And Low He Was Welcomed Into The Fold

Well, my three weeks of enforced exile are over and I've been re-united with my family :-)

The last three weeks have been really weird. The house has been very dark and quiet. I've been living a bachelor lifestyle of constant gaming and basic food, I've been watching my daughter change noticeably between our video chats every few days. Aside: Anyone who tells you that we're not living in the future because cars don't fly, we don't have personal jetpacks and we don't live on the moon hasn't appreciated the full wonder that is video conferencing with your one year old offspring. One the phone she silently holds it then either hangs up or puts me on hold accidentally. Over video she gets really excited to see me and interacts with me as if I was there (pressing my nose on the screen and saying 'beep' is my favourite!).

It's been hard being away from them for so long, having to hear about the new skills she's learning second hand and knowing there's nothing I can do to help when she has a bad night or is ill. It's going to be tough to re-adjust to the bad nights and early starts after three weeks of late nights and lying in, but it'll be totally worth it and I'm glad it's finally over.

That's not to say I haven't put my exile to good use. I had to keep myself busy to distract myself from the loneliness, so I played a lot of games. I've made it to Newcastle Gamers twice (once all day!), Newcastle Playtest once, been down to see my mates Terry, Andrew and Graham in the south for a day's gaming and played a 10 hour game of Twiglet. In total, 54 games in 18 days!

Now that my family are back I'm going to have a break from gaming for a bit and concentrate on spending some quality time with them.

Having said that, I'm still working on getting another Codename: Vacuum version together, incorporating the ideas I've had over the last few weeks and at a lower priority I've got some more Zombology ideas to get together too.

In related news, I've started getting art for the NaGa DeMon competition winners' copies of Zombology from the artist :-)