Blogging, Real Life and Why Cancer Doesn't Care.

Blogging is my hobby rather than my profession so often has to take a back seat to things such as paying the mortgage, helping my daughter with her homework, mowing the lawn and (if SynSynn from the House of Paincakes Blog Network is to be believed) kidnapping random people and holding them hostage in my basement before murdering them...

...obviously only three of those things are actually true...

Not...THE BASEMENT!!!!!

I don't normally mention my personal life in blog posts but in this case it's relevant so I'll  make an exception so bear with me. I had a few months ago decided to expand the scope of the blog to cover more aspects of the local hobby community specifically and the wider community generally in a number of areas. Amongst these features were Hobby Galleries, Guest Articles, a separate Newsletter tab, more Introduction features and a number of articles that were more in the areas of 'inspirational' rather than practical such as this Steampunk post.

I'd made a significant start on these features when unfortunately my partner was diagnosed with Cancer which for a variety of reasons made popping down to my FLGS a bit problematic due to the chemotherapy effectively meaning she had no immune system whatsoever for two weeks out of three and next to no immune system for the third.

It's worth pointing out that it was the early discovery of the cancer that has made it so treatable so I'd highly recommend regular check-ups for any-one who feels they're at risk as it took three visits to our own doctor before they final sent her for a check up. It would have been easy to just have ignored the problem and then I dread to think what the consequences might have been...

Anyway, short of demanding that all people entering the shop had a health check first...

We're just off to our FLGS for a game of Malifaux...

...there was no way of keeping her healthy other than keeping her away from people as much as possible and from a personal point of view I had no desire to leave her on her own while I went to play with toy soldiers. This made obtaining detailed enough pictures of armies to do galleries nearly impossible and made Introduction articles somewhat tricky due to the fact that I'd have had to have learned new systems on my own and then played with or against myself neither of which are particularly optimal ways to test a system in detail or to explore it well enough to explain it adequately to another...not as well as I would like to anyway. Sometimes I get lucky though as in the case of Salute 2014 it fell right at the tail end of one of the her treatments so she was well enough to accompany me as to be honest I wouldn't have been happy to go without her as it's a long time to leave a poorly person all on their own and to be perfectly honest I've got that used to the rare benefits of having a partner who shares my hobby that the thought of doing it without her was frankly quite unappealing indeed.

I also discovered that getting people who say they want to write articles for you to actually do so takes a lot more pestering than I currently have the energy for...

All the local hobbyists lived in fear of the 'productivity motivation' tools.....

Certain features have been unaffected though. The Unboxings have continued just fine, editorials and inspiring articles can still be written (though they tend to be less confrontational in direct proportion to the lower amount of time I spend around people...perhaps there's a pattern there...) and general hobbying can still be documented even if the 'crew a week' project has in reality become the 'crew every now and again' project. To be honest it's the crew a week bit that I most miss being able to give my attention to...especially as I'm still over ten crews behind. Of course when working out my priorities at any given time 'make sure the woman I love has medicine' is much higher up the list than 'get around to painting Pandora' or 'repair that Cryx army that fell off the shelf'....

Fortunately things are looking up. The operation and subsequent treatment have been a success so far and the horrible part of it (the chemotherapy bit) will soon be over which means we can soon resume our joint hobbying activities and I can start giving those features a bit more attention. It also means my painting will start to improve again as she'll now have the energy to shout at me for 'forgetting' to do that last layer of highlighting and I'll once again have to suffer the inconvenience of actually matching colours correctly...still...that's a small price to pay, lol. She's already working out what short hair styles might suit her but strangely enough I've actually got used to her being bald now...

It also means that I can start bugging the hell out of any-one whose promised to do a feature for me and then hasn't...so brace yourself if you happen to be one of those people...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome...just keep them positive okay...I've heard enough cancer horror stories to last a lifetime...