I hope all of you had happy holidays, and that you're doing well in this new Corona peak!

Sadly polishing the website takes waaaay longer than planned. Taking photos and editing them always takes much longer than expected, and since I haven't seen anyone except my husband for two years now (ever since our old boardgame group broke apart) we try to play some boardgames now with a new group, and due to the pandemic it's all online, of course. It's been a heck of work for me to digitalize some of our games for online play. It's also been a ton of fun though and we can barely wait to finally be able to meet up in real life to play with real miniatures, so I'm not really feeling bad about the distraction. It was quite a boost for my mental health.

Apart from that there's also a lot of work piling on me, but I keep tinkering with the website. It's horrifying how much is broken - especially in the English version! Honestly, I have no idea why the gallery insists that every album only has one picture. There are way more! The counter works in German, but a lot of things got broken by the translation module. I hope to catch all the really awful problems, but the counter has to wait. If you ever come across broken pictures in the new galleries, please let me know. I do my best but there's always a chance one or two slip through.
Basically everything else is outdated and needs new info. But I'm making progress, and I stay positive. I'm very sure that there will be new updates in 2022. (In case you like miniatures there's actually already quite much new content in the galleries, and I also uploaded many photos of new crafts.)

Let's keep on trucking and hope that the pandemic will be broken soon. Have a happy new year, everyone!

So, I'm finally back. Yes, I know, much later than expected, but I don't want to bore you with details. The house renovations, life, health, hardware and last but not least the pandemic just threw one curveball after the other. We're still far from done with renovations, but I can finally carve out some time for the website again.

Now I have to find my way around the new software, though, and generally take the content into this century. There's so much old and outdated stuff around here, e.g. the pictures in the galleries are much too small. Also the navigation has to change to make space for future projects.
Actually, I have neglected you English-spoken folks for MUCH too long, the German visitors got way more content and we were horrified when we noticed yesterday that the galleries were broken since the last Joomla update due to a clash between a safety feature of the gallery and the translation module - that update was almost a year ago! Dangblast, I won't even try to find an excuse for not noticing that earlier!
You guys were really left hanging by me and I hope I can make up for that a little bit rather sooner than later.

As a first step I will update ALL galleries. In this context they will all be bundled in the new menu item "Galleries". I will update one after the other, and whenever one is done it will be moved there from its old place, until all galleries are done. I will replace all photos with bigger versions and look for typos, but there will also be completely new content in ca. 70% of the galleries, so check into your fav themes.
The big exceptions are the miniature galleries, currently still found at "Miniatures and Boardgames". Those won't be reworked but made COMPLETELY new. Many photos in there are over 10 years old and not even available in higher resolution. Since Games Workshop is much more relaxed than some years ago we will also put up all of our GW miniatures again, and in general we have much new material to show you.

Since reworking the first 100 pictures already took me around 15 hours I don't get my hopes up to get anything else done this year. But I just have to undust everything first to feel comfortable again and find my way around on the website. Over the last few years I lost my fun working on the website almost completely, and I want to change that. Next year I'll take care of updating the texts and look of the homepage, and I will try to have new material too as often as possible.

Yesterday I removed the option to register new accounts for comments and the forum. Existing accounts can still log in, of course.

That shouldn't be a bother for anyone since nobody registered for years, and when I come around to finally update the website regularly again next year and to update the software I will re-activate the option. It's very sad that every single option for communication online gets dampened by spammers. By now the damn bots send me emails with viruses in DOC attachments after they try to register here by the dozens daily and get denied. I have too much work to do to spend half of my day deleting that junk from my website and inboxes.
In the unlikely case that someone wants an account in the meantime just email me and I'll create one.

What else is new? Not very much. Our house will have all windows and the front door replaced this year and we bulldoze and redo the whole front garden by hand before the winter comes. So we're just tired. Next year things will hopefully look up, there won't be that many renovations left then. My Joomly is also very outdated which makes especially the English translations very complicated right now, but my husband doesn't have the mental capacities left to take care of that right now.
So my updates are almost exclusively my German-only Sims soap opera.
Next year will be better. This house is slowly becoming a home, and we won't have to move again for a long, long time.

Hello, everyone!

It was about time to report back that I'm still alive! The new house was and is a truckload of work! It's all so expensive - and of course there's way more broken than the estate agent said - that we don't have money to spare on builders. Friends, colleagues and family members helped us with the move, transport of new furniture and some initial renovations as much as they could, given the often long distance between us and them, but mostly it was just us two working here over the last months. We ripped out carpet and wallpapers, painted, did plaster work, laid over 140m2 new floors so far, scrubbed the house time and again, dug out dead plants and bushes, assembled furniture and the kitchen, mounted baseboards and lamps und came back from the DIY market with new material by foot and laden like pack mules at least 20 times. Everything we can do ourselves, we do ourselves. In the first month, we didn't even have a kitchen or real internet, and we had our first free afternoon in January. There was no time or mental energy for something creative or even a nice board game session - and for a long time no surface to do anything like that on. Now we take things slower, since all important rooms are usable and we can spread out the open tasks as we want. We are very thankful for the helpfulness of everyone - a big "Thank you!" goes to user MJKJ again, who showed up as a New Year angel and helped us during his holidays! I was very moved by that, thanks!

By now my computer sits on its new desk in the living room, which only needs some curtains sewn and pictures put up, and I can slowly, very slowly think about updates again. : )

Due to all the chaos I actually missed my websites' 20th anniversary now, and since we still need to redo the whole garden and have new windows put in for the whole house I won't be able to make good on that party. Very likely updates will be very sporadic until late winter, actually. Perhaps we can do a big party next year, who knows - although the 21 isn't a big number in Germany and we'd rather celebrate the 25. ;)

What kind of updates there will be I can't say. Often I still have medium to strong pain or numbness in my hand from working so much, so I never know how my fine motor skills are tomorrow. Can I crochet or paint? No idea! In the dollroom the lights and the surfaces for the outdoor sets are still missing, and some things went broken during the move and have to be repaired. The good camera battery is still missing and the scanner has to be repaired, to boot, since a lot of dirt sticks to the underside of the glass after the move now, which ruins the scan results. If we can't manage to take the glass out and clean it without breaking the device we'll have to strain our budget even further and buy a new one, after we already had to replace the printer, grr.
So in the meantime I have to concentrate on material that's already on my pc, and actually there are various pending older projects, not just for the Sims soap opera and board game reports, which you guys always miss out on because I can't translate them.
By now I have no clue anymore of what kind of stuff is sitting in the depths of my harddrives, so I guess we'll all be surprised by what will show up. :P