Christmas Loot!

Dwarf on a Shelf

 

I meant to post this earlier, so I didn't get a chance to conduct any extended on-line activity between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  But since the Feast of the Epiphany is still two-to-four days away, depending on what liturgical calendar you go by, it's still the Christmas Season.  Right?

 

Anyway, we didn't have any Elves on the Shelves conducting surveillance for Santa.  Instead, my wife gave me Thorin Oakenshield Christmas Ornament.  Since all the unused decorations and accessories were put away before Christmas Morning, I placed Thorin on one of my bookshelves instead of hanging him on the tree.  (Okay, I admit it, I was too lazy to go on a quest for an ornament hook).

 

I was planning on doing some "Elf on the Shelf" parody photos, but Thorin's attire is so dark the figure was nearly indistinguishable among my books and games.  So I used a blue-sky backdrop and took some staged photos:

 

By erasing the ornament's hook ring, Thorin now looks like an action-figure.  I took several pictures with various backdrops.  As soon as I figure out what to do with them, I'll post more images of the King Under the Mountain.

 

In the meantime, here's a quick view of some of the other goodies I got for Christmas:

 

My daughter and her boyfriend stumbled across this Star Trek Commemorative Model of Mr. Spock, re-issued by Round 2: 

 

 

I was astonished!  I remember this, along with other figure kits back in the '70s.  I haven't opened mine yet, but TrekWorks shows you what's inside the original. 

 

Along with Spock, they also gave me this Vulcan Shuttle model:

 

I must admit, I never knew the shuttle's name in the first Star Trek film was Surak.  Once again, TrekWorks not only shows you what's inside, but begins constructing the model.

 

In addition to finding these models at Half Price Books they came across unopened copies of Stalin's Tanks: 

This is an original Metagaming Concepts "MicroHistory" game, (#3 in the series), I use to see when I was a teenager.  I hadn't owned Stalin's Tanks, but I bought several other of these games back-in-the-day.  Unfortunately, none of them survived.  I'll write a product review on a later post.

 

Finally, my wife made a nice scrap book commemorating out courtship, which features Verses 4-8 of Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13:  

 

But the most important gift I have--is having loving family and friends I can exchange presents with.

 

I hope your Christmas and Holiday Season of 2014 was a joyous one.  Best wishes to you throughout 2015.