A fistful of ... excuses!

To all those who drop by and peruse my infrequent pictorial ramblings on this hobby blog, I must apologise for the poor show over recent weeks.

Here in the southern hemisphere, we are just coming out of winter and entering spring, but there are still a lot of folks about suffering coughs and colds, as I see day to day at work.

And yep you guessed it, I have been struck down repeatedly this season.

I reckon over the past six weeks my family and I have each had 3 seperate colds, and I got the added bonus of a seperate sinus infection which quite literally floored me for a couple of days...( I haven't had to take time off work since I had my appendix out)

It's the dear little folks of the family bringing a whole plethora of bugs home from school to infect mam and dad with, usually getting mum first as she is closest with them and finally sticking it to dear ol' dad.

Then of course there is the cyclical action I experience at work; customers come and cough and splutter over me their request for cough and cold medication - so I come down with the same . Then when I am coughing and spluttering, the next customers get it back from me presumeably! Ah well it keeps it going round and round, and is I guess, good for sales and profits! ;-)

So, "physician heal thy self" I hear you cry, well I manage to get through the day at work pumped full of pills and potions, but by the time I get home and have dinner, I just can't be motivated to paint, and just veg-out in front of TV before an early night, dosed up to the eyeballs with a hot-toddy.

Since most of my painting is done in the late evening, you can tell I have done bugger all painting really over the last several weeks!

Even at the wintery weekends when you are rained in, and I would normally get some time painting, but when you have that horrible throbbing head and sinus thing going on, you just cant be bothered to try and focus on the models and get any painting done...

I have a desk covered in half done models; ACW, Cannibal natives, the first few Zulu test figures, more strumpets, Royal navy crew, and several ships parts...

Oh well, I have hopefully just about kicked this latest bug out of my system and can hope to get back to normallity soon, but...

With the arrival of spring and finer weather, I have also had the usual garden duties to do, and due to a few changes on the domestic front aswell, I have been busy with both house and garden. Jings don't you hate it when 'normal life' gets in the way of your hobby time!

On top of this, there has been a further pressure on my painting time... Better weather has me thinking of trying to get out for a bike ride, if garden and other family duties dont get in the way first, but I have always felt a little guilty going out by myself for a ride at weekends, leaving kids at home, when they dont see much of me through week due to work and school...

However, after watching "Wild Hogs" with my young son, on TV a couple of weekends ago, that seems to have broken the ice so to speak, over his fear of the bike (he'd been told many tales from mum and grandma about my past biking accidents... admittedly when I was 'younger and stupid' and tried to be the fastest thing on 2 wheels on the road, riding my sportsbike - its difficult to ride them slow!)

So having now decided he wanted to be a 'Wild Hog' with his dad, we checked him on back of the bike and he could get his feet on the footpegs, so off we went and got him a helmet. And that was it, after a couple of runs up and down our street to get his confidence, we were off, and enjoyed several rides round the local town.

Not to be out done, younger daughter jumped up and down until she got a turn too... sliding forward on seat she could just get her feet on the pegs, she was determined to have a go. I only took for a run up and down our quiet street.

So as you can see there have been a few things getting between me and a paint brush recently. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to normality soon...

In the meantime a good gaming buddy of mine, Roly Hermans, reminded me of the Warhammer Historical half price sale currently on. I havent played Warhammer (WAB) for a couple of years now I think, and have most the supplements anyway, and didnt bother getting the latest revamp of the rules as there was a lot of dissenting comments when it came out, and my interest was waning... However Roly pointed out the Waterloo supplement.

Truth be told I think he was seduced by the eye candy pictures, but GW usually turn out fairly playable sets of rules, and at half price it was worth a try. So I joined him in a purchase.

To be honest we are both more than happy with Black Powder for our Napoleonic gaming. We like the command and control mechanism and its gentlemanly non competative playing style, but as mentioned we thought this would be worth a try. Plus Roly had noted the rules description suggests easily playing on a 6 x 4 playing area, and that would suit his slightly limited playing area. So worth a try we thought.

With Black Powder rules, and it's ancients 'cousin' - Hail Caesar, in mind, and perhaps noticing that the amount of Lord of the Rings material on this blog has tailed off over the last year or so, I was very intrigued to see that John over on PlasticLegions blog is looking to do a Lord of the Rings variant for Hail Caesar. I know a chap called David did do a version for Black Powder, which is available in the Black Powder yahoo groups files, but obviously Hail Caesar would be a better match for the 'period', so I wish John well in this endevour, and look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

I still feel Lord of the Rings is better played as a large scale battle, (although the SBG skirmish game does equally well suit smaller actions), but have found several issues with the War of the Rings rules, which have frustrated and put me off playing, yet I still love the mythos and figures.

So I think a Hail Caesar variant would be ideal!

[quick blog edit: I would also like to see some sort of 'Fantasy templates' done for Hail Caesar, so other fantasy worlds could be explored with this rule set, eg Narnia. To put this further in context - I greatly enjoy perusing through the variety of army list possibilities in the Hordes of the Things rulebook, I just have always found the rules themselves rather dull, and difficult to get to grips with anyway (its not an eye-candy rulebook!) Having a, dare I say, 'generic' list of templates for various races & monsters etc. that could be tweaked further to suit the setting would allow wonderful scope for Fantasy gaming with these rules]

Well thats enough of a rambling catch up for now. I'll try and get back to painting, get some pictures up, and have normal service resumed!

Thanks for reading and your patience.

regards
Scott