Long time, no update

My last post was over a week ago, but it feels like ages. I wish I could say I've been productive, but I find myself flailing about more than usual as I try to wrap up various time sensitive year end projects.

These include:

• Making a calendar with pictures of the kids to give to family members
• Printing out mailing labels for the annual Holiday cards
• Going through the thousands of pictures from the Flag football season to get a few good ones
• Putting up the Christmas decorations

The calendar I've been making since not long after my daughter was born. Initially it was meant to be something mainly for my wife's grandmother and to satisfy my nerdy impulse to make a calendar that had all the Chinese lunar dates and holidays on it. I began to lose interest in doing it several years ago, but apparently no one in the family buys calendars any more. I've since pared it down a bit by only including the major holidays and luni-solar events, and I send it out for printing instead of doing it myself. The rest is fairly mundane and self explanatory.

I quickly lost my painting mojo with what felt like a whirlwind of activity. Really it was only a resumption of normal activity. School and extra curricular. So I have nothing to show for prep on the challenge or for the game I must play before going on holidays.

One thing I did do, however, was re-install vassal on my new Surface Pro 2. The Surface is Microsoft's latest tablet PC running Windows 8.1 and so far I have been enjoying it. Thus far I have used it for just about everything that I was using my 15.6" ASUS laptop annd my Kindle Fire for. I have GIMP installed and Netflix and Kindle for PC. I think I would agree with reviews that it is a tad unwieldy as a tablet, but it is an extremely convenient laptop.

But I digress. I put Vassal on there to see about playing games on it over the holidays. I may have mentioned before that I want to play out a sort of faux Great Patriotic War campaign using Blitzkrieg for strategic movement and play out the combats using Memoir '44, or rather M'44 stuff with Bob Corderey's latest rules. But I need to add stuff onto the modules so we shall see how that works.

Time to think about projects and how to achieve them. You also may have noticed, should you look at such things, that I've updated the games played to show a few games of Zombie Dice (very fun) and that last Rally Round the King (RRtK) battle I played back in October(?).

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I started writing this over the weekend and it felt a bit rambling. I was going to rewrite it and try to make it coherent but in the meantime I've had a bit of bad news. I've somehow given myself hematuria. It's not painful but I wouldn't look it up if you are squeamish. I went for a run and when I got home experienced the symptoms, which quite frankly freaked me out. Apparently this can happen to long distance runners, which I don't consider myself. There is some evidence of kidney damage and perhaps muscle involvement, so it's not of the garden variety. So once again no exercise and a bunch of tests. The one bright side is I saw a new doctor at the practice and she is quite young and attractive.