Pledge is kinda weird this week.

My blood pressure been up lately, partly stress of work and life, but also too much processed food in my diet with all that salt.

So my pledge is to start cooking real food instead of opening the freezer, tins and packets all the time. I live alone and making an effort seemed too much trouble, but given how high my BP was I decided I needed to make some changes.

To that end I bought myself a bigger airfryer along with lots of fresh fruit and veg to use in recipes.

A healthy gamer is better than a stressed gamer with no motivation, or enthusiasm.

Have a healthy new year everyone… and a happy one.

@pagan8th like @sundancer said : start simple

Spaghetti (or any form of pasta) is stupendously simple to make. All you really need is some kind of sauce.
There’s also subscription services like ‘Hello Fresh’ and ‘Marley Spoon’ that are useful as they give you all the ingredients and the instructions to use them. It’s not perfect and pretty expensive, but even a short subscription will teach you a few things.

The most annoying thing about cooking meals is that everything tends to cater to (large) families. Even recipes tend to aim for 4 grown ups. However there are cook books that focus on students which can be useful.

Oh … and ‘SMAC’ (I think in English it’s “spam”, processed meat in a tin) is quite good. Chop it in cubes and it makes for a nice add-on to pasta with some pre-made pasta sauce. Or throw in a pack of mushrooms and you got yourself a nice meal with very little effort (I think under 30 minutes, but I never checked total time myself).

Funny thing is that I’ve never used salt in any of my meals. My only real spice is (black) pepper. Oh … and garlic.
I’m probably using it wrong, because I can rarely taste I had used it so I’m always tempted to add more.

//

I got all my stuff at my new house now. We needed a total of 2,5 days. Today the washing machine was moved to its proper place and we moved as many boxes into the attic as I had acquired more stuff than I had realised 😀
If I had to do that last bit myself I probably would need all of next year to finish as I’d be tempted to open all boxes before even thinking of moving them one inch.

Today I can finally relax. Next year there will be more hobby to do and a proper space for hobby.

Food wise the slow cooker is your friend. We don’t mind  having the same things 2cor 3 nights in a row

This is one of our go to’s if  we can’t think what to eat

https://youtube.com/@kitchensanctuary?si=jtD6iHrZlLDnUj5c

Yeah let’s talk toy soldiers 😀

My plans for 2025 basically are getting my hobby space setup for gaming & crafting.

I’m planning on focussing on a small set of games/settings, but I also find myself wanting more … or discovering new aspects that I want to do.

Things on my list at the moment :

– WW2 Skirmish : Bolt Action 3rd edition : German Fallschirmjaeger vs US Airborne
I’ve got the new starter set and have a few more bits and pieces incoming. The only thing ‘missing’ is the terrain aspect.
Some sort of snow terrain mat will have to be acquired.
There is a big ruined farm resin kit from the 1:48 Tactics kickstarter that I think is perfect as a focus point

– Deadmans’ Hand / Wild West
Terrain was part of the kickstarter, but I’ve got a few extra buildings from TTCombat on order (not sure when those arrive … )
I think a desert / plains terrain mat is needed for this one as a base of the table. Other than that there’s loads of assembly and painting to do 🙂

– Fantasy : Kings of War
I still need to build that Ogre army and I’ve got a few ambush sets to build as well.
I have plans for terrain, but nothing solid yet.

– Multi Award Winning Moonstone
Plenty of minis to assemble and paint.
A few bits of terrain to assemble from Kromlech.

– SciFi  : Halo, Deadzone, Firefight
No real ideas yet, but enough material to make Halo a thing.

– SciFi Epic : Battletech Mercenaries & Mantics’ kickstarter …
Waiting for stuff to arrive is the key thing here. I suspect I will get Mantic’s before anything from CGL shows up, but we’ll see.

– Ancients : Punic wars battle …
I know it’s Lloyds’ favourite scale, but to me it was simpy a good way to get two armies for an epic scale battle.

– Blood & Plunder … I’ve got more than enough pirates and related scum. Terrain is the tricky bit here. Port Royal may be my first focus once that arrives.

– Carnevale … on my list, practically everything for that one is in storage.

– Dropfleet commander … ditto. New starterset is tempting, but I’ve got enough things on my list already

– Rumbleslam … on my list, same as Carnevale it’s all in storage at the moment

– WW2 15mm : Flames of War; somewhere in storage.

– Sci Fi / Pulp : StarSchlock & 7TV … lots of stuff in my pile of potential for those two.

– Vietnam : ‘Nam 68; No minis or terrain yet

– Walking Dead : in storage …

– Modern Skirmish : Spectre Operations … a few squads and some bad guys.
Need to think about terrain for this one.

I probably will think of more stuff as the year progresses, because I haven’t found a single thing that I would prefer over and above everything else in that list.

I’m hoping to avoid kickstarter completely next year, but there’s already two exceptions on my list :

– Strikezone commander : the skirmish game set in the Dropzone universe
– Anything Firelock plan to do for their Blood&… series of rules.

I doubt there’s enough days in the next year to get all of this completed 😉
The real tricky bit is forcing myself to focus on just one project at a time.

I definitely don’t have to fear running out of things to do in the next decades even if I don’t buy into anything new.

Those are very interesting minis. Initially I wanted to mention Crooked Dice (7TV), but they don’t have any nuns with guns that I could find.

I seem to recall an indie of the week that had more ‘nuns with guns’ minis. Not sure if they were regular nuns with guns or more like the fetish nuns that were in the Hitman 47 videogame. I’m sure the hive mind knows what I am referring to.

Toy soldier wise I think 2025 will just be labelled Warpath given all the crap I have arriving

Last year, at this time, I was just hoping to get motivated to clear some of my backlog but not feeling inspired for any of it.  Then I received Marvel Crisis Protocol for my birthday and have painted little else since.  That being the case, I am not making any hard pledges as I have no idea what may light that fire and make me feel like a little kid again. So far MCP is doing that and I will keep painting those minis this year as long as they do.  If some of my older, unfinished, projects can do the same I will be revisiting them.  One always needs more scifi terrain after all…