Long Time, No Post

As you might have noticed, it’s been a while since I posted. This hasn’t been intentional – I’ve got a backlog of things I’d like to write about, but writing blogposts takes time, and I just haven’t had any of that spare lately. Life and work have kept me far too busy for that. It’s my hope that I’ll get enough free time to write some more soon, though.

So what’s been eating my time?

Six things have been chewing up my time and spitting it out:

  • Work – It’s just been insane lately. Working with folks in the US has meant that I’ve had a lot of work calls late in the day, which means I don’t get to wind down properly. The commute is still a killer too, so I’m glad I’m working from home at least two days a week.
  • Theatre – Following on from Little Shop of Horrors, we had several meetings to try to get a night of two one act plays together… which I was going to stage manage. Regrettably, the dates available weren’t good for a group so wiped out after LSOH, so this never came to fruition. I’ve had a couple of tech meetings since then so we can plan out the next advances for the group’s tech kit.
  • Mortals Game – You’ve probably gathered from previous posts that I run a monthly live action nWoD Mortals game. That takes quite a lot of work, what with writing the plot, sourcing and making props and set dressing, etc… Not to mention the game days themselves.
  • Family & WH40K LARP – I needed to go and visit my mother, and I’d volunteered to crew the third “Death Unto Darkness” WH40K live action game in the Forest of Dean. My mother lives about 45 minutes from the site of that game, and I wasn’t going to find another available weekend… so I had to do both at once. This meant I dropped Beth off at the site on Friday afternoon, then went to my mums for Friday evening, then back to the forest for late saturday morning, where I crewed for the day until one of my knees decided it was going to start locking up, so I drove back to my mums… returning again sunday morning to pick Beth up again. Whilst the relay was exhausting, it was good to see my mum, and crewing was fun.
  • Illness – Not so long ago, I had the same sinus headache for nearly two weeks.
  • The Garage – Our garage had become a dumping ground for all kinds of stuff, and it was becoming highly impractical to work in… so I put a fair bit of time and effort into clearing it out. More is still needed, but I now actually have space on the desk out there to do electronics work properly, and also to set up the workmate. I’ve even acquired and labelled crates for different kinds of junk-that-might-become-props. This clearout means that I’ve now been able to spend about an hour or two tinkering with my Arduino, and have actually built my BoArduino (an arduino clone that you can plug into a solderless breadboard for prototyping). Next step – getting kit to program an ATTiny2313, so I can build an assortment of cheap electronic gubbins.

There has almost certainly been more as well, but this is what I can remember right now.