Nothing Gets You Painting...

...like having a game set up, ready to play, and discovering that some of your miniatures are missing.  

It all started, just before the weekend, when I had a wee bit of dental surgery.  Nothing outrageous, just enough to make your jaw throb for a few days.  Irritated and distracted by the sensation, the one thing that I knew could distract me from my constant awareness of it, is gaming.  

So I picked up my folder for my 3rd world imagi-nations campaign, took a look,  and thought, "I should be able to get at least three games in this weekend."  I figured out the sequence of the next series of battles,  hurried downstairs, set up the terrain, pulled the Mugabian forces and placed them on the table, pulled the Uwandan forces, and wait a minute...

… Where is the other half of my "company" of Sherman Fireflies?  I need 13,  I know that I painted 14 of them at one point.  I can only find seven of them. What the heck?  I snoop around, confident that they will show up shortly.  Jaw is throbbing.

After some time searching, like better than two hours, I still have only seven tanks.  The Jaw is throbbing.  In years past, my dentist would have prescribed a day of two's worth of prescription pain killers.  I've never used more than two of the buggers in the same year, but even so, because of the opioid epidemic, he no longer prescribes them.  He noted that I might feel "minor distress" as a result.

Yup.  He was right.  I have indeed been visited by "minor distress".

And...

… My tanks are gone.  Just gone.  

Got no clue where they could be.  A couple of years ago, I discovered that all of my 15mm Panzer Is and variants were missing.  The last time that I could remember seeing them was at a convention a few years before, where I ran a France 1940 game.  The drawer was there in my wooden storage box, but mostly empty.  It had some Pz IIs, but no Pz1s, PzJg 1, Befehls-boxes, et cetera, maybe 22-25 vehicles were missing.  It would be hard to have left them there accidentally. They had a drawer in a wooden storage box that I built for my vehicles; so it wasn't a matter of leaving a plastic box on a chair or under a table.  And besides, I didn't use all of them in the game, so some never left the storage drawer.  To leave them, I would have had to pack up everything, and left two dozen tanks setting on an empty event table.  I hate to think that someone walked off with them, but unless my house has a ghost with a thing for German light tanks, I don't know what could have happened to them.  Guess those Pz1s are in trouble now, as the ghost has some Fireflies that will rip them a new one.

Well, I just happen to have seven more castings, assembled, but unpainted, setting in the hopper.  So I got the dudes out, chased down my painting notes from a hundred years ago, and started painting.  they just get a basic paint job with a touch of weathering.  But we had a ton of rain the other day, which means that the basement, no... cellar, we have a cellar, ancient (by American standards) stone walls, kind of dungeon-like; the cellar is damp.  Even with the dehumidifier running, the humidity will just not go away.

So, I thought, I'll slap a first coat on them, and play out one of the dogfights occurring in association with one of the other land battles.  Umm, wait.  I have that game already set up; the fight for Objective B29.  Crap!  Nowhere to play.  

Well, how long can it take to do a basic paint job?  I'm now on day three, and may not finish them in time to play the first game of the weekend, this weekend.  I just did the final touch up of the basic hull color, still wet after 45 minutes.  Not used to this.  

So, here I am, with an entire weekend (actually, three days) actually free, to do nothing but game, and instead, I am watching paint dry, and too distracted to paint other stuff to pass the time.

Did I mention that my jaw hurts?