Retirement has turned me into a bearded recluse rifling through closets and the garage to see what is there. I find I am busier than I was when I was employed as an IT expert. I wake up in the morning, prepare and drive the child to school, do morning errands and shopping, pick up the child, babysit, cook dinner, get the child ready for bed, and finally, go to sleep. All this is pretty routine and surprisingly time consuming.

I thought I might start posting images of stuff in process. A lot of miniatures get little notice as they go from bag to fully painted storage. I have returned to the task of learning defensive fire procedures for ASL. But most of the good stuff gets done on Sunday when i get some time off.

Retirement is more wearing than I hoped with no real moments of sitting around drinking and eating and watching foreign movies. Too much to do. At least, I found Kate’s home.

I suppose it is no surprise that someone with a sedentary hobby and a job that compels him to sit in a chair all day and who commutes several hundred miles each week and cannot recall where he is when he wakes up in the morning should find themselves held in a hospital for a few days. Now, I am hearing about my terrible lifestyle that has driven me to this awful fate. It is a twin difficulty with being found to have a physical ailment that it is also seen as a personal failing. I finally reached a limit when a doctor told me that my days of ‘hiding from doctors’ were through. I pointed out to him that I had been to a doctor as recently as the summer and had a test for the exact same condition they are treating me for just a year ago with no results. He in turn listened to my concerns that I cannot jump into his office at a moment’s notice by summoning me to his office one business day after our meeting about my lab results to discuss further details about the results. I declined.

OK, that is irrelevant. Circumstances have limited my additions to the site though I feel I am reaching a point where I can return to it. I dug out an old Jack Scruby catalog I knew I had but had been unable to find. The catalog shows that unlike his contemporaries, Scruby was quite happy to match his figures to existing scales including model railroad scales. I am hopeful that I will also ferret out a group of his American Civil War figures I purchased at that time. I felt they did not stand up to the attractive 25mm figures from Custom Cast so placed no additional orders but sometimes wish I did.

I also found some old Task Force Games figures for their game Musketeer. I will post the photos when I have the opportunity.

Still here, what’s left of me.  The highway has been a mess since the start of spring break.  I saw the remains of a great truck fire yesterday though yesterday seems like a week ago.  The summer appears to entail a lot of travel.  The trip to Taipei will likely entail another trip into miniature soldier hinterlands.  There is one store that has a great selection but the aisles are only just wide enough for a single person and the ceiling is oppressively low.  There are a couple of other negatives but the selection is remarkable and so are the prices.  Not much metal but plenty of plastic.

In the meantime, I try to remain conscious during the day and get some sleep at night.  The weekend promises much activity.  I will be glad to get some rest.  I bought some Langton miniature ships and as usual my fingers end up coated with cyanoacrylic glue.  There are not many concessions made to ease of assembly but I will sort it out and post the results.

A few days late but then we come to the story of my life.  Lovecraft has somehow become the embodiment of horror as it relates to gaming.  Chaosium has certainly helped that along with a role-playing game and multiple card games.  More recently, there has been a spate of board games revolving around the eldritch horrors of Miskatonic County.

My first encounter with Mr. Lovecraft was in a TAB book sales flyer.  These flyers meant either to encourage reading or book sales offered nominally priced books aimed at a young audience.  Somehow, Lovecraft made the list and I found myself with a copy of the Colour Out of Space and Other Stories.  I became a devotee as I was a devotee of Ambrose Bierce and Olaf Stapledon.  A strange literary diet for a 12-year old but my devotion has not wavered.

TAB books would arrive in a box a few weeks after we had marked our order sheets and paid our money.  They would be set out along the lip of the blackboard and we would get whichever one we had sent for.  With Lovecraft, I entered a world where malevolent entities of unimaginable destructive power were held back by a thin line of antiquarians, professors, and half mad poets and where even the most benign locations held terrors.  I recall once driving through southern Massachusetts and immediately recognizing it as the setting for the Dunwich Horror.

Like so many other writers, Lovecraft did not live to benefit from his well-earned fame.  His fans kept his work alive and now, he is almost a household word.  Lovecraft has made the heaviest mark in that most light hearted of pursuits gaming so it is worth mentioning the passing of his birthday, August 20th.  I have posted a blurry picture of a night gaunt I believe produced by RAFM.  My hope is by Mr. Lovecraft’s next birthday, to drag out all the wildly painted critters from RAFM and Grenadier and celebrate his birthday on time and in style.  But as befits this rather watered down year with my own birthday soon to arrive we will have to draw this rather tepid tea till better times.

Seems like I just got here and I am moving again.  The insects and lizards roaming the apartment like some tiny ecosystem, the severe flooding, the neighbor who owns the private road to the apartment and insists on making it as difficult and dangerous to drive as it could be, and the difficulties of getting from the side road to the main road mitigate for change so change is upon me.

I have packed everything and this time hope not to make the mistake of last time and let the movers handle the boxes of figures.  Nothing was broken or lost but turning a box of figures over and shaking it can do it no good.

I calculated that since i was born, I move on the average of every two years.  I am certainly bringing that average down not staying in one place for more than a year.  I once marveled at how desert nomads could pack their home and all their belongings and travel so frequently.  I think my own belongings have become increasingly spare as I move.  At least I am no longer a frequent flier.  Life always has its good aspect.

This morning I drove by Winn-Dixie and wished that I was living somewhere I could not drive past Winn-Dixie. I miss snow. I suspect that snow is one of those things I will never see again. For some reason, the more I try to repair my life, the less time I have. I finished painting a lone regiment of figures and felt I had accomplished some major feat when it used to be a regular occurrence.

I do not think I ever stopped to catalog my life the way I am now cataloging the miniatures and rule books that overflow boxes and spill out everywhere. Cataloging it I would say that I do not accomplish as much as I did in the past. Even little accomplishments seem out of reach. One wishes for the stray day at home knowing they are becoming less and less likely. Today, I hopefully carried in a drawing pad and a box of pastels and now I wonder if I will even touch them.

I suppose the beauty of leading an isolated childhood is that one always has inner places to go to where there is some satisfaction to be had no matter what the world becomes. Still, I wish I had more time and more snow.

The weather is nice outside.   There are large and small angry dogs barking.  But no one is berating me for my stupidity or anything else at the moment so the day is a passable one.

I have returned from a lengthy ocean voyage to find little changed.  There is sadly a bottle of milk in the refrigerator.  The tiny band of Muscovy ducks has been whittled down to two.  The neighboring housing complex has put up traffic signs where they do not belong.  But overall, things are where I left them.

So now it is time to return to the modifications I have been hoping to make.  About time, too.  With all the visitors to the house gone, there may perhaps be just a little bit of time to do some work like pull out all the 1/32 plastic figures and set up a game with them or photograph some of the old figures that cross the line between toys and wargaming miniatures.

The red cat suggests my hope for the future.  I am not sure whether he will have an impact or not.  We will see.

Time for reassessment again.   Another new year in just over a month and this one involves monkeys.  I am not terribly superstitious but always check the horoscope for horses.  It is generally bad.  I have yet to encounter anything especially cheerful and assume that the cheerful news is for snakes or rats or some other annoying animal.

It is also Super Bowl Sunday and this will make yet another of a long line of Super Bowls I have not watched trailing back to the first.  It is not that I dislike football.  I just never saw the point.  I do like junk food and beer.  And sandwiches.  But the fascination of football eludes me.

Next week starts a major revision of the site.  All ten people who have visited this past year may not notice the change but it is coming.  Promise.