What is all this...?

Yes, I'm totally in the dark and clueless.  I can't really point a finger on it, and that is kind of driving me crazy...

Okay, I admit, I would have a clue what to do if Alicia stood on my doorstep...

Since half of October I am painting again, and I bloody well enjoy it an awful lot again.  Hence having done almost 75 models in a month, including a scale model that was time intensive.

I went to the Crisis wargame show, and had a lot of nice talks.  And I enjoyed it for every moment.

I updated the library to make my armies in the making once more 'current edition' where applicable.

And then I needed to start making the army lists...

... and everything came crashing down faster then a sumo wrestler jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

It's odd, I used to be a dice chucker, I loved the clacking sound of the dice in my hands before rolling certain doom (I can't say for whom, I like to think for my opponent before those all 1s turned up...), the anticipation of hoping my 'master plan' would come together without my opponent noticing what is going on. 
I just can't say what it is what is happening to me.  I've been reading my rulebooks, I have been imagining how my completed armies will look like... and I can't get the slightest spark anymore in my core of actually packing the models up and go to a convention or a tournament, not even a club night, to play a game with them.

At first, pre-Crisis, I tended to think that it was because it had been so long.  But half a month after the convention and the eye candy, I still can't force myself to paint 'targeted' to complete armies. I can imagine myself painting through all of Lead Mountain more and more, but I have the happy view of the Journey, but the road seems to be going in a direction far beyond the horizon.

Is it truly all over?  Well, I think the honest answer is yes and no.  I still love reading and talking wargames and conventions, but I just can't focus anymore on playing actual wargames.  I feel like the only hobby that keeps firing me up, now for the 26th year running, is my obsession with all Saints and their likes.  I completed a regiment of ACW last week and stared at it, putting it on some shelf, shrugged and closed the cabinet.  I received some old Italian trading cards, and I did a happy dance in front of my GF and... my mother.  Yes, that is sad, yet I was happy to get those cards (which I showed yesterday) and the quest for getting the missing cards has me more 'in her grip' then finishing the next Yayoi battlegroup.

I can even get more excitement from my plastic bricks (as it 'binds' me with the Smurf in a way, as well as with Humpty and Dumpty) and can even envision myself helping out on the next year big build project.

It is time to face the music I fear, and really get over the fact I have reached a wargame 'dead end'.  I might as well keep painting and then try to trade the models off, and enjoy the building of my scale models of Saints.  Never the less, I'm not burrying the hobby totally, I'll be showing off the regiments and models I try to massacre with paint and brush, but I just can't say they will ever see the fields of battle.

I'm going to have a long think over all of these 'mixed hobby feelings' and have some more chats with the GF and the Nemesis, going to grab a pint over at TSA one of the weeks and have it all a look, but if the 'holy flame' doesn't roar up by the end of the year...

It will be all over, and I'll become a hobbyist painter instead of a hobbyist gamer in sabbatical...