The Irvania Blog

It’s March 2008, which marks the five-year anniversary of my moving here to the wild Pennsylvania tundra. This is the sort of time when I sit on the balcony with a dog in my lap and a mug of good strong coffee, looking out over the woods, thinking of life and living.

This time of year is full of anniversaries for me. It was five years ago that my career as a hot-shot manager and computer jockey at a large international telecommunications firm came to a screeching halt (some called it “downsizing”), and not coincidentally, my first marriage finally crashed and burned. It was about five years ago I began my 18-month hiatus from a “real” job and concentrated on turning my “fixer-upper” (almost “burner-downer”) house into something I could live in, writing the bulk of my first novel, and trying to heal from the wounds life had been dumping on me in that way that life tends to do to people.

My 30-year high school class reunion is coming up this year. It was 30 years ago I left home and went off to join the Air Force. Twenty years ago I graduated from college. Ten years ago I had a corner window office. Now I’m a technician working in a local factory. I run the machine that makes the little cardboard tubes in the middle of paper towel rolls. I don’t even have my own chair. Go figure.

In a few months Hanna and I will have been married two months, and shortly after that it’ll be the third anniversary of our first date. Now we’re thinking of having kids.

As I sit here pondering the possibility of fatherhood, I look back at my life then and now. While my career has taken a definite nosedive over the past five years, I’m much happier now, and I’m much better off. I have a lot now that I didn’t have then, perhaps the most important of which is: perspective. I’ve got a better grasp on what’s important, and what’s not, than I had back then.

I find myself thinking of my “failures”, and for the most part those are things I haven’t done yet. The word yet is the key in that sentence. I haven’t gotten my first book published or sold yet, and I haven’t written any of the other books I have planned yet, and that’s the only one of my “failures” that is at all important. The rest of them are game-related projects: Tankbase, the various Shipbase variants, the Generic Legions games, The Book of Tanks, not to mention the assembly and painting of thousands (really!) of wargaming miniatures. Some of these I will probably finish before my time is up, and some I won’t, but that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Some of these projects may get handed down to my kids, if they’re willing to take them on (somebody’s got to paint those 350 1:2400 scale Napoleonic ships).

Yes, I have hope for the future. As long as Hanna and I and the dogs can sit out on the balcony and sip coffee and look at the woods and listen to the birds and ponder life, things will be all right. Until the zombies come. But that’s another blog entry.