Welcome to Hobby Town

I was thinking the other day about hobbies. Pretty random thought but those happen everyday. Anyway...
I was talking to Nicole about getting a new hobby. She thought it would be a great idea and that got me trying to remember all of the hobbies I had growing up. Here are my best childhood hobbies!

I can remember saving up all of my allowance money for months to go to Toys R' Us to buy LEGOs. That's right piles and piles of Legos. I just couldn't get enough of those little nubby plastic bricks! I even went as far as collecting particular kinds of kits. I loved the pirate ships especially. I would build them over and over and come up with my own buildings and machines. I had the best time of my life playing LEGOs. I have even hung on to all of them so that my kids one day will play with them!

Yaaarr!

For awhile in 5th grade I was really into playing boardgames and cards. I thought it was a lot of fun, but my family got a little worn by playing so many games of Risk. So I ended up going to my best friend's house all of the time for hours to play that game. I was addicted. Around that same time there was a awesome line of game stores opening up around the valley called GameDaze. Awesome store if you're really into all kinds of crazy games!

I don't know if you can see but that's me on the horse.

I don't think anybody could roll those dice.

On a side note that same year, there were some other great games to come out. Pogs and Magic the Gathering, super nerdy but still fun.

You were cool if you had Magic cards and the illustrations were amazing.

Pogs were for the less cool but still nerdy guys.

Next up on the ol' hobby list is computer games. This is when the real nerdiness kicked in. There were some wonderful computer games when I was younger, namely StarCraft and WarCraft. Both amazing games.

Awsomeness. 

Extra Awesomeness.

I think hobbies help to pass the time, teach us new skills and let us explore things differently. Hobbies are great fun basically. Lately I've been trying to think of a new hobby that I can do to pass the time and to have something to focus on other than the television. At nights here at my job there isn't really anyone to talk to and there is never anything on TV, so to pass the time I've been listening to these video podcasts from MiniWarGaming.com. Its a group of guys in Canada that own a hobby shop that specializes in (surprise!) miniature war games. I didn't know what miniature war games were either but these guys are great to listen to and have some really fun videos. I later found out in one of their videos that both of these guys are Mormon and turned their hobby into their jobs! Awesome. They've got me so excited about this one game called Warhammer 40k, that I'm considering getting into it myself. Its basically a way to gather an army and paint the little figures to your liking. I've never really ever painted things, especially miniatures, but I like the way the models look especially the Ork and Space Marine armies.

When I mentioned that I wanted to paint miniatures to Nicole was really encouraging. She wanted me to be creative and have a fun hobby. 'Yay!' I thought, but then I showed her the models below and told her that there was a game that they're supposed to be used for. Her nerd alert went off and she became really hesitant about the whole thing. :) I always manage to surprise my wife with how nerdy I actually am. Don't worry honey there's more where that comes from...

Space Marine Rhino

Space Marines

Ork Trukk 

The Ork Boyz