Hoarding or horde-ing?

I was feeling ansty yesterday. My kid had wrecked the place. The living room looked like a Thomas the Tank Engine graveyard, intermingled with crayola crayons, pieces of chalk, balls and magnetic letters from the fridge. It was driving me nuts. We only have a small place, so a small mess looks like a hurricane blew through. Obviously, there is no point tidiying up when you have a 2 year old, as it’ll be thrown about the floor again in less than 5 minutes. We do all that after he’s gone to bed. Thats when the veil of calm descends 🙂 So, as I couldn’t clean up his mess, I felt I should really do something.

So, I went to my closet. Actually, i’ll correct myself, the ‘area I store my figures and hobby stuff, along with the coats, hoodies and other crap we can’t find a home for’. For a while now, it has looked a little like a GW independent stockists back stock. So, I dutifully used my little step ladder thingy to get up to all the stuff stacked on the top shelf. I went through all the boxes, pulling out sprues with odd bits and bobs on, throwing out boxes, empty FW bags, instruction booklets on how to assemble your cadians/rhinos/Land Raiders, devastators etc etc, and any other crap that I didn’t need. My plan is to condense all the sprue bits by cutting them off the sprues and bagging them up for easier storage. I’ll get to that this week hopefully. So, I restacked everything and stood back and looked at my handiwork:

It was then that it occurred to me that it didn’t look like I had actually done anything at all. This image belies the fact that I threw out an entire 13 gallon garbage bag full of stuff. Yikes. I want to get some better shelves in here. The ones I have were a temporary measure to give me somewhere to stash my minis. I also have 2 mini cases full of minis, that you can’t see here, plus the various foam trays you can see in the picture which also have stuff in them.

So, it made me think about all the stuff I have. I have plans for all of it, but it really made me think about the practicality and the time it’s going to take to get it all done. It seems to be a well known trait amongst gamers with having several armies and not one of them being fully painted, unless, however, you are my buddy Colin, whom I am convinced has elves and faeries that come out at night and help him paint all his stuff. Anyway, I digress. I look at what I have, and I often think, ‘should I get rid of a bunch’, in an effort to bring it under control, but I dearly enjoy all the stuff I have. I recently started revolving the armies for painting, to keep morale up and also to try and get more done and keep interest going. Maybe its because there is so much cool stuff that gets released, or is pending that it creates that ‘must have’ mentality. Before you know it, you have yet another army patiently waiting for a coat of paint. I will admit that a few times I have been eyeballing the new Blood Angels, but have thus far been successful in ignoring the ‘phwaaaooor! thats AWESOME’ feeling I get when seeing them. I never was one for getting in on the current trend, so I won’t be getting my IPhone Blood Angels. I’ll stick with my Bellbottom jeans Sisters haha!

PS yes, that is a signed Bolt Thower picture on the wall.

TTFN!

Paul