Tin Soldiers

Over the years I have acquired and dropped hobbies the way a snake sheds its skin. I learned how to sail in my late teens at a public facility. Had a passion for it for two or three years getting approved as a racing skipper and even racing for my college team as a freshman. Got married, transferred to a different school, and so much for sailing. Considered buying a small sailboat a couple of times but nothing came of it.

The case could be made that I have been at flyfishing the longest, but maybe it is skiing. I downhill skied between 1962 and 1995 never avidly, because it's expensive, giving it up only after my wife dropped me at one of the cluster of areas near us--she was headed to cross country--and what turned out to be one of the steepest mountains I had ever been on. I had already had problems because the boots I had purchased to replace my beloved Hansens didn't quite fit right despite repeated visits to the shop. I got off the lift that day, took one look down the hill, and walked down. My skis went to the dump a couple of years later. Though state of the art when purchased, at nine years old and despite limited wear (I only skiied three or four times a season) they weren't even wanted by the second hand sports equipment places. She thought I was better than I was.

I've been flyfishing since 1985, so I'm catching up. If I last it will be my longest lived "hobby" in 2018. The equipment doesn't get superceded quite as quickly as with skiing. A cane rod is still pretty much the same as one made 50 or 75 years ago. They issue new graphite compositions every year or so, but I can never tell that much difference in the actions. You get new lines, a new reel once in a rare while. The rod companies guarantee their products for life even if the most frequent ways they are broken is getting slammed in screen or car doors. I'll probably still be fishing my beloved 1 weight, or the lovely 5 piece 3 weight, in 2018.

There is another hobby that I have had for a long time. I'm a gamer. I'm not a totally addicted to one game gamer like the D&D crowd, but I did have a D&D character. I have a pretty complete set of "Traveller" materials. "Traveller" is a space opera style role playing game put out by Game Designer's Workshop. I also have some stuff from a related futuristic after the apocalypse gaming system.

But my game preference was historical miltary simulation games. I played off and on and collected them from the early sixties into the early eighties, and acquired a few even since. I was a long time subscriber to Strategy & Tactics which featured a game in every issue. The games are realistic simulations and take a while to play so it is hard to find opponents. I haven't played the table top variety for over twenty years, but there are some on-line incarnations that work like the old play-by-mail versions of things that I have played more recently. It's a tenuous business model so they go in and out of business pretty often.

Along that line in the later seventies I started to paint armies of 15 mm figures from the Napoleonic era. I worked on them off and on over a dozen years, and moved them now six times. I still have a number of unpainted figures, and painted I have a couple of different French cavalry units, two regiments of British horse, artillery for both sides, and something like two or three battalions of infantry for each side. I may have actually played with them twice. Those rules are pretty complicated, too.

In any case what I told myself was that "when I retired" I'd spend my time painting. Well there are some inconvenient facts. One, I don't think I'm about to have that kind of retirement. But even more to the point, they way we have chosen to shape our lives and living arrangements doesn't allow for the kind of space it takes for the hobby. No place to set up a table, not much of any place to paint.

So they are taking up storage space, and memory share. Not much space, as they are all in boxes along with the brushes and what's left of the paints. I don't even know where I could replace the enamels I used. They were a specialty item and the last store I knew of in town that carried them went out of business a couple of years ago. They are there along with my collection of S&T games.

It's the memory share that is up for me now. I enjoyed them, enjoyed making them; and now it seems like some silly wasted effort and I haven't a clue of what to do with them. The spouse says Craig's List, but I would have to dig it all out and lay it out for photographs, etc. etc.; and besides it oddly feels like disappearing a part of myself.

So despite waking up thinking about it this week, I don't have a clue what I am going to do.