Week 1: Festive Fuzzies Powered by Hopes and Dreams (HAD™)

Introduction

Twenty-fourteen wasn’t all it was cracked up to be so I’ve decided to try keeping a weekly blog in 2015.  “Why?” You ask.  “What good will that do?”  Be quiet for a moment and let me speak.  Well, as well as recording things as they were, the blog can provide a way for me to keep track of my own ups and downs along the road, providing a kind of yard-stick for future times or future me(s), albeit a vague one at best.  It can be part dream, part plan, part review.  In this early stage, I doubt there’ll be a great deal of action, but if there is, it can be part that too - I won’t complain if any shows up.

Although I’m writing this just before New Years Eve, I write this with the hope of someone examining the same old terrarium in their garage but now with a new lamp, or maybe a newly-cleaned pair of glasses… and possibly a miniature ruined castle.  Okay, so my analogy isn’t great.  In fact, that analogy was a lot like a wet canvas sack on the back seat of a fresh convertible: smelly and pointless, but kind of exciting too.  Anyway, my point is there’s a lot of promise in twenty-fifteen.  There’s fifty-two weeks of wholey untapped time, right there.  It’s just waiting for the picking.

Shop-talk

I worked over the festive season - only taking the public holidays off as the office was closed on those days.  But during office hours, the opportunity for a temporary higher position arose - with an estimated start date right after the new year!  “Why not apply?”  I told myself.  “Stop talking to yourself and apply already!”  I replied.  So I become one of a handful of souls bothering to venture into the great unknown of the Territory of the Written Application with its capital city of Culling Application Down into a Manageable and Acceptable Size.  Very quickly following this, it was advised that I was one of these game show contestants who had passed into the daunting Realm of the Interview Panel.  Let it be known here and now that as reasonable as I am at putting text on a page (and if you made it this far, I will take it that my opinion of myself isn’t pure ego), I am not the world’s greatest improviser.  I could fill in as MacGyver’s arch nemesis, O’Reilly - you know, the guy who never improvises anything but always has everything planned out to the nth degree seventeen episodes down the line?  I trained that guy.  I taught him everything he knows.  Anyway, I might tell you how the interview went next week.  Hang on to that suspense.

At Home

Parenthood isn’t a walk in the park, unless you’re actually walking your kids through a park, in which case a metaphor probably won’t work for you anyway.  However, parenthood can be rewarding.  While this seems like a given, everyday frustrations (from whatever source) can sometimes blind you to that fact, so it’s worth mentioning - to give parents like myself a high note to start the year on, if nothing else.  This Christmas Day, I helped my youngest build her Lego kit, and then helped her siblings build their science kits.  I concluded that watching kids think and learn is still one of the more enjoyable things there is to do in life.  It’s something I already knew, but it’s the kind of feeling you forget about quickly until you experience it again, like the smell of your grandmother’s house, or the exceptionally rare joy that can be found in near-silence.

Projects to Track

Seeing as I already have projects on the go, I may integrate their progress into the blog in order to keep track of them:

• I have a failed exercise regime which I need to kick back into gear.  Summer in Australia probably isn’t the best time to do this but as I’m not a time traveller (yet), it’s just going to have to happen in spite of the Earth’s tilted axis.

• Writing is a love of mine that I need to do more of.  This will definitely be on here, as I have several stories on the go, as well as campaign settings for roleplaying games (see below), and background stories for characters to go into those settings. Don't worry - I'm going to be talking about all this stuff individually as we get to it in future weeks, but for now it will all be coming under the Writing banner.

• Painting and drawing are other art forms I love, and since I received an easel as a Christmas present, I will have to add this stuff to the blog too.

• Table-top role-playing games are another hobby of mine and once all the silly season events are over with, I hope to finally nail down some people for an RPG group.  We should see how this pans out in the coming weeks with any luck.

• I have an idea for a table-top strategy game as well, vaguely similar to something like Settlers of Catan, but with a different style of tactical complexity, RPG elements in the form of heroes or leaders, and statistics for units/cities/terrain, that can change a side’s chances.  I have spent a bit of time working out basic rules for a magic system too, to allow sides to hire “wizards” in order to allow the granting of special abilities/items to other units through magic, as well as perhaps summoning specialised units etc.  It would probably make a decent video game too, but it’s beyond my meagre programming ability, so I’ll stick to what I know.

• I have a Youtube channel and it’s been neglected for some time now, but I hope to add that into the blog as a project too.  I don’t really have news along these lines however, so I’ll leave that there with a big “Coming soon” sign on it.  I have also considered doing the occasional video game review on the blog, perhaps with links to recorded gameplay on the channel.

Anyway, that’s it from me for week 1.  I hope you all had a fantastic silly season. I’m keen to get started on some of the above content for Week 2 so I’ll see you then!

-Ix.