Digressions and Diversions

It's a fact of life as an adult that we have to do a lot of things without having much control over the schedule. My second job as a freelance proofreader has turned up two pieces of work this week, and it's back to the day job after an extended holiday, so painting has slowed to a crawl again. I have parts of three projects on the workbench today: chariots for the Bronze Age, a group of 40mm semiflat cavalry for my Charge! project, and some 1/72 scale Cossacks for a little digression into the Russian Civil War. Despite years of trying to keep just one thing in front of me until it's finished, I still tend to scatter work across a lot of things. This wasn't so much of an issue when I was painting more productively, but at a busy time in my life, it means that taking on anything new is an invitation to frustration.

Without picking up a brush, though, I did at least do two things today that bear on miniatures. The first was to finish up Edward Luttwak's new book The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire at lunch, which had me considering pre-gunpowder sieges. I've at least got a neat little 1/72 scale Usborne cardstock castle I could besiege, plus a selection of Zvezda siege equipment that came with a Russian/Mongol starter set. The second was to suddenly realize how I could make use of the (simple) features of my new computer to make handling the dispatches on a delayed communication-based campaign possible. My first Charge! based campaign foundered under my inability to handle the message traffic. Time to slip CS Grant on campaigns back into my briefcase...