It’s been awhile, huh? I have been really busy lately, but not so much with things that I can show you. Or maybe I should be more honest. I have not been busy with things that I want to show you!

One of the new things I tried this year was Bollywood dancing. It was really fun! Unfortunately, taking two dance classes per week is a bit much for me. Since I already signed up for belly dance, I’m going to keep going with it. But in the future, I may take a few more Bollywood classes.

This past weekend was our girls’ holiday get-together. In addition to our usual shopping, gorging ourselves with delicious food and drinks, and playing games, we decided to try one of those group painting classes that seem to be so popular now.

We went to The Paint Pub, hence the photo of a painting. There were things that I liked about the class, and things that I didn’t like. First for the likes: The instructor was very personable, and did a really good job of entertaining everyone and keeping the mood light. I also liked that the space was covered in paintings that they offer for future classes. Good marketing, but also inspiring. I had never taken an art class before where everyone was painting the exact same thing, so that was fun. It was interesting to see how everyone was painting from the exact same perspective, the exact same thing, but the paintings all looked different.

Now for the dislikes: This place offered food and drinks. The table space was small, so I felt like there was a pretty good chance that I got paint in the sandwich of the woman who was sitting next to me. Eww! And I looked at my wine glass after class, and there were paint specks inside of it. The paint is non-toxic, but it’s still kind of gross. Although the instruction was good, I felt like it was a little too dumbed down. It was basically, paint this, now this, now this, and now you’re done. At one point, I thought we were painting the trees in the foreground, but it turned out to be the trees right before the foreground, which messed up my spacing. Not a huge deal, but it would have been nice to get a little more idea of what part we were on and where we were.

Overall, it was a good time, and I would go back again if anyone wanted to. But I think I’ll probably just stick to painting on my own.

This weekend was Colonial Day (that’s what we call it, in reference to the show Battlestar Galactica)! We invited some friends over and played the board game all day long! And I’m not joking when I say all day long. We started at 10am and finished around 11pm! The game has four expansions, and we play them all in a row, adding things in to follow the thematics of the TV show. (If you didn’t already realize it, we’re a little nerdy!)

This year for Colonial Day, we wanted to make our copy of the game more fun! Nick got a fancy case and designed some stickers and envelopes to put everything in. I was in charge of painting the miniatures, as you can see. For the most part, they were really easy to do. I just primed them and dry-brushed them with another color. But the white planes (vipers) were much harder. I had to freehand those. And I had a few snafus…one of which involved me not realizing that a plane fell on the garage floor, and I ran over it with my car! Oops!

This went well (other than the car snafu), and I’m excited to move on to our other games! Watch out Last Night on Earth! Your zombies will no longer be red, green, and brownish globs of plastic!