Hiatus?

It's been a long time since I worked on a model. In fact, this week is the first sustained model work I've done in a long time. Why the break?

For one thing, sometimes I just do that. I once spent about four years without so much as touching a model, and I didn't really miss it. It's not uncommon for me to take a month or two or three off. Not common, but not uncommon. It seems that I develop a sort of ennui over what I'm working on - oh great, another Me-109, can it get any more novel and exciting than that? - and I just quit. Then after a while, some fanciful thing will catch my eye and I'll find myself back in my chair. The four-year layoff was ended by, of all things, the Airfix Hs-123 biplane ground attack plane (I find the Hs-123 and Hs-129 inordinately interesting). This latest hiatus was ended by a Monogram F-101 Voodoo, mostly because the idea of adding a Genie-armed airplane to my collection tickled my fancy.

For another thing, open-heart surgery affected how well I could sit in my hunched-forward workshop posture. For a long time I couldn't abide sitting that way at all, and it's hard to do detail painting or sand out filler when you're leaning back on a pile of pillows in bed. Modeling isn't much fun when you know that you can only sit at the workbench for five minutes. Five minutes! Cripes, some days it takes me five minutes to find a knife! These days I'm able to sit at the workbench for usefully long periods of time without whimpering, but it's taken a long, long time to get to this point.

Quitting smoking affected my enjoyment of pretty much everything, including modeling. It was no fun to sit at the workbench, where I used to chain-smoke relentlessly, and think about how bad I wanted a cigarette. But since it's been almost a year since I quit, the urgency of the desire to smoke is tapering off and I can sometimes slip into a frame of mind where I just don't think about cigarettes - so long as nobody smokes around me.

So here I am. I can sit longer, and I can sit longer without fixating on cigarettes. So I'm slowly coming back to modeling, though it'll be a little while yet before I break out the airbrush again.