2015 Commitments

So, let’s look towards my goals and hopes for my 2015 commitments.  Part of my issues on some of these will be that I probably be working out of town most, if not all, of the year with one or two weekends a month home.

Personal Related:

• Change my diet / eating habits to lose weight and become more health oriented.
• Try to exercise more, mainly by walking
• Try to clear out more items from my aunt’s house and get a Building Inspector to find what needs to be corrected for possibly renting it out or selling it
• Go back to cleaning up my basement
• Try to get rid of more books and start reducing my CD & DVD collections

Entertainment Related:

Read / listen to a minimum of 24 books by the end of the year, especially since I am not planning to read many novellas or essays this year.  Specially, I want to finish reading the current Ridgeway book that I am reading and finish off the other two that are on my list to read on the same subject.  I also plan to read a couple of books on WW1, some books on the Argentine side of the Falklands conflict, and to finish off the Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.  After that, my main goal is to read the four volume opus by Bruce Nichols’ Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri (just over 1600 pages including notes & indexes!)

I play to track on my blog’s 2015 Commitments page also all of the radio plays / dramas and movies that I watch as well.  I am sort of interested in see how many different things that I watch / listen to as well.  The catch will be that I will only list it one time if I listen / watch it multiple times. 

Traveling to site-see or visiting local sites will be at a minimum this year as I plan to spend most of my free time and time off working on my aunt’s house or my house.  However, I do plan to go to the Missouri History Museum to see the Utopia: Revisiting the German State in America exhibit.  Otherwise, anything else will not be planned.

Gaming Related:

Here is where I am going to make up a bunch of wild and out-right lies.  I know that I am lying to myself, but here we go!

My basement gaming table is one of my top priorities for 2015.  I want to get everything cleared off that I got on it, which really is not much, but I need to sort, inventory, and bag it for selling instead of just sweeping it in to a trash can.  I think I can realistically do it in two days, if I can only commit myself to it when I am back at home.

Continue on with my 15mm Ridgeway project in painting my Canadians and start repainting my Fenian figs.  Next I am going to lay out a scale map and see what I need for terrain to make this a playable game prior to the 150^th anniversary of the battle in 2016.

I am planning to restart my 15mm ACW project this year too.  I am going to try to mirror it when I start reworking on my Fenians for Ridgeway. 

If I get my Ridgeway project near completion, I might start back up my 1/6000 Falklands Conflict naval project.   This should be an easy painting project due to the smallest of the models.

I plan to start working / buying up more terrain.  This will be pretty restrictive as I will really only be able to do it the weekends I am home since I will be limited to how much space I can pack of gaming items that will need to  be transported back with me in my car at the end of the out of town project.

I am hoping to run at least three games this year: a 20mm Falklands game, a 10mm Vietnam game, and the third to be determined later, but I am thinking of running an ACW game using paper figures from Billy Bones Workshop until my 15mm ACW figures are done.

Due to other commitments for spending free time on cleaning out my aunt’s house and other projects around the house, I am not planning to attend any gaming conventions this year.

I will start back up on my downsizing of my dead gaming projects and try to get back to selling stuff off, but if I am out of town for most of the year, I might only try to sell off only a small amount periodically as I will be limited to what I can carry with me in the car along with all of my important items (clothes, cooking ware, etc.)

One thing that will be good this year is I will have my house finally paid off!  So now I have what I have being using to pay my mortgage can be spent on other things.  Most of it will go to making sure my aunt’s house will pass inspections, increase in my insurance for a second home, extra property taxes, etc. and another large chunk will go to savings, but I should have extra cash for gaming.  I am probably going to start buying more pre-made terrain, especially snow/winter as I really don’t have any of that.   Then I probably start sending stuff off again for painting commissions. 

Finally, new projects – I am planning to avoid doing any new projects this year.  Yeah, I tend to break this one every year, but I am trying to really mean it.  I am going to only buy things to finish off or add to existing projects.  The only exception that I might make is breaking down and buying the 28mm Perry’s ACW / British Intervention figures to do Ridgeway in a larger scale.  I guess one could argue that this would be a new project, but I am looking at it as an extension to my existing project…but there are no plans to buy the figures now.

As always…cheers!

Sapper