WSS: Two New French Regiments of Horse

 I'm very pleased to welcome two new units for my French army, once again painted - and very nicely indeed - by Lee. Here (without and with flash - take your choice) are the Regiments of Tarnault (grey coats, in front) and Le Roi (in blue, at the back). Appropriately flagged and based, and ready for the duty boxes - thanks very much, Lee!

I had one rather amusing misadventure while basing these chaps up. The days of steel paper are long gone, alas, and the replacement for it is a very clever material which is described as Ferro Sheet, which is a little thicker than the old metallised paper but otherwise seems to work just as well. The only bad news is that it looks pretty much identical to the familiar self-adhesive Magnetic Sheet which I've been using for my soldiers for some years. I am, of course, careful not to mix these two types of sheet up, but it had to happen eventually. Having stayed up a bit late to finish off the application of Mag Sheet under the bases for these new units, and having made quite a nice job of it, though I say so myself, I was disappointed to find this morning that the new units were sliding about in their storage box - yes, that's right, I'd used the wrong stuff. So, this morning, before I fitted the flags, I had to peel off the Ferro Sheet and replace with Mag Sheet. No damage done, just a reminder that I'll have to be careful.

There is a quick safety check - the Mag Sheet will stick on the central heating radiators, while the Ferro Sheet doesn't. Fortunately, I always have a central heating radiator with me. Planning, or what?

Separate Topic - the Calm Before the Storm

Yes, there's another storm coming today - expected to arrive after 5pm. There was one on Friday, which was noisy but not too bad here, though it was pretty severe elsewhere. This one is expected to be rather worse in this area - unlike Storm Arwen, this one is coming from the South West, so it should at least be rather warmer if/when the power goes off. It is expected to be of short duration - probably finished by midnight. It puts an interesting background to the things which are supposed to be happening today:

(1) we are scheduled to do some testing of our broadband service around 7pm - this with the computer connected by Ethernet, so we don't include any delays caused by wi-fi issues. I've to take screenshots of the speedtest.com results and forward them to my service provider. I would say there is very little chance of our having both electricity and broadband by 7pm...

(2) Amazon tell me that their fine courier will deliver a package to me this evening, before 10pm. I don't think so. I think their local courier will be safely in his bed this evening, and quite right too. 

The sky seemed a bit on the red side this morning - not sure if it's enough to alarm shepherds, but I thought a photo might be a useful souvenir, just in case the garden has gone by tomorrow. [Think positive]

Whatever else happens, we'd better stow the garden chairs in the woodshed this morning. Either that, or else mark them with our name and address.