As has been par for the course this month, this post is coming a few hours late. I had always intended to do this post on Sept. 1st as the first post of the month but it’s still not coming at the usual time slot in the morning. (I wonder how many of my readers actually read it when it first drops. Probably very few if any.)

Looking Back

This has been a rough month for me. I managed to get my regular posts out but it was a close thing. I partially looked at this in my post last week for the RPG Blog Carnival where I summarized all the projects I’m working on. That’s really nothing new as all of those projects have been going on and off for years, but they still contribute to everything I have to think about each month as I work. The funny thing is, after I published that post, I thought of a few other things that I had forgotten. I updated the post to add the podcast stuff, but I thought of other things later that probably should have been in the list.

The other posts for last month were the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, a detailed post on Brekstoone Manor in Myha’s Beach on Pale, and an outline of the Skills for Hire adventure I ran last month. There should have been a second session of that game but life intervened and I had to cancel.

The month started well as we took the family up to Glacier National Park in Montana for an 8 day camping trip. We had a lot of fun and it was quite relaxing.

The problems started on the way home. As we were driving we needed to stop. As I was making a left hand turn, a car came up from behind (in the on coming traffic lane – he was apparently passing people in the line of cars behind me on the two lane highway) and clipped the front of my truck. He went flying off into the ditch with a big dent in the side doors of his car and my front bumper was bent in. Luckily no one was hurt. We were able to drive our truck home (another 650 miles) without any real problems. The only real issue to driving was that making a right turn caused the tire to rub against a bit of plastic on the bent in bumper. However, it turned out that the damage was enough that the truck was considered totaled (it was an 18 year old truck).

Dealing with that – taking the truck in for repair, finding out it was totaled, getting a rental car (with 6 drivers we could not manage on only 2 cars), and looking for a new truck – used up all my spare time this month. So there really was no “behind the scenes” game work done. I’ve even fallen way behind on the timeline posts on Twitter and have about a week and half of them to complete writing and catch up on. The good news is we found a new truck we’re happy with and all that is now officially behind us. I’m turning the rental car in later today.

Looking Forward

Beyond the Detailed Frontier Timeline post next week, I really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pipe. This month has five Tuesdays which is why I moved this post to today. I think I’ll be posting another location. I have the maps all sketched out, I’d just need to do the write-up and make nice versions of the maps. This is the next location for my Skills for Hire game which I am hopefully running tomorrow. So you might get a write-up on that adventure as well. Beyond that, we’ll see.

Behind the scenes I’m starting work this week on the next issue (#30) of the Frontier Explorer to be released in October. That will take up a bunch of my time as well but I’m going to focus on getting started early so it is more manageable and more spread out to allow me to work on other things as well.

I still have a bit of real life stuff to catch up on now that the truck purchasing is out of the way and that will probably use up any extra time I have left. School has started for my wife (she’s an astronomy professor) and kids so we’re starting to get back into a regular routine. Hopefully the schools don’t shut down again and throw a wrench in that.

Final Thoughts

It’s not a long post but there really hasn’t been a lot happening this month related to the blog. I just managed to squeak by. I looking forward to September being a little less stressful. As always feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.