Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Every Wednesday at noon The Comicshop has a “paint to play” workshop where Ryan sets up a table and people can glue and paint their gaming miniatures. Normally this time coincides with my weekly bike out to UBC where I volunteer, reading text books out loud into the computer for blind students, but I took this week and all of December off of that for a number of reasons (mostly because people who lose their sight probably deserve it but also so I can catch up on my comic book drawing). Geisel and I have been conspiring to get together to paint minis for months so we finally took this opportunity to go down there and get some work done.

And I gotta say, I must stop buying miniatures that don’t come fully assembled - no matter how cool they look - because I am ass at gluing minis together. There are certain minis that I just don’t think are ever going to see play on the battlemat, unless I need a quadriplegic ranger for some reason.

But I’ve been getting a lot of ‘dungeon decor’ lately - beds, tables, bookshelves, etc, which are really nice to be able to put on the battlemat for some set dressing, if you will.

Characters that stand out in a crowd but who are clearly not demons or 30th level paladins are a bit harder to find. The standard fare for ‘townsfolk‘ are usually the bartender and the barmaid or perhaps some kind of damsel. In my current Freeport campaign the town is 99% human and it’s hard to find run-of-the-mill citizens that aren’t brandishing a dagger. They should put a set of figures out that include:

The town guard (not hard to adapt from a typical mercenary fig, actually)
Two kids (one trying to sell you a melon?) & their portly mum
The street sweeper
The beekeeper
The courier
The rickshaw driver
The village idiot
The blacksmith
The beggar/the busker/the opium addict
The prostitute
The sage/preacher (not hard to adapt from a cleric if he’s not brandishing a mace)
The noble
The prisoner/slave
The town crier
The barber-surgeon
The merchant of…baskets? Fruit?

I did get these baggage yaks and started painting them today. What’s more exciting than three yaks? Not four yaks, that’s just silly.

It’s both happy and sad that The Comicshop is right next to The Candy Aisle as I couldn’t resist getting some licorice treats, as well as some candy coated peanuts and candy corn. Just a small sampling, luckily.

Things I’m most looking forward to eating when the deal is done:

Falafully Good!
plate of nachos with lots of guacamole, refried beans and olives
a big bag of candy from The Candy Aisle
pizza with feta, sundried tomato & kalamata olives
Scottish eccles cake and a florentine from Max’s Deli
The Naam’s sesame fries with miso gravy and some hot apple crisp at 1 in the morning.
Kettle Chips cheddar beer flava
Timmy Ho’s sour cream donut
DQ cappuccino Skor blizzard or Ben & Jerry’s Vermonty Python (ps - did you know that there’s a B&J shop in Coquitlam?)
butter chicken (buffet at New India restaurant) and gulab jamun

Earlier today: Picked out the tiniest whitish potatoes that I could find. Some are no bigger in diameter than a dollar coin. I also picked up a white onion (I’ve tried red and uh…regular brown so it’s time for the white) and a couple of thin yams. I put those all in the bottom. A can of spinach on top of that, and a can of carrots and a can of peas, but I drained both those last two and put their water into a bowl with a chicken boullion cube and microwaved it for 2 minutes. While that was happening I dusted the stuff in the crock with a heaping tablespoon of curry powder. I also put in four grape tomatoes for uh…garnish? The hot chicken broth I cooled with a dash of skim milk and into that I put a heaping tablespoon of curry powder, mixed it up and poured it over everything. Then I realized I forgot the small banana, so I chopped that over the pile. Then I put on three chicken breasts and put almost a bulb of garlic on top with the cloves or half-cloves equidistantly spread. Another heaping tbsp of curry powder, a pinch of ginger powder and the bounty was overflowing so I had to squish it down to put the lid on.

Just now: I don’t know what exactly my expectations were for the slow cooker, but they haven’t been met. I’d say I’m about 60% satisfied with the results so far - the smell during cooking is always better than the taste for some reason. Still got a few more experiments to try before I give up on it, though, such as:

pumpkin pie spice & orange
acorn squash & nutmeg
corn & black beans
and when I get off my diet, stuffing & swiss cheese.

All with chicken breasts, of course.

Day 19: apple 100 granoli 110 miscellaneous bits while I prepared my crockery (peas, banana, tomatoes etc) 50 popsicle 25 orange 100 fudgsicle 70 crockery 250 = 800