Where did the year go? It felt like it was Halloween three days ago. It wasn’t, of course, and it takes only the briefest of reflections to immediately become overwhelmed with all the things that have happened in the last couple of months, much less the year.

So what has been going on? I suppose the biggest thing was and is the birth of my daughter. Everything really dwarfs in comparison. In regards to the regular content of this blog, the big win is hitting my goal of 48 miniatures for the year and then crushing it for a final total of 70. Not the highest ever, but definitely an uptick from some of the recent totals.

A sort of mixed win is my D&D campaign, which endured the loss of four players all around the same time to rebound with three new ones. But as if often the case, I’m already looking at losing two or three more sometime soon. As is so often the case, keeping these kinds of games going feels like a hobby unto itself./

What’s been kind of a letdown? I was surprised to see that I had not done a single solo session of my 5150 campaign “Hard Currency” in over a year. It is weird because I keep thinking that it is just “on hiatus” and it is just a free Friday away. Part of that was being a little sidelined by Space Station Zero, which is a very similar but different system.

When you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there

So now, 2023. I do not talk a lot about my personal life on this blog. There are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which that I was kicked out of the running for another job because they found another old blog of mine and used the content against me. But now I am in an even better job than that one, a position that is practically a tenured position. But also, a lot of what is going on (or not happening) in my hobby past-times is being impacted by my real life in a huge way.

Without getting into too many details, I mentioned earlier that in 2022 my wife and I had a child, who is now almost a year old. Over the last few months we began noticing things were not quite right. There were symptoms, signs, etc. that while each one on their own wouldn’t be a big deal but taken together added up to something much, much larger. A few weeks ago we got the tests results back: she has a genetic disorder that is so ridiculously rare that you could take every person diagnosed with this in the world and they would all fit in a high school cafeteria. The pathogenic disorder has a huge spectrum of symptomology, but the hard reality is that even at the best end of spectrum she is in for a lifetime of struggling with physical disability. And with that, countless doctors appointments, specialists, and hours upon hours of working with her at home to help her grow and develop and be as strong and capable as she can be.

As a result, my hobbies have this odd paradoxical quality of being both highly constrained by more important responsibilities in terms of time and yet also being significantly more critical in terms of my emotional health and well-being. Which also means that I would love to be able to tell you my plans for 2023 but I honestly don’t know how much time and energy I have to give to whatever project I might consider.

So I am not setting a painting goal for myself for miniatures, even though I suspect that I will still spend my evenings painting minis. I would love to finish up the Space Station Zero game, and painted up the sci-fi scatter terrain in the photo for it. It is also for this reason I am interested in the Quick Play rules by Two Hour Wargames because I think that they could be played in small, discrete sessions that could appease my need for a gaming fix without really demanding a lot from my time (like two hours).

At this point it has taken me so much time to write this post that I have moved from 2022 to 2023, so I will sign off with wishing all of you, my faithful handful of readers, and myself, the best possibly 2023 you can have.

Yours Truly,
Rob