As a serial hobbyist, I regularly find new hobbies that catch my interest, so the hobbies that I am spending my time on in any given month could be quite different from the previous month
Miniature painting – A month or so ago I got in a new order of 6mm miniatures for my ancients wargaming, and I’ve been slowly getting them painted since then. So far I’ve finished 2 units of German warriors, 1 unit of Roman legionaries, and 5 units of Parthian cataphracts. I’m currently painting 9 units of Parthian horse archers, though I ran out of muddy brown color paint after painting the ground for only 3 units’ worth of miniatures, so I’ll have to get more of that to finish the rest of them.
De Bellis Antiquitatis – This is my main miniatures wargame of choice, and therefore is the reason that I’m painting these miniatures. So sometimes when I don’t feel like painting, I’ll just pull out my existing miniatures and pit my two armies against each other for an hour.
The Lord of the Rings Online – My current PC game of choice. I recently purchased the Helm’s Deep expansion (covering western Rohan), since I was nearly done with the Riders of Rohan expansion (covering eastern Rohan). Since then I finished Riders of Rohan and am in the middle of the first area of western Rohan.
Bass guitar practice – I recently got a new bass guitar, after using my cheap beginner bass guitar for the last two years. My new bass is in the “good quality beginner” level – an Ibanez SR300E in Black Planet Matte Color. I like it a lot, and I’ve been practicing with it a fair bit since I got it a month or so ago.
Archery – I have an inexpensive beginner recurve bow and a little foam target that I shoot at in my backyard when the weather is nice. It’s a lot of fun, and now I’ve done it enough that I want a new bow, one with a bit higher draw weight (my current one is 20 lbs. and I’m thinking of getting a 30 lb bow). I’m considering either a Samick Sage recurve bow, or an Alibow Mongol Asiatic bow.
Reading – My main reading recently has been split between Battletech short story anthologies and issues of Ancient Warfare Magazine. The thing I’ve noticed about my interest in history is how interconnected things are. Painting my Parthian army has led me to study more about the Parthian empire, and by extension about other nearby kingdoms and peoples, such as the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the nomadic horse archers of the central Asian steppe. That in turn got me interested in horse archery (which I’ll probably never get into because I don’t own a horse and likely never will), which has influenced my choice of the next bow to get, as well as my practicing a thumb draw for archery in addition to the Mediterranean draw I’ve been using up to now. Then after learning about all that, I went to a couple of back issues of Ancient Warfare Magazine to look for reference artwork for painting my Parthians, and found several articles with topics related to central Asia and its peoples, which I found far more interesting this time than I originally did when I first read through those issues. Who knows where my studies in history will take me next!
Transmuter's Tower 