Na-na na-na na-na na-na na! BatAlex!

Another bout of silence but not as long as before. The virtual world is not holding much appeal for me at the moment, it has to be said. I’m spending most of my time working and being with family as per usual.

Work has seriously improved. My old assistant has taken a secondment to another section and I have a new assistant whom I have been working with for the last two months and it’s a HUGE improvement. She is much more relaxed and more efficient. We are actually AHEAD of our current schedule of classes and have some time to tackle the jobs that normally get left to the semester breaks. It’s awesome. She doesn’t take offence to things like my old assistant did and I don’t have to tiptoe around her like I used to. End result: I’m more relaxed and happy at work. I’d nearly forgotten what that was like.

At home, I am enjoying my son being three. His personality has come leaping out now that he’s discovered his voice and it’s a doozy. His first passion is Cars. Not just any old cars (though he does love Matchbox and Hot Wheels) but Cars from Pixar. He has just about every Cars thing that has ever been made but he’s also recently developed a liking for Batman. Most three-year olds I’ve met love Spider-man but not my boy. Batman all the way and that’s fine by me. I love Batman. He has a little Batman shirt that comes complete with a cape and he loves few things more than running around trying to make the cape fly out behind him and it’s so much fun to watch.

He loves the shirt so much that he wears it everywhere he can. This lead to the following incident, as described to me by my wife. The other day he was at the shops with his Mum and wearing his Batman shirt and cape. It came time to leave and so the following exchange took place:

“Alex, it’s time to go.”

“I’m not Alex. I’m Batman and Batman goes where he wants!”

“Well, I’m Batman’s MUM and Batman’s MUM says it’s time to go!”

“Oh.”

Heh. I would have LOVED to have seen that. My little Batman!

On the gaming front, not much has happened. I had planned on getting lots ready for CanCon 2013 Apocalypse but to tell the truth, nothing much has changed. I’ve developed a new list that has cut down the number of models I need to paint from 117 to 82 but I still have a LOT to paint (only 1 model of that 82 is painted). Easter is on its way, though, and I hope to get a little time to do some more prep on the army and get it ready.

Hello 2012

A flurry of posting activity and then silence. Until now.

Yep, last year I got busy with the postings and then lay low. The usual excuses still apply: family and work. Christmas was very nice with a visit from my folks in the morning to watch my son go mad opening presents and not know what to play with first. They also helped to assemble Alex’s big present: a 16ft trampoline. It’s a big SOB. Luckily we had cleared a big section of the backyard only a couple of months before otherwise we’d have had no where to put it. Thankfully he loves it and gets very depressed when it rains and he can’t use it. Christmas lunch then followed with a few friends joining us for the traditional stuffing of the face punctuated with home-made mojitos (I’m pretty awesome at mojitos I have to say). A nice relaxing day that I really did enjoy.

New Year came and went and I started back at work. First thing up was hiring a new assistant. My previous one took a secondment to another section to earn more money (yay!) so I had to hire a replacement. She seems to be working out really well and we appear to be getting on O.K. so the stress here at work has lessened, which has made for a happier me. It should be an interesting year as QUT is hosting TechNet, a conference for Technical Staff from around Australia and I’m involved with the Entertainment Committee. We’re having fun arranging a place for the conference dinner as well as the attendee packs and other entertainment (funny that).

On the gaming front I’ve done very little. I’m spending lots of spare time with my family as Alex is at such a fun age. His speech continues to rocket along and we’ve finally reached the point where we are telling him to shut up. I never thought I’d be happy to have to tell my boy to be quiet. But on the topic of gaming, I’ve decided to aim for CanCon 2013 to play Warhammer 40,000 Apocalypse again. Last time I went and played it, I had a great time and I’d love to do it again. To that end I am planning my army now so there isn’t a big rush to get it finished. Last time I took Tau (with the attendant Tigershark aircraft I built. I still owe Blog-land pics of the finished products). This time I plan to break out my first 40K army: Imperial Guard. Normally the Imperial Guard are pretty squishy with lots of infantry that dies easily but in Apocalypse, you get to take some of the really BIG stuff, which the Imperial Guard have in abundance. I am aiming to take a company of three Baneblades (tanks that are 4 times the size of an ordinary tank, with the expected big guns and tough hides), a Shadowsword (another superheavy tank with a massive laser cannon), Deathstrike Vortex Missile (think of a cruise missile launcher who’s missile annihilates everything it touches when it blows) and lots of infantry to protect them. Heh. Fun. But there’s lots of assembling and painting to do between now and January 2013. Hopefully I can use this blog as a way of keeping track of my progress but based on my track record, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you.

In any case, stay tuned for either modelling updates or a complete lack of activity!

Of Bikes and Marriage...

Wow. This morning I was pretty drowsy. The course yesterday really took it out of me and I was wasted. 8 hours of sleep later and I still felt pretty cr@p. I'm cleaning up the kitchen when Tash wanders over to me and says: "Happy 13th Anniversary, hon!" Wait, what? Its not the 21st is it!?! Well sh!te, it is! I'd nearly forgotten our anniversary! We've been married for 13 years and I nearly let the day go by without a thought. I never thought that would happen to me. Ever. Thankfully, my wife is a wonderful, forgiving person and she was not upset. We're going to go out for dinner tonight with the boy in tow and have ourselves a family night. Should be very nice.

As to the bike-thing, I passed my Q-Ride course! YAY! I was really very nervous about it but I think I did really well. I was most nervous about the road-ride but once I was out there, it felt so natural. My gear changing and braking all came to me smoothly and I enjoyed the ride. Wow. I went into QLD Transport today and am now an officially licensed motorcycle rider. Look out world! Here I come! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

My Boy's Growing Up.

Two posts in a single day? Are you kidding me? Wow. He’s either got lots of news to share, is feeling talkative or is bored at work. Well, it’s mostly the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got stuff to do but I’m just not interested in doing it. Plus I’m on my break.

I mentioned a couple of months ago that Alex is in speech therapy to treat his childhood apraxia of speech (or “CAS”). He’s been coming along brilliantly and is up to spontaneous 4 to 6 word sentences. This is awesome. For a child diagnosed with severe CAS, to be spontaneously generating sentences of this length after only 7 months of treatment is truly amazing. But that’s not the best part. What is even better is that he is also spontaneously copying new words and repeating them without prompting. This means he is starting to overcome the apraxia barriers in his mind and body. And yesterday evening he showed me just how far he’s come.

We’ve had a big corner of our backyard cleared out of the weeds and crap. This left a big, bare patch of soil which we seeded with some grass. This has come up but the recent (and sudden) increase in temperature coupled with a lack of rain has turned it brown and its starting to die. Water restrictions have been eased lately so I thought we’d water it to try and get it going again. I was watering it when Alex came over and told me “My turn, Dad”. I gave him the hose and he ran off to spray the water into his sandpit. I told him to come back and water the grass.

“No. My turn, Dad!”

“But the grass needs water, Alex.”

“No.”

“But look, it’s all brown and sad. Its needs the water to be happy again.”

“Oh, no. My turn for happy!”

With that, he ran over to the grass and began to water it by running up and down, spraying water and saying “Happy! Happy!” over and over. He’s never said the word “happy” before. It involves several sounds he’s had trouble with (“H”, “Pee”) but he just took straight to it. It was wonderful and made the months of hard work worth every minute and cent we’ve spent. Occasionally he’d stop to survey his handiwork and see a brown patch he’d not seen previously. He’d say “Oh, no. Sad, Dad!” I’d ask him, “So what will you do?”, “I go happy!” would be his reply (we’re working on “make”). He’d smile at me and run off with the hose and water the patch of “sad” grass. It felt good to have him communicate with me. I can’t wait to hold long conversations with my boy.

Where HAVE you been?

Wow. The months fly by. Its such a cliche but at the same time its not uncommon to look up and think, "Geez! Where did that time go?". And so it's been for me. So what has been keeping me so busy?

Gaming.
I've mentioned my liking for the miniature games Warmachine and Hordes before. What I may not have mentioned that I am a volunteer rep for the company that produces them. For those of you not familiar with these games and their parent company, Privateer Press, we reps are called Press Gangers (Privateer Press - Press Gangers; get it?). Each year in Australia we hold a National Championship for these games to crown an Australian Champion. Its normally held at GenCon Australia, formerly Australia's "Premier Gaming Event" and this year I volunteered to run it. About 8 weeks out from the event, GenCon Australia announced they would not be running this year due to "financial concerns". This created a few hiccups around the traps but eventually we found a new venue and ploughed ahead with running our National Titles anyway. I wanted to make this event the biggest and best Nationals ever seen and to that end I wanted to give every player a prize-pack for coming along. It was quite a lot of work getting it all together. I could bore you with all the details but to make a long story short, I ran the event (with much help from friends and fellow Press Gangers), the players played and walked away with their swag of stuff and the various champions walked away with a swag of prizes. I thought the event went along pretty well on the whole but it ate a large chunk of my spare time.

Work.
I won't say much about work as you never know who's reading your blog and don't want to unnecessarily offend certain people. Suffice to say that I've had some big issues at work and have been focusing on getting under control there. Its been pretty stressful and I'll be glad when its all sorted out some more or I go on holidays a few weeks (yay January!).

Family.
Before you get worried, my wife and son are fine. We still have a few sleep issues with our boy but they are slowly improving. He goes to sleep much better now than he used to, he just gets pretty restless some nights and finds it hard to settle himself. We're working on it. Other than that, our boy is a pretty happy lad who is fairly easy to take care of. He has his good days and bad days but on the whole, the good far outweighs the bad. My wife is enjoying being back working at least two days a week and feels like she's contributing something (as if looking after our son wasn't enough). No, my family issues have been with one of my brothers. He suffers from pretty severe depression and recently it got the better of him. Thankfully, nothing tragic happened but it was touch and go for quite a while. While I didn't have to deal with most of the problems, it still made me worry a lot at a time when I had lots of worries already. Depression is a very serious mental health issue that many people don't realise is quite so bad until they have to deal with it (and I didn't deal very well with it I have to say).

But thank heavens a lot of it has passed and things are looking up. I hope to be blogging more regularly in the near future. I'm heading to Canberra to play in an Apocalypse tourney being run by my mate Bart in January and I am really looking forward to it so to motivate myself to get my figures ready I'll try and blog about my progress. Stay tuned.