaming.

Finally, I won't be posting to the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog quite as often in the coming weeks and months since it occurred to me mid-summer that endless blathering, errrr, blogging can easily interfere with painting and gaming, and there are only so many hours in a day. So, I have decided to restrict myself to a single post a week -- Ok, maybe two if there is a lot happening -- and get on with the painting since completion of my initial Sittangbad-size forces is within sight (just a few more units). So, stay tuned, and I'll see you in week's time!