A tentative return...

Hi all (if anyone of my old readership is still out there)

Looking back, it's been over 5 months since my last post. With my fingers poised over the keyboard now, for the 54th (maybe) time of trying to bring myself to dive back into the world of blogging, I'm finding the process difficult to say the least. My last post, way back in April was meant to be a triumphant post celebrating the excellence of Uncon 5.0 - a board game convention, that I thoroughly love, but instead became a post about the sudden passing of my father. Tbh enthusiasm for most things ended... On top of all of that, work announced that I would have to complete another university module at level 6 in order to mentor students (a condition of my employment apparently) which would pile on pressure and to make matters worse the founder of Uncon announced that he would no longer be putting the event on as it was causing too much financial pressure...

So what has changed? well time passes and people heal(ish), things get easier and enthusiasms return. For one thing I have completed the uni module and that particular pressure is in the rearview mirror. Work, while still challenging, is starting to relax it's demands on my focus.  While I miss my dad (and my mum, who passed 2 years ago) every day, I have moved through the intense grief phase and have moved to a more acceptance phase (it is still bizarre to think I'm technically an orphan now at 45...).

In the last few months I have been gaming, although tabletop wargames have become a lot less frequent for a number of reasons.  I've played mostly board games which have a quicker setup and turn around time, although my favourites are still mostly based around miniatures like Rising Sun, Blood Rage and Zombicide. I have also been painting a lot of miniatures - commissions for board games, my own games like Zombicide and for Warhammer Fantast Roleplay 4ed.  These projects will be spoken more about as and when (and if) I blog over the next few months.  I was also commissioned to build a dice tower for a client as far away as Mexico City, again I will showcase this later on.  I've also been working hard to streamline the rules and polish my own BG design "Blood, Sweat & Horses" and some major developments have happened around that which I will also post about at a later time.

So lots to talk about, I have been reading my favourite blogs and hope to start commenting on them again soon. Thank you to all of you lovely people who offered your condolences, I read them all and appreciated them greatly at the time and still do, what a wonderful community we have built here.  Thank you especially to my buddy (who, over the last few months, I have been a very neglectful friend to) Rich Gates - who has encouraged me to get back behind the keyboard and bang out these few words.  My apologies for the content free post, hopefully some regular(ish) posts to follow shortly but 

Welcome back to Da Grotto...

dGG aka Andy