Holiday Greetings

A belated Merry Christmas and an early Happy New Year!

It has been a busy time at the Admiralty, with business travel (3 days to Florida to mark actuarial exams), final exams for the Fall Semester and Christmas.  Now with that all out of the way, I have picked up paint brushes and reference books for Curt's annual painting challenge.

Yesterday we took my mother in law to the airport for a 6am flight and then my wife, daughter and I saw the Star Wars film in IMAX.  Our local Science Centre has the only IMAX copy of the film in Canada, which was to our good fortune.  I am not a Star Wars geek loud some, but it was a very entertaining afternoon at the pictures.  Space Opera with great action scenes and pretty good characters, what more could you ask for?

My Other Addiction - Books

I got taken in by Cyber Monday this week with a BOGO (buy one get one free) sale on E-books over at Pen and Sword, typically my go to pusher of military e-books.  I like the ebook route for a number of reasons.  Mostly it comes down to the fact that I am both cheap and impatient and most of my hobby wants are way to obscure to be found in a Saskatchewan book store.  ebooks are a cheap and fast way of feeding the addiction!


So what did I get in my electronic package?  Two absolute classics.


This one feeds into my Italian Wars project which is timely as it arrives just before the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge and my upcoming side duel with Curt.  Well written, good detail and lots of flavour.  It covers from the 13th century to the end of the 15th, ending with Fornovo.



It doesn't get much better than Marder when it comes to Naval History.  This volume covers a number of topics over the two world wars.  Of particular interest are the chapters on the Dardanelles  Churchill's time in the admiralty in the early days of WWII and the Battle of Mers-El-Klebir.