We have normality*. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem**

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

I've been away a few weeks and, for that, I apologise. The reason for my absence is simple illness. Over the course of the last month I've had two colds and one weird bug/virus/somethingoranother that had me with room spins, nausea and vomiting. None of these things, alone, would have been an issue normally but I've fund, since having Covid a couple of years ago, that my resistance to things like that has been severely diminished and I find myself knocked on my arse by things I would have merrily strode through before. Even as I write this, the cold that started ten days ago is still lingering on, I feel physically drained and the 2-mile walk to work has just about done for me. It feels ridiculous that I can be knocked back by such minor things but it is what it is. 

The real trouble is that being ill, having time off, not getting stuff done is a real trigger for my depression. The longer I'm inactive, the more I struggle with the Bad Head Stuff and this is why I've dropped off the radar for the last few weeks. I know from bitter experience that trying to force myself out of a depressive period can be the worst thing to do. I've lost count of the amount of work that's gone in the paint stripper (or worse- in the bin) because my head's been in the worng place and I've hated the work I've done, which leads me further down the spiral, as I then beat myself up for wasting time, or destroying work that was probably salvageable which leads to self-doubt...etc, etc. It's a horrible slippery slope. So I took myself out of the equation. Tried to relax, stopped the blog and the Instagram posts, took the pressure off. I did manage to sneak in the occasional few hours' work here and there and got a couple of jobs, that were nearly done anyway, finished just to test my headspace but, for the most part, I've been playing games, watching tv and reading, until I felt ready to raise my head above the parapet again.

Unfortunately, the upshot of all this is that I'm now massively behind on everything. Money is tight because all the commissons I was expecting to finish over the last month have ground to a halt and my Golden Demon projects have barely started. So I've got a LOT of catching up to do. As I said, I did manage to get a few bits finished, such as the Deathwatch and Chosen shown below, and I've got blog posts regarding them pretty much ready to go over the next couple of weeks, along with a couple of other posts I've been working on, so I've got plenty of content to keep things ticking over here for a month or so. 

I'm having to seriously rethink my Golden Demon entries. My priority has to be finishing off my outstanding commissions which is going to leave me precious little time to work on my own stuff.  I have to accept that there's no way I'm going to get entries done that stand the slightest chance of placing (not that I expected to produce winning-level entries anyway, with the standard of the competition these days...) andthe grand plans I had will have to be abandoned, but I'm determined that I'm going to take something along, even if it's just to make up the numbers. It's not the winning that counts, after all, but the taking part and, besides, I wanted to use the event to catch up with some people more than anything else and that's far more important to me. So I'm going to use the opportunity to finish off some projects from the lost and the nameless box- my huge collection of unfinished projects. That way I can take some personal satisfaction from getting them done, even if they don't cut the mustard in the competition. 

The other thing that's fallen by the wayside in my time away has been #TheStreak23 that I've been running over on my Instagram posts. This has been a real disappointment as I'd managed to get it up to 40 days and it's a shame to have to start over. I've thought about ignoring the time off and take a sickness mulligan but I thought better to start over. Then I thought, if I add a .1 to #TheStreak23 I can keep an eye on how many ties I have had to restart when I get to the end of the year. Clever, no?

So there we go.  Again, I apologise for being away but it really was circumstance beyond my control. Apologies also to my patient customers, and thank you for putting up with my absence. I'll be back next week with a painting guide for either the Chosen or the Deathwatch (whichever I get finished first) and the daily Instagram posts will start again tomorrow. Ooh, and don't forget to log in to Die Rolling over on Twitch on Tuesday evening at 7.30pm (UK time) for some D&D-based shenanigans!

Thanks for reading!

-Stu

p.s. if you like what I'm doing here, a click on the link below and the donation of the price of a pot of paint would be a wonderful gesture. I'm thinking of adding special stuff to the Ko-fi, like competitions and prize draws, so it'd be a good idea to at least have a look there now and then 😁 

*What we laughingly refer to as normal around here, anyway...

**A gold star to the first person who identifies the quote...