Play it Painted’s Year in Review: 2014
As I write this, we have 23 days remaining in 2014.
That makes me feel that starting to write this may be a bit premature. If there’s anything I learned in this past year, a lot can change in 23 days. 2014 was a pivotal year not just for Play it Painted, but for myself on many different levels. The year is marked with significant change, it was kicked off by significant change, and at the moment I am cautiously optimistic about where these significant changes may lead us. In the past 23 days, I’ve seen my son go from being barely able to stand to now walking. All around me is change, some of it slightly traumatic, but a fair bit of it to be quite promising.
First up, there were significant changes to some of us personally. For myself, with my wife and I having our son in October of 2013 was the most important thing to happen to us since getting married in 2008. I can’t even begin to express my happiness with our new addition, and every day with our son has just been incredible. Octavius is doing very well, he’s the happiest baby I have ever known, and he grows stronger every day! I look forward to getting to know my son more as the years go by.
Also during the summer of 2014, our very own Phill Howard married his wife Faith. I’m very happy for them and we’ve already enjoyed a few couples gatherings together, and looking forward to many more. Congrats to Phill and Faith!
These significant life changes did have some bearing in our approach to Play it Painted and our strategy for 2014. In order to continue to operate as an active ambassador for tabletop gaming, we needed to become a more efficient operation. It is difficult enough for our new families and new family members to be without us when we are hosting and attending gaming events, so spending large amounts of money in addition to sacrificing time just isn’t being fair to our families our ourselves. It is reasons like this that fueled Play it Painted’s commission painting services, to help fund our hobbies and even put a little extra on the table to cover some costs on the homefront. We also needed efficiency in our shows- we needed a more unified games offering than the dozens of different games we hosted in 2013, and ideally any form of manufacturer compensation for our activities would be helpful. Finally higher priority demands on our time required us to be smarter with our actual gaming and activity time- we needed trustworthy, reliable support from our PiP teammates to ensure a high quality show without it always falling to a few to hold up the shows when others failed on their commitments.