Hello, my name is Mike, but online, I normally can be found using the name "Serrecko". The name is pronounced "Sir Echo". It was the name of my German Shepherd that passed away in 2005. He was named after a German Shepherd that lived beside us while we were small kids growing up in the late 60's. Which means, yes, I'm a little on the old side.
I turned 50 this past summer, on August 20.
By trade I am a desktop support specialist for a very large financial institution, and I hope to join my wife in retirement from the same company in the next 5 years, unless the good Lord has other plans for me over the next 5 years. See, I turned 50 while also fighting cancer for the second time. I beat it the first time, and I have beaten it a second time.
Which is also why after not building a model in well over 30-35 years, I am getting back into the hobby. It seems that each time I get cancer, and beat it, I take up a new "old" hobby while I recover. The first time it was playing computer games, this time it is building plastic World War II Aircraft models.
I'm an avid Washington Redskins fan, and have been since Vince Lombardi was their coach, that means 1970 or so and I was only 6 years old. Not much of a baseball fan, or hockey fan, which means I will have a lot of time to work on a few models once football is over.
Over the past few years I have taken up the "sport" of paintball, and yes, it is a sport. I actually put together a paintball team and we are called "The Gaggle Of Noobs" and we are all about just having fun, not trying to be all "Johnny Ammo Belt" and the best player in the woods, we just want to have good clean fun. While at the same time trying to "kill" each other with a paintball.
We can be found on the YouTubes if you look for us by name or you can find us at our web site which is GaggleEmpire.com with links to our videos and all the stupid stuff we do.
While I was a kid, growing up, I used to read "Fine Scale Modeler" because my father was into models, and model trains, and he got all kinds of great magazines like this, and he showed me how to build models and I can still remember my very first model I completed without his help. It was a F4U-1 Corsair, and this was around the time of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" was on TV and I just loved the Corsair and the gull wings it had, so that was my first model.
Well, I went on to build a lot of the aircraft from the war, and shifted over to tanks and other armor and other military hardware. I guess eventually I just stopped working on the models and drifted to other things. Like getting married and buying a house and things like that and traveling the world for the State Dept, getting kicked out of England on spy charges and stuff like that. We can talk about that later.
Anyway, I am back and I am trying to get all setup again and finding a good place to have my kits laid out and I think this is the worst part of the hobby. Starting out for the first time. Back in the day, I probably had every paint Testor made, enough brushes, and glues and you name it, I had a crap ton of it. Now I am at a stopping point since I do not have any flat black paint. Go figure!
But I think I will be having fun doing this part of it as well. I hope to get to take part in a lot of the discussions and I hope this is not as boring as I think it is.
Serrcko