The Young Master checking out several of the two dozen Zvezda trees we assembled yesterday afternoon. This was the first time he really and truly assisted with something wargaming-related. It took us about 90 minutes and was fun despite the tedium of sorting through everything.
But the leaves on the trees. Or pine needles as the case may be. Yesterday was a rainy day, so the Young Master, who finished school last week and is now into his summer vacation, spent most of the day hanging around with me in Zum Stollenkeller Mk II here at Totleigh-in-the-Wold doing one thing and another. We began by playing with a large cardboard wardrobe box, which functioned as a rocket, an anthill, then a skyscraper. Without slowing down, YMP next moved to playing with his large collection of plastic dinosaurs, Legos, and then Matchbox cars. All of the great things that six-year-old boys do in fact. A full lunch with Dad at the dining table was in there somewhere, and YMP enjoyed everything and was extremely polite at the table, which isn't always the case although we try. Oh, Lord, how we try.
But back to our time together in my basement den. At one point, the Young Master spotted a plastic bag of Zvezda pine tree parts idling on my painting desk and asked to see them. Well, before we knew it, we were both up to our elbows with sorting these into piles of different sized tree layers and trunks before we next started to assemble them into coherent trees.
Longtime visitors to the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog might recall that I purchased two packages of these Zvezda evergreen trees years ago, way back in the winter of 2007 I think. A few of them have featured in some of the games and photo shoots I've staged for the blog over the years, but I never managed to get around to assembling all 24 trees.
Well, the years went by and everything was tossed into a plastic bag at some point where all of the pieces became hopelessly mixed up as the trees came apart. So, this time, I got smart. Once the Young Master and I sorted everything and assembled the trees, I returned last night late, well after his bedtime, with some Crazy Glue gel and cemented them together. Amazingly, I managed to accomplish everything without cementing my eyelashes or anything else together.
This evening, I'll glue the foliage to the trunks, and Robert is your mother's brother. The finished trees will be sprinkled in among the deciduous cake decoration trees already attached to those great laser-cut plywood Litko terrain bases that I painted several days ago. I've also got a few small bases left that will have only evergreens attached to them to place on higher levels of hills, to approximate wooded ridges for instance, which are the next part of my pledge for The Great Terrain Challenge of June 2016.
-- Stokes
And then the inflatable solar system arrived in the mail this Friday afternoon. That's the Young Master's friend, the intrepid Lieutenant Bee in her space-going Lego helicopter.
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Bill