A Mind of Metal and Wheels: Josh has two problems...

Last Tuesday at 3:56am, my son Rohan entered this world kicking and screaming and, according to every parent willing to give their opinion, will change my life forever. This has left me with two problems.

Problem #1 - With his (hopefully) consistent 3-hour sleep/feed/poop schedule, I am left with 1-2 hour windows of time (when I'm not catching up on sleep) to kill where I can't really go off and do something.

Problem # 2 - Below is a picture of the gaming table I built during an industrious phase when my wife and I first bought our new house about a year ago. As you can see, it is a perfectly nice gaming table. Problem is, I haven't been able to actually play games on it, as I never took the time to create any gaming terrain for it.

Thus evolved the solution to both problems. Starting the weekend before my son was born, I set out to populate this gaming table with terrain. As my latest tabletop gaming obsession is Flames of War (www.flamesofwar.com), and there seems to be an abundance of Normandy gaming tables out there, I chose to take the route of making a table typical of the Eastern Front. Here are the materials I set out to use

- 1 large bag of playground sand
- 2-3 2ftx4ft sheets of 1/8in thick MDF
- 1 large container of spackle
- a half dozen wire coat hangers
- a large sheet of pink insulation foam
- a gallon of dark brown paint
- a large jug of waterproof wood glue
- 3 moulded resin russian farm houses
- 1 door mat
- 1 woodland scenics tree kit
- 1 shaker woodland scenics brown static grass flock
- 1 packet of hobby clay
- 1 package of 4 2in diameter styrofoam craft balls
- 1 spool small guage wire

Now, I made some significant progress before beginning these blog entries, so the pictures below shows that point I am currently at. I plan to go back and detail my various steps for each type of terrain piece as the project evolves.

The Table with the Goods