Disappointments and new doors

I was all excited about getting the new house in time for the new baby, but it seems that something else was in store for me. My wife ended up losing her job, mostly because it just wasn't a good fit for her. This shot the house deal in the head, so we're going to be staying in our condo for a while to come.

On the surface this should be terrible, but I've been at peace with it. This gives my wife the opportunity to find a job for which she is better suited, and frees up all of the money we had slated for the house for more investments. That may end up with us having a much larger down payment available for the summer, so perhaps it is not all for ill on the housing front.

The down side of this is that without knowing that our housing situation will change, we need to get our little condo ready for a baby. This will likely preclude me from bringing all of my gaming stuff back into the condo for the foreseeable future. I'll be getting enough LOTR stuff back into the house for the Necro in July and continuing to work on Trafalgar, but that's going to be it.

Finally, spring break is wrapping up for me, and I'm finally getting over this cold/flu that struck me down last week. Thus the long delay in actually getting something done with Trafalgar despite not moving. Sigh... why did I have to be sick over a holiday?

HMS Guerriere done without rigging

Finally finished working on the Guerriere, with the exception of the rigging. I really should have done some of that before I based it, but I got impatient. I'll try to do that once I've primed the other three ships I've constructed.



The most interesting aspect of all of this was the base. I was kind of torn on this one - the directions in the Trafalgar book give a method that produces a very blue ocean, like what I'd associate with the Pacific or the Mediterranean. I wanted an Atlantic color, though, which would be more grey. So I went with a thinned basecoat of Adeptus Battlegrey over a black primer, followed by an overbrush of Fenris Grey, and finally a light drybrush of Space Wolf Grey over the peaks and around the area the hull would go. I may try white instead of the SW Grey next time, but overall I like the effect much better than the rich blue that the rule book uses.





I also finally got the other three ships built and ready to prime. I'm going to do the US ships with a black primer and the other British ship, along with the sails, in white. I'm trying to leave the masts in the British ship, while putting the other masts into a Starbucks' cup sleeve (putting the masts into the corrugation) for priming.

I also learned an important lesson in construction of these ships - build them one at a time, and don't do it when you're distracted. The masts and sails are just too similar to each other - I ended up putting the wrong sails on masts something like four times while building the USS Essex and my British sloop, and when I finally finished I found I had actually SWAPPED MASTS, and trimmed the mast to fit already. Well, crap. Fortunately, they don't look TOO crazy off, since it is going from a ship-sloop rig to a small frigate rig. But from now on I build one ship at a time, no more.