I finished up another brigade and mounted it as well as a finishing a bunch more rocks and a random 25mm figure that caught my eye out of a box o' lead, but all I accomplished today was prep work for the next two brigades. I have a brigade pack of Union troops in hats that I broke open. The figures appear a bit taller and slender than the figures with kepi's with blanket wraps I've been painting. Also, you have to glue on the backpacks.... So I spent the Seahawk game removing flashing, filing the fill mark off the bases and gluing on backpacks. The regimental package has enough figures for two brigades, and 3 sprues of 9 backpacks each. Since four of the figures are standard bearers, a drummer and an officer, that leaves 7 spare backpacks. So I cut some 1/2 inch square bases and made a couple of piles of backpacks to mark stationary units. There will be more spare backpacks....
I spent the Indianapolis game ransacking the house for the package of labels I had put somewhere for safekeeping so I could relabel all the manila folders in my filing system in the new filing cabinet I bought six months ago to hold my bill files which have been in a heap since we moved into this house. I finally found them and filed the heap.
By then the glue holding the first brigade, the personality figures and the mounted officer to their paint sticks had set. So I primered them and they are ready to paint, but that's as far as I got, 'cause I fired up my Linux laptop to write this post while I watched Sunday Night Football (Eli != Peyton) and couldn't get it to talk to the network, wired or wireless it wouldn't pull an IP address from the DHCP server. Fiddled with it the entire game, then gave up and went back to my main box (which uses my HDTV for a monitor) after the game which also didn't want to connect to my wireless network until I rebooted the router. I'm thinkin' I may have to break down and secure my router, which is lazy man configured.
I've accumulated quite a number of nice rockpiles and some hasty fortifications. I got some stuff to repair my tree collection which has lost a lot of foliage, too. I think I'll dig the camera out soon and put out a terrain display, I like my rocks....
The whole family has been passing a cold around, it seems to have hit Jen the hardest, Kimberlyn bounced back fastest and I can't seem to shake the low grade problem I have....
Guess I'll just have to work in misery 'til it goes away.
My wife insists I am the oldest 14 year old in the world. My chronological age is considerably in excess of that. She also says she has three children, the one she married and the two she bore. I was 35 when we married, my oldest (a daughter) is 14. You can approximate my age if you want to do the math (Eeep!!! She's even older now), but it won't be right.... ;o) If you wonder how the political stuff fits, my formative political experiences were when I was, you guessed it, fourteen.
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2 comments:
Sorry to hear that you and your family are not feeling well.
By your definition of last week this weeks Seahawk's game was super exciting right? Close game...no real score...right? right?
As for coming down for RadCon I haven't decided yet. It will depend on my schedule and what the pass is doing.
I continue to believe that absent a War or Revolution that it was unlikely that the South would have voluntarily given up slavery. Human beings are resistant to change, even if that change could be one for the better.
For example, Slavery was a very inefficient system, but so are the farming techniques that we employ today. I think that it is no small coincidence that farm workers are exempt from the wage and hours laws, the NLRA, and all other laws which exist to protect workers. I think that farm lobby did (and continues to do) a great job protecting an inefficient system which can only exist in its present state by exploiting workers. If farmers had to comply with the minimum wage rules then many of them would be driven out of business, and only those who could adapt or invent new more productive technology would survive.
I think that the Slave-owners of the South would have put up the same kinds of fights and attempted to protect what they had rather than be willing to be open to new ideas. Not all of them, but the vast majority.
This week's Seahawks game was more exciting that last weeks, but please recall my basic thesis, football is boring and easy to ignore.... ;o)
Turtledove operates on the thesis in both Guns of the South and in How Few Remain that there would be internal political pressure to free the slaves as well as powerful external political pressures. How Few Remain has the war.
There are certainly powerful reactionary conservative pressures that would act to maintain the peculiar institution. And, of course, look at how long it took for international opprubrium (and sanctions) to bring an end to apartheid. But I would stand by Turtledove's thesis that President Lee would favor freeing the slaves.... and probably be the only guy who could be president of the Confederate states and hold such a viewpoint. Remember, only Nixon could go to China. ;o)
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