I’m getting good a starting my blog with an apology for missing updates and this one has I think been the longest gap. Now that isn’t because I’ve fallen out of love with the hobby or even that I’ve lost my mojo it’s been a combination of being busy with other things and also being a bit lazy. So the other things account for a few weeks where I was extremely busy at work in the run up to taking a couple of weeks off. Then I had the aforementioned time off and in the past this would probably have been a very productive and somewhat drunk affair. This time though I spent it with the misses being extremely and I really mean extremely lazy. I have to say that I hadn’t realised just how ready I was for break, with all the things going on at home and at work I was really run down and the break was very welcome. In typical fashion the weather was rubbish and as we still have a lot of lockdown restrictions, which I think are about to get worse, there wasn’t really a lot to do but it was nice. With regards to the restrictions at the time of writing I’m living in the town with the highest cases per 100,000 in the UK and I can’t understand why people can’t just follow the rules. But that is rant for another time and place. Back to the missing weeks.
Like a lot of you I find that whilst the time off has been great as soon as you back at work there is a mountain to catch up on, or at least that was the case for me. So that meant I hadn’t got anything done and didn’t have anything to update you on for a couple of weeks and then we get to last week. I was all set to make a triumphant return to the interweb and the had a really busy Friday at work, but no problem I could still get the update done but then fate intervened. When lock down started I signed up for a beer delivery service, where you tell them what types of beer you like, all of it, and you then get a selection of beers delivered each month. You guessed it, it turned up last Friday and the result was lots of inspiration but very little productivity. So this week I’ve been working on the update whenever I get the chance, mainly it has to be said whilst of really boring video calls so it looks like I’m being really productive. The end result is that I’m back with a lot more of a waffle than I am a hobby update. But I have been painting and I have been jotting down ideas for future projects and whilst I’m not going to make any firm commitments I’m hoping that a more normal service will be resumed. And in my defence I have been doing this for a few years now so some bumps in the road are only to be expected.
I’m going to digress a little bit here but bear with me because it does have a very precarious hobby link. Prior to current chaos that has ensnared us all I had to commute on the train a few times a week and I made the most of this by listening to music and reading. It didn’t take me long to go from real books to a kindle, but rest assured I still buy real books, it was my music provision that was the challenge. I used an old iPod but not being an apple user any more a lot of my music was in MP3 and getting that onto an iPod was a faf. So a colleague put me onto a Shanling m0 music player. Tiny, takes a micro SD card and will read just about any music format. All is good in the world. I use this with the standard ear phones I had from the iPod and it was ok. Now for my birthday I got some nice Fiio In Ear Monitors, which is basically fancy earbuds. But there is a marked difference in how good they sound. Well then now that I have some nice earphones what if try switching some of my music from MP3 to a loss less format such as FLAC, would I be able to notice the difference. The simple answer to that is yes. Now I’m no audiophile, I just like listening to music but I was hearing things in tracks that I hadn’t heard before. Something of a revelation to me but it has left me in the process of trying to download FLAC versions of all the music I want to listen to like this. And the promised connection to hobby time is that I’ve been sitting there with my earphones in listing to music at lunch time while I’m painting away.
Whilst I’ve not been filling all my free time with hobby projects I’ve still been doing lots of reading and in one of those gaps where didn’t have anything lined up to read I started to re-read some Raymond E Fiest. Full disclosure here he is one of my favourite authors so I started at the beginning and I’m working my way through all of the magician books. I don’t know why but one of the things that I’ve never really paid any attention to is the in his world Goblins have blue skin and not green, which got me thinking. I had some Goblins from Atlantis miniatures and had been pondering how to paint them. So I’m sure you can guess what’s coming next.
It is still early doors with them but I’ve gone with blue skin and I want to try and make them just a band of adventurers. Nothing nefarious about them or anything like that. Just another party out for an adventure. I’m happy with how they are going so fare and with a bit of luck won’t take long to finish.
That’s it for this week. Granted not a big update but I’m hoping it gets me back into the swing of things and I won’t have such big gaps again. So until next time, keep safe and hope to catch you all again soon.
