Von's Adventures in eBayland (and Elsewhere)

I'd like to take this moment to refer you all back to this post of Dave's from last year, in which he talks about how to make loadsamoney on eBay.  I'm following most of Dave's tips, albeit not quite all of them; in particular, the starting and reserve prices for my items are curiously similar to the final prices of things I recently purchased, meaning that (if we're going to get technical here) my moment of weakness actually cost me nothing.

On that note: the moment of weakness.  I am, technically, not breaking my resolution involving no new figures until everything I own is painted, since the Dark Elves and Tyranids are no longer mine to paint, which left me with a grand total of twelve Skorne to worry about.  Like last edition's army lists, my resolution drifts forlorn on the breeze, to be looked back on with fond memories and bitter regrets, until an opportunity arises to redefine and reimagine it in the cause of nostalgic entertainment and something resembling innovation.

Replace the words 'Dark Elves and Tyranids' with 'Warriors of Chaos', though, and the point still stands.  Yes, I was weak.  No, I regret nothing.  Why?  Because I scored sixty classic Warriors of Chaos, the ones which are frankly cast from nothing less than pure happy memories for me (my first WFB army was composed almost entirely of them, and they were renovated into the first army I was really happy with the looks of), armed with exactly what I'd want sixty Warriors of Chaos armed with, in the appropriate numbers, and - shipping included, mark you - they cost me fifty pence each.

Fifty pence.
Each.
That's cheaper than they were when they came out, and they were pretty good value then at a rockin' eighty-three-and-a-third pence a head.  And they're primed (red, admittedly, but I can work with that).  That's about eleven hundred points, all the Core infantry I could ever want, ready for me to start painting, and they cost me fifty pence each.  Which, by the way, pretty much exactly corresponds to the fundage raised by flogging off the Dark Elves they're replacing (five hundred points worth, and fewer models!).  All I had to do was stay up for an extra hour on Sunday and snipe like I've just been given a NERF gun, a laser pointer and a roll of gaffer tape.

I was hardly going to pass that up,  was I?  Neither the chance to own a shiny new Nikon digital camera with a 5cm macro setting (the sort of thing that's just about perfect for the aspiring miniature blogger with an artist life partner who really needs to kick their online gallery into gear - and that's Hark, by the way, not Shiny, although they're both very talented people and you should totally buy paintings off them when they eventually sort themselves out to sell said paintings).

It's been a pretty good month; I've cleared out the doomed projects of the previous (failed) Frugal year, bought myself a thing that's going to improve my blogging and help us make some money by selling art, kick-started a new, cheap, sensible hobby project, and the whole thing's been zero-sum.  Even the terrain I'm working on has been gratis, having come out of the budget for (ahem)

- which I'm working on scenery for in between testing out the Cryx army I'll be ringering with at the event.

I have, admittedly, still spent some money (£3.50 bus fare and £2 admission to Dice & Decks once a week, skipping one when I was ill, and £10 petrol money plus I-think-it-was-£5 admission fees to a little mini-tournament over in Evesham, oh, and the WoW fees at £7.99), so that's still well over thirty quid in a month, which could stand to be less.  It's a good start, though - certainly better than last year.