je ne parle pas francais

So then the Pixie came out to New Zealand.  We got drunk, played mini golf and romped around a spooky/lame/awesome maze.

We got back in time for Christmas, and made friends with my new niece Abigail.  She is tiny, and her special skills mostly involve drooling and pooping.

Three months passed by where I managed to not completely lose my mind in an intense work placement, I went to a bunch of gigs, and I painted a load of toy soldiers.  None of which I took photos of.

I now find myself to be, to a considerable extent, in France.  Wine and cheese are plentiful.  Everything else is a bit meh.

In my time here I have managed to see the mighty Godflesh, and also paint a bunch of grotz.

Grotz are ace because the only thing they are really good at is dying in huge numbers; so you only feel jipped if they don't die in droves.  And even then they usually survive whilst lurking about near some kind of strategically important hill or spooky ruin or magic barrel of stuff or something, thereby winning the day for any other greenskins that have not yet been exploded by space communists or future nazis or electro wizards or whatever.

This hopeless wall of cannon fodder was purchased from Target Gaming, the final solution for toy soldier excellence.

and oh, the sweetness of the air

It would be a shame to travel all the way to a country where they have regular V8 races and to not watch some V8 races; so last weekend I went to watch some V8 races.

On Saturday night I went to Woodford Glen Speedway to watch dirt track death racing with post apocalypse deathtrap cars of death.

It was sort of comparable to UK stock cars and banger racing; louder and faster (some of the modified stocks were pulling wheelies as they accelerated off the back of the final corner), but much less destructive.  Although one chap still managed to flip his Super Saloon on the back straight, messing up his car and bruising his elbow in the process.

The next day I went to Ruapuna Park to watch something slightly more civilised; V8 Supertourers, the Kiwi equivalent of Aussie V8 touring cars.  Support races took the form of Rennsport (a load of German stuff) and classic muscle car racing.

It was a pretty fun waste of a few days, and almost helped to take my mind off the fact that I was completely missing the final race of an enthralling F1 season.  Thanks, NZ telly.

I also finished painting some toys this week; a Big Mek with a kustum force field...

...and a Painboy with his grot minion.

The painboy is great for making Nobz mobz much more expensive and only slightly more survivable.  The Big Mek with his whizzy gubbinz does much the same thing but on a slightly larger scale; thereby having a mediocre effect on a much larger proportion of the army.

Sinister foreign confectionery; Whittaker's.  It's not a single type of chocolate bar - Whittaker's will happily sell you a whole range of yummy things to stuff into your stupid face.

I've chosen the Bittersweet Peanut Slab not because it is especially delicious (they're all delicious) or exotic (none of them are exotic), but because I like the black and gold packaging.  It reminds me of the JPS Lotus cars from the seventies and eighties.

hitler skelter

My temporary housemate and I decided last weekend that it might be nice to do something that didn't involve a 1000+ km round trip; so we went on a little jaunt over to Akaroa in the Banks Peninsula.

Lying around 50km to the south east of the city, the peninsula is essentially a massive crater that was created as the result of a couple of volcanic eruptions many, many years ago.  If I'm learning nothing else out here, it's that the two things New Zealand do really well are big fucking hills and badass natural disasters.

We stopped off for lunch in the Hilltop Pub.  Because I am a stupid, I only took a photo of the boring buildingy bit and neglected to capture for posterity the view from the garden, which consisted of 1) the distant shimmery wet bit of the Banks Peninsula surrounded by big craggy hills, 2) a sheep munching away at the grass just the other side of the fence, and 3) a splendid jerk chicken burger and a jug of beer to wash it down with.  There was also a surprising number of vintage motorcycles parked outside; I completely failed to capture these too.

And then on to Akaroa.  160 years ago Akaroa was a French settlement, and a lot of the people living there now are direct descendants - there were more than a few tricolores fluttering in the breeze, and lots of the streets are called Rue De something or other.  It was all terribly quaint, and with all the surrounding hills it felt like we were in the middle of a huge crater.  Because we literally were.

  

The main road around the peninsula is called Summit Road, and runs pretty much along the crest of the hills.  The best views from Summit Road were of the road itself as we drove along it; but what with the sheer drops and the lack of barriers and the fucked front shocks lending DeathCar2000's steering the kind of vagueness that really focuses a chaps mind, I thought it best not to try to take any photos en route.  I think you can Street View most of it anyway.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of other spots along the way to stop and waste more cameraphone battery, including Le Bons Bay; a nice little spot which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the frontman of Duran Duran.

The following day I would have gone to a classic motorsport shenanigan at the local raceway, but it turns out that I'm too stupid to use a calendar.  So instead we stayed at home and didn't go anywhere; which actually made for quite a pleasant change.  I used the time to finish off painting some toys...

A mob of five lootaz.  Mobz of five are great because you can fit the whole unit under a single blast template, and when they all die in one go it saves a lot of going back and forth between the table and the figure case.

Units of five; efficient.

Sinister foreign candy this week took the form of Pascall's Pineapple Lumps.

The packet proudly proclaims the contents to be "artificial flavoured" - and I can confirm this to be the case.  It was like eating dense slabs of vaguely pineappley yellow rubber.  Not the worst thing I've eaten since I got here, but that's mainly because I've eaten a Pinky and a Reel Rainbow Big Fish.

fairygodmotherlicker

Between then and now.

Eduardo Monteaz - either failed to kill us all, or (more likely) didn't bother trying.  Also didn't reveal his true identity, leaving us all to endure a thoroughly pleasant evening of eating, drinking and talking bollocks.  The bastard.

Track slag - we fitted more red bits to make it go faster.

We haven't had an opportunity to see how much faster the new springs and anti-roll bars actually make it go; but the lower ride height does make it easier to access disintegrating bits of engine, so it's still some sort of progress.

Mouses - due to Megatron's increasingly more psychotic tendancies, he and Barton went through a trial seperation.  This was followed by a very brief trial reunion, followed by a permanent separation.  Stupid mouses.

Gigs 'n' that - many.  Harvey Milk, Trash Talk, Bastions, Kylesa, Eyehategod, Baroness, Karma To Burn and countless support acts.  It's been a tinitus filled couple of months.

Toy soldiers - more orkses happened.  My stormboyz were so cripplingly bad at the doubles tournament that I decided to paint a few more.

Kommandos cost almost twice as much as normal boyz without being very much better, so they're a must.

A few extra nobz give me more options when it comes to deciding what to waste my points on.

And a trukk should allow my warboss and his drinking buddies to get almost twice as far across the board before they get exploded to pieces.

Next on the list of things to do; lootaz.

And that's about it.

Oh, except for the fact that I'm living in New Zealand for the next three months.

the road to lull

And then we went to the doubles tournament.

It came as little surprise that Jeff "Ultimate Weapon" McDeath had failed to get all of his toys painted in time; and so we found ourselves sat around in the hotel bar at 2am drunkenly daubing brown ink onto his Blood Angels (subsequently referred to as Brown Angels). This theme of booze fuelled toy soldier chicanery persisted for the rest of the weekend.

From what I can recall, the RoboJew and I (team Master Cylinder) blundered our way to a magnificently average mid-table finish, and also managed to get nominated for the Best Army award too (although our toys weren't quite pretty enough to win it).

It was all very super indeed, and a good time was had by all.