First stage almost complete

I was right. When tidying up, the moment when things appear to be most confused immediately precedes the moment when things come together again.

I am almost at that latter moment.

I have just one corner of my toy/wargames room to deal with ... and then the first stage of the spring clean will be over, and I can begin the second stage.

So what is the second stage if the room is now tidy?

That is simple; it involves going around the room AGAIN and checking that I know where everything now is and – if necessary – moving one or two bits so that related items are stored together. Once that is done, matters will progress to the third stage, which is the point when all the loose odds and ends are sorted and stored.

I fully expect the first stage to be completed just after lunch (we have to go to do some shopping this morning, otherwise it would be finished this morning) and the second stage to be completed tomorrow. The third stage will then begin, with the intention that it will end by Friday at the latest. (We have a trip to the National Archives planned for later this week and I also have two Masonic meetings to attend.)

I hope to 'celebrate' the completion of the spring clean with a wargame ... but who knows when that will be?

Sixty-four ... and one day

After enjoying a great birthday yesterday that included eating an excellent dinner with my wife at a nearby Italian restaurant called Da Peppino ...

... today it was back to the serious business of spring cleaning my toy/wargames room.

I have been working on this for most of the day, and I am now at the stage where I seem to have no room left in which to sort out what I have but previous experience tells me that this is the precursor to the final stage of the task, and with a bit of luck I should be finished tomorrow.

I have found quite a lot of stuff that I had forgotten that I had, including several large pieces of green and tan-coloured felt. These will be ideal for use as playing surfaces for my PORTABLE WARGAME, as will the set of Chessex vinyl gridded mats I have found. I also have several rolls of green and desert-coloured vinyl that Games Workshop used to sell, and these are also being 'saved' for possible future use.

I still have several large storage boxes left to open and go through, but they should be sorted by later this evening ... and with luck I will be able to put everything I am keeping back into storage boxes etc., during the course of Sunday afternoon. I will have some stuff that I will be getting rid of, but I suspect that it will be a lot less than I originally thought.

Sixy-four

When I get older, losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out 'til quarter to three,
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

You'll be older too,
Ah, and if you say the word,
I could stay with you.

I could be handy, mending a fuse,
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside,
Sunday mornings, go for a ride.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear.
We shall scrimp and save.
Ah, grandchildren on your knee,
Vera, Chuck and Dave.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say,
Yours sincerely wasting away.
Give me your answer,
Fill in a form, mine forever more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

I am going to find out whether any of the above is true today!

Progress is being made ... slowly

The spring clean of my toy/wargames room has continued today ... but progress has been slower than I had hoped.

Today I have concentrated on sorting out my modelling tools (e.g. razor saws, modelling knives, files, clamps etc.) and I had not realised quite how much stuff I owned. I have thrown away anything that was damaged and/or dangerous, and where I have had duplicates of the same tool I have usually only kept the one that was in the best condition.

With luck this part of my spring cleaning task should be finished later today. I will then rationalise my paints and paint brushes before moving on to the next stage of the process ... which is likely to be the storage boxes that contain my collection of painted 15mm-scale buildings and unmade model kits.

Time for a spring clean

Having decided to put my OP14/ITCHY AND SCRATCHY rules project on the back burner I have decided to carry out a bit of a spring clean of both my computer and my toy/wargames room.

A sort through my computer files showed that I had multiple copies of quite a few files, and that by rationalising them I have freed up over 5Gb of space. I also found several files that were saved in formats that were either no longer supported or that will become unsupported over the next year or so ... and I have managed to save most of them in newer formats.

The spring clean of my toy/wargames room is going to take me longer to complete ... but I have made a start. So far I have found a boxful of modelling paint where the contents of almost every pot or jar  was dry, a tray of old paint brushes - most of which seemed to have very fragile bristles - and containers of used superglue that are impossible to open.

I hope to carry on with this spring clean tomorrow ... and I suspect that I am going to be filling several bagfuls of rubbish before I am finished.

Nugget 268

I collected the latest edition of THE NUGGET (N268) from the printer this afternoon and I intend to post it out to members of Wargame Developments tomorrow morning.

I have already uploaded the PDF versions of THE NUGGET and THE NUGGET COLOUR SUPPLEMENT to the Wargame Developments website, and they are now available for members of Wargame Developments to read online or to download and print.

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IMPORTANT: Please note that this is the fourth issue of THE NUGGET to be published for the 2013-2014 subscription year. It is still possible to subscribe, and this can be done online via the Wargame Developments website. Please note that the subscription costs rose with effect from the beginning of the current subscription year.

"If I was going there I wouldn't start from here"

This is exactly how I am feeling today about my attempts to meld together elements of Richard Brooks' OP14 rules with the combat mechanisms from my ITCHY AND SCRATCHY rules. Yesterday I thought that I was almost there ... but the cold light of today showed that not only was I wrong but that I had made several quite fundamental errors that were going to require a complete re-write of what I had so far produced.

The problem is that I had thought that what I was doing was going to be a simple 'cut and paste' job that would require a little bit of tidying up at the end. That is how I started out ... and that is why I have not got to where I wanted to be.

I am now in something of a quandary and need to find an answer to the following questions:

• Do I persist with my current draft and try to iron out the problems?
• Do I start again from scratch?
• Do I walk away from my idea for the time being with the intention of returning to it at a later date?
• Do I give up trying to do what I set out to do and move onto a new project?

I am very tempted to answer 'No', 'No', 'Possibly', and 'Yes' to these questions ... but before I do I intend have a good night's sleep first.

Itchy and Scratchy meets OP14: the first draft ... and the siren call of Morschauser!

Thanks to a bad bout of insomnia last night, I rose early this morning and finished writing the first rough draft of my latest wargame rules. As regular blog readers will know, these combine elements of my own ITCHY AND SCRATCHY rules with some from Richard Brooks' OP14 rules.

When I call then a first rough draft I mean that they are very rough indeed. In fact I know that there a still a few things that need to be ironed out before I can even begin thinking about play-testing them. As I am going to be rather busy for the rest of today (I have an important Lodge meeting this afternoon and evening) and for most of tomorrow (we had a guest staying overnight), I will have to leave the 'ironing' until later in the week.

During my bout of sleeplessness I began thinking about the various Morschauser-based rules I have written over the years ... and how much fun and enjoyment they have given me. This morning I glanced through the computer file containing those rules, and began to hear (in my imagination) the siren call of Morschauser ... and I must admit that 'going back to Morschauser basics' has a tremendous appeal.

I am trying to resist ... but I doubt if I will be able to do so for very long!

Seduced by Morschauser

I spent most of the morning finishing off cutting up and shredding the remaining laurel branches that had broken off and fallen down during the recent storms. I then raked up all the dead leaves that had also come down ... and now I have a large green wheelie bin full of leaves and shredded laurel branches and a largish pile of laurel logs.

By the time I had finished I was feeling rather tired and did little else before lunch. After lunch I helped my wife to try to sort out the information she had acquired concerning her father's army career. We used a variety of different documents provided by the Army Records Department as well his Pay Book and Soldiers Book. None of the documents showed a complete breakdown of where he was, what unit/formation he served with, and the places he served in throughout his service. In the end I used a spreadsheet to enter and sort the information, and we finally have a slightly less confused idea about his army career, although there still appear to be some anomalies and quite a few gaps.

Towards the latter part of the afternoon I decided to try to do some more work on my combined OP14 and ITCHY AND SCRATCHY wargame rules ... but despite my best intentions I was ‘dragged’ away by a recent addition to my collection of articles written by or about Joseph Morschauser. This happened because the VINTAGE WARGAMING blog had published a copy of Joseph Morschauser's contribution to the 1966/67 edition of Donald Featherstone's WARGAMERS YEARBOOK and I had printed off a copy of what he had written.

Over the years I have been transcribing and saving all the relevant articles that I can find. As a result I have a small but gradually expanding archive of Morschauser's work ... and this afternoon – as a consequence of reading the latest addition to my collection – I made the mistake of sitting back and reading through everything in the archive, with the result that I did very little work on anything else.

One thing in the latest article did make me sit up and think. It was the following paragraph:

I have been playing around with grids and small war game boards for some time now and have finally developed a workable and interesting method of conducting full-scale battles on a 3 by 3 foot board lined with a 3 inch grid. To push things to the limit so to speak I have designed this one for use with 54mm troops figuring that if it were possible to fight a full battle with these on such a small board any other scale would work.

Visions of some of my Britains 54mm figures being used on my small tabletop suddenly came to mind ... as did the idea for a 'Very Little Wars' game! I even went into my toy/wargames room to see if I had a large enough piece of green felt on which to mark out a 12 x 12 grid of 3-inch squares before sanity returned and I decided that I needed to try to get one project finished first before I started another.

Yet again I had almost been seduced away from what I should have been doing by Morschauser!

A short break in the weather

For the first time in what seems like an age it was not raining this morning ... and it has not started yet!

As a result I decided to spend some time in the garden cutting up and shredding the laurel hedge branches that had broken off and fallen down during the recent storms. After a couple of hours work I had managed to get all the branches together and had cut up and shredded about a third of them.

The time I spent gardening gave me the opportunity to do some thinking about how I am going to combine some elements of Richard Brooks' OP14 wargame rules with those drawn from my own ITCHY AND SCRATCHY wargame rules ... and with luck I should be able to start work on the first draft later today.