Time flies when you’re having fun. That’s what they say and it has been true for me. My last post was around Christmastime last year. Since then, there’s been quite a bit of news.
Winter’s Victory
Winter’s Victory by New England Simulations was published this past January. I spent quite a bit of time working on this and I’m quite proud of what we achieved. It’s a fun game, albeit quite a large one.
Brick Mill Games
Work continues on building a purely software wargame from scratch. I spend most of my time working on this and it is a rewarding experience, most of the time. The Crux web application environment is extremely powerful and the Javascript code I’m writing to support the game functions continues to evolve and mature. We are beginning to finally evolve away from the unit test harnesses being the primary mode of development and into using the game client on a near-daily basis.
Stack Académie
This past May I finally attended the annual game convention of the Stack Académie game club in Montréal. I met some great people, like Marc Guenette and Richard Archambault, and had a lot of fun. Being north of the border among my distant cousins in the “old country” is always a happy experience for me. The game club hosts near-monthly single-day events and I will probably make an appearance at quite a few of them, extending the stay with some on-site genealogy research and general exploration.
French Class
Claire and I have been taking French classes since last September. We finished both halves of the Beginner Level French Language course offered by the Franco-American Center of New Hampshire. We will both be taking the next level of courses in September and Claire will supplement her education with some pronunciation classes in August (Parisienne, bien sur). After three trips to Québec together, and two to France/Belgium, we both want to learn the language and spend more time in-country.
Genealogy
My Franco-American genealogical research continues in the background. I’ve moved into the distant branches of the Guérin and Robert families as well as doing some research into my friends’ families. It’s interesting to see how far afield some of the lines have migrated.
I’ve also begin to add some on-site travel to my genealogy research. During my trip to Montréal for the Stack Académie event, I returned home via Malone, NY. I paid a visit to their historical society to get some information regarding Francis Néron, my great-great-great-grandfather. It turns out that he died young, in 1870 before the US Census enumeration for that year. Ida Nero, my great-great-grandmother, and her mother, Mary Jane Bridges, were shown in that census record as living with Mary Jane’s parents in their home. When I initially saw this record, I supposed that something terrible had happened to the father. Later, I suspected that he died in the US Civil War or had simply abandoned the family. One of the volunteers at the Franklin County Historical & Museum Society in Malone was able to find a burial record for Francis, solving the mystery.
While I was there, I found quite a few Guérins and Roberts in the church records there. I transcribed those as best I could and will see if they connect to my family tree.
Hiking
Claire and I continue to hike. After finishing the 52 With a View list in September of last year, we began to tackle the Belknap Range in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. There is a patch you can get if you hike 12 of the peaks. To date, we’ve hiked 10 of the 12.
I’ve returned to the gym to get in shape to tackle another hiking list: The Terrifying 25. Claire is not interested in this one and, to be frank, if I wasn’t already halfway through the list I might’ve balked. I still might. Most of the trails I have to complete on this list involve some of the toughest hiking in the northern Presidential Range. That said, I know I can do them, albeit slowly compared to my younger self.
The Future
There will be more projects coming up in the near future, including Steel & Steam and two other game ideas that I have in my mental pipeline. I’m going to try to spend a bit more time on this blog explaining some of them and reporting on progress, so stay tuned.