Wolftime

Any 40k fans among you will no doubt recognise the title's reference - I have settled upon an army to create; the Space Wolves! Originally, I had worked out my own colour scheme/background/chapter/the works, but I kept looking at the army list (which was nicely rounded and I felt could handle pretty much anything game-wise) and feeling uninspired. Finally, a few days ago, I put my finger on why. Despite creating characters and stories for them, I felt they lacked character. I went through a terribly long-winded dilemma phase of looking through White Dwarf magazines, the rulebook and various websites, made a list for Tau, Orks and looked over my Eldar army list (a competitive tournament army list), before finding the answer in the wolves.

I've got my list hammered out to a round 2000 points to begin with - and hope to save enough money via my essays-in-early-for-money-in-the-army-tin scheme to buy a couple of units to start me off. Now I'm onto concept and design; how will my Space Wolves differ from Joe Bloggs Space Wolves? What will make them stand out? What story will they tell? I intend to answer these questions in the coming week (/'s) and develop them into reality as and when I get the models/units in the coming months. However, all in all, I'm supremely happy with the wealth of character the Wolves have, and the amount of play they give me to use.

Reading: I've kind of stalled lately. Having read Aaron Dembski-Bowden's The Emperor's Gift, I picked up a novel called High Fidelity on an RNLI charity bookstand for 25p. All in all a refreshing read- not something I'd normally pick up but it intrigued me. Now I seem to have fizzled on the book-reading drive, though no doubt once I get around to picking up Fear To Tread from my shelf I'll remember my groove.

Writing: I've made some edits on my novel that I mentioned in a previous post, and also begun a smaller side-project to give me some contrast when I don't feel like writing crime-fantasy. It's a real-life fiction, but aside from that I'm not really sure where it's going. It's pretty much just a 'write what I feel like' so far that I started on the train home today. I've not begun any competitions yet, because I want to see how much spare time I have once I'm into full uni-work flow before getting a list of comps to enter.

Studies have begun well; my second week is just ending, and already I'm happier with what I'm doing than I was last year. Chemistry I seem to have become a magical genie of, even gaining praise from our tutor Meg (which is rarer than a blue moon/life on mars/pig flying/insert your own metaphor). Biology 2 is similarly going well (Biology 1 is what we did last year), with our coursework pretty much set out for us to start straight away. Use of Evidence is a module that we've just started for this year only - it basically involves a large case report and a load of research into a given crime case from recent history. Recent is somewhat of a lie, as it goes back to OJ Simpson and Jill Dando, but you get my meaning.

For Biology 3 we have to write a mini-dissertation of 3000 words, on a chosen subject. I narrowed it down to three areas last week, and now have it down to my question to be answered; How Does Fire Effect The Identification Of Human Remains In An Anthropological Investigation? Fancy huh? I've already got a load of articles that I'm in the middle of reading through (to decide which one's to use), and have borrowed several (heavy) books from the UCLan library to aid my studies! After we finish the essay we have to convert it into a 15 minute powerpoint presentation (I think I've mentioned this before), but I'm not worrying about that yet.

Yesterday in our biology lesson we had the fun task of whacking a sponge with a hammer. Or a two-by-four. Or a metal rod. Or a screwdriver. The sponge was soaked in fake blood and placed on a stool in front of a clothes-clad skeleton, in the middle of a ring of white sheets - the point was to see how blood spatters from blunt object trauma and the shape the blood drops make when they encounter different surfaces at different angles. It was fun! There will be photos, but I'm waiting on the technician to email them to me.

Katie's got good news - she has a start date for work! Yipee! They took their time (given that they told her she got the job mid-august), but finally she's set to head off to earn some extra pennies on Monday. Yesterday she also attended training at an old people's care home, where she'll be volunteering for the foreseeable future, in a bid to help her medical school application in a year or so's time. Busy woman that she is, she's also attending a Samaritan's selection evening on Monday in the hopes of being accepted to join their ranks to help people in need. I'm also going along to see if I can join up, as it seems like a nice thing to do and would be a unique point for my CV!

Speaking of CV, our final module is PPDP; Personal & Professional Development Programme. This is essentially a 'preparing you for the outside world' module, which is quite funny as the majority of us in the class have had jobs already, and so know what the job world is like (dry as a bone right now!). Anyway, part of this is a ten-year career plan. Ten Years. I've no idea what I'm going to do when I finish this course in 2014, let alone where I want to be in ten years time! If all goes to plan then after my exams are over I'll be heading to the Coventry area whilst Katie goes to medical school, but other than that I've no idea what I'm going to be doing!

The weather has gotten colder over the past week or two - it's super windy and nasty nasty here now! Anyway, to end the post on a light note, here's an awesome dog that I want SO much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU9RSNXaElw&feature=share