Back in the saddle!!

Hi guys,

First up – many apologies for the hiatus for so long. Real life got in the way big time on the gaming front (I will get to my long list of excuses soon enough…) but with the release of the 6th edition of 40k I have got back into it all in a big way with all my mates.

I know I don’t have a huge following on the blog-o-sphere but I started out this blog for my own selfish motivation and to have a log to look back on. I got a real buzz out of some of the feedback I received for various projects in the past, so I would like to say thanks to everyone that chimed in. I know most people are lurkers (myself included) but please pipe up as all little bits of feedback that you give really do help people keep motivated (I am sure my fellow bloggers would agree). I will wind it back a little bit and give you a quick rundown of what I have been doing with myself since my last post, which was back in December 2010 (how embarrassing!!!).


Early 2011
Shortly after getting back from our fantastic European trip, my wife and I had an interesting proposition to consider. We have been looking at completing a major renovation on our little two bedroom workers cottage to add some bedrooms so that we could start a family. It just happened that my father-in-law wanted to sell up his place (which was only about 800m from my house) and it has all the bedrooms we wanted. Long story short – we decided that we would sell our little cottage and upgrade to a larger house.

Sounds easy doesn’t it…well it was a 6 month long nightmare (but was worth it in the end!). Just as we were getting various real estate agents in to value our cottage we discovered a nasty little pest that basically required me to fully renovate our downstairs laundry area – GAH! This pushed our plans back a bit. In the end we got it all repaired and tidied up the few remaining jobs on the house and placed it on the market. Now bear in mind this was in a very slow market to start with and our little cottage only having two bedrooms limited its appeal to some. Anyway it did sell to eventually to the two most skittish painful buyers one could come across…. and we are now in our dream house.


Mid - Late 2011
Now our new house is awesome! It’s a four bedroom house on a large block (with dual street frontage), a large double garage, pool and has a fully self-contained granny flat (READ – MAN CAVE!). Sure – like any old house there is plenty of work to do when you first move in and we had our fair share initially. The Queensland pool laws were just updated and required us to pretty much rebuild all the fencing around the pool within three months of moving in. So like crazy things we dived in and got cracking in ripping out trees, old fences and prepping the place for all new fencing and the like so we could be compliant to the new rules.


Late 2011 – Mid 2012
It is funny how life goes sometimes – just as the home front was easing back work took a bit of a different turn. Our Operations Manager resigned and I was asked to backfill the role while the company recruited a new one (while still completing my Vendor Manager job). Unfortunately this ended up taking seven months due to one issue or another with HR and the like but it did involve me working massive hours to manage our teams that look after our system and being on call 24x7 for various software releases and ensuring major incidents were being looked after. We now have a new Operations Manager and I am back in my old job but unfortunately it took a bit of a toll on my health and that had to become my primary focus.


Mid 2012 - Now
Well the health kick has been wonderful and I have managed to lose a stack of weight in the past three months. I am feeling great and still all motivated on the health front of things. I have had to move my painting area out of the Man Cave and into the study (to make room for some family moving from intrastate) – which is good as I do want to be in hear shot around the house with my wife and my cats rather than feeling antisocial painting in the shack. All the rest of the hobby stuff (scenery and eleventy billion kits) has all moved into the shed – here’s hoping summer is nice in there. Well enough of the life story I hear you say – I just wanted to give you some context of what has been going on. In a nutshell real life took a massive dump on me and the hobby had to take a back seat for an extended time.


STOP! – Hobby Time
Another thing that kinda bummed me out was the douche-baggery that GW has been pulling for some time with the ROW crap in Australia, Finecast etc. This really turned me off the hobby as well so it was good in one way to have an extended break. Boy oh boy has that changed since the rumours and subsequent release of 6th Ed came out. It has got me in a bit of frenzy especially with things like allies – it really has got my creative juices flowing! Just initial random ideas for allies include Rynn’s World PDF, Adeptus Mechanicus and other cool things. First things first are getting some basic painting out of the way.


I will leave it there at the moment but I promise to post some other rambling in the near future with my plans on my painting area and other 40k/hobby related things.

(That is actually me (in the top pic) taking a 432 out for a spin after driver training at The Tank Museum at Bovington. It was awesome fun!)