The Grand Duchy of Stollen

'Liebster' means, in German, something like 'favorite' in translation. A ctually, it's a 'Liebster' award rather than 'Liebhaber,' which has an altogether different set of connotations!  Just a bit of delusional orthographic tomfoolery here this morning.  ;-) Anyway, thanks to Neil, the man behind the blog Toy Soldiers and Dining Room Battles , and Peter at The Singlehanded Admiral blog for nominating the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog to join the growing ranks of fellow Liebters out there in Internetlandia.  The rules of the Leibster Blog Award are as follows:   1. Copy and paste the award on your blog linking it to the blogger who has given it to you.  Done (see above)! 2. Pass the award to your top 5 favorite blogs with fewer than 200 followers by leaving a comment on one of their posts to notify them that they have won the award and listing them on your own blog. 3. Sit back and bask in that warm fuzzy feeling that comes with knowi...

  The slightly smaller, new War Room here at Stollen Central. A long, lazy, and relaxed Thanksgiving Weekend here in the Grand Duchy of Stollen.  However, I did get busy for an hour or so late yesterday afternoon and moved the wargaming table from the central room of the basement into the SW corner room at the front of the house, just beneath our library on the ground floor.  This room can be closed off to those devilish felines Gunnlaug and her brother Onyx without difficulty, and I might just install a proper door and threshold in the new year. Here's a second shot of the paneled and carpeted room. A pleasant surprise was the fact that it will not be as much of a tight squeeze maneuvering around a 6'x8' table in this room as I had anticipated.  It's a bit hard to tell from the photographs, but there are at least two feet of clearance on either side of the table, and three or more feet of clearance at the near end of the table in the foreground above....

The noble turkey, which Benjamin Franklin wanted to see made the national bird, sadly gets the short end of the stick on the fourth Thursday in November each year in the United States.  Gobble, gobble! A quiet, relaxed day here at Stollen Central for the Grand Duchess, Young Master Paul, and yours truly.  The turkey goes into the oven in a little while, and most everything else is ready to be warmed/cooked later this afternoon.  The table is ready for setting, and we all have fancy clothes laid out to dress for a 5:30pm supper here at home.  Today, all is right with our little world. Meanwhile, down here in Zum Stollenkeller , I am snatching a few minutes to myself to continue work on cutting and sanding the edges of various 3/32" thick bass bass wood bases in irregular shapes for those command vignettes I've been dabbling with the last week or so.  A not unpleasant task given that each base will be chock-a-block with various Minden, RSM, and Fife & D...

  Here is one photograph that shows some of the recently arrived figures mixed in along with others that were already residing in the relatively modest pile of lead here at Stollen Central. A small package, from Minden Miniatures in Great Britain, arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon!  It contained only a few things, but exciting, interesting, fun things nevertheless.  For example, a few extra Croats that are necessary to finish off a third company to go with those I painted last summer, a couple of mounted officers (Austrian and Hungarian) as well as Austrian and Prussian staffs on foot.  Last of all, the recently released set of two mounted gentlemen and two mounted ladies, riding side-saddle.  A few more useful figures -- call them a middle-of-the-night afterthought -- are currently on their way from Minden, which will be mixed in with these on their arrival. This latest bunch of figures is a late birthday gift to myself -- or maybe an early Chris...

On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front.  Let's pause for a moment today to recall that actual war is a frightful thing in which people die , and even among survivors, lives and psyches irrevocably altered. T his morning, my thoughts turn to my maternal grandfather and his two older brothers, my great uncles, all of whom served in the Armed Forces of the United States during the Second World War.  All three came home, but all three had seen and endured some extremely unpleasant things.   Very little of this was ever talked about by the time I was old enough to ask questions and remember things, but my grandfather Dave was close by when a friend and fellow paratrooper was killed in France.  Uncle Baxter's ship was torpedoed and sunk in the South Pacific.  I seem to remember him saying something once about the sharks circling the survivors who clung to wreckage and improvise...

Austrian staff on foot by Minden Miniatures (photo 'borrowed' from the Minden Miniatures blog). A very quiet birthday yesterday, celebrated with the Grand Duchess and the Young Master (who is now a devotee of all things chocolate)  over a delicious Indian meal that I picked up and brought home for us early in the evening from one of our local Indian restaurants (we are very fortunate to have three within just a few miles of us).  A chocolate cake with a few candles followed that was baked by my wife, with "help" from our son, and then some cards and a few nice gifts, including a recent finger painting by the Young Master and a bottle of Glenmorangie single highland malt whisky from the Grand Duchess.  Oh, and on the miniature soldier front, I placed a small order to Minden Miniatures late yesterday afternoon for Austrian and Prussian staffs on foot plus some more Croat grenzers and a couple of other odds and ends to fill out a few things in the collection her...

Desert island wargaming wishes, anyone? T he Grand Duchess is away at another conference this weekend, in our old stomping grounds -- the delightful Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota -- darn her, so it is just the Young Master Paul and me plus the cats at home.  A nice quiet, chilly and wet November day outside.  My favorite kind of weather.  So, while the Young Master plays with his cars and trucks just overhead on the first floor, I have stolen away down here to Zum Stollenkeller for a hobby little thinking and writing on the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog. Speaking of cats, those dastardly beasts Gunnlaug and her brother Onyx (much as we love them) have recently discovered that they can jump up onto table surfaces.  And where do you think they went first?  Yep, the wargaming table here in the basement not terribly far from where their litter tray resides.  And they laid waste to the Neu Sittangbad game that has been unfolding very gradually since las...