It’s been awhile! As egocentric as it makes me feel, I wanted to give an update about what’s going on in my life. And hey, it’s still the NFL offseason so I don’t have much else to talk about!

I’ve written here a few times about my adventures in unemployment. After 12 long weeks, I’m excited to say that I’m no longer unemployed!…kind of. I’ve been rehired at my old company but don’t start work until July 24th. That means by the time I’m back at work, I will have been away for about 108 days. Aside from my bank account and mental health both looking a little anemic, the whole affair worked out well for me. I only got squeezed financially for the final few weeks, I got hired back at a higher rate and to a more senior position, I got an extended break from the stress of my career that most people would kill for, and I used the time to accomplish a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. I’ve finally settled into a routine so it’ll be a little painful to shake my life up again but I’m excited to have an income. What’s better, I’ll be working with a couple long-time friends on an aspect of the company’s work that’s less stressful than what I was doing before.

I spent my free time on a lot of little things, but the lion’s share of it went towards developing my board game company, Nic James Games. I’ve written about a couple of our projects in the past. The company has come a long way in the past 3 months! We incorporated officially, hired a marketing team, started signing up for convention booths, got several beta copies of our first game printed… The list goes on. We also made a website, www.nicjamesgames.com, that you’re welcome to visit if you want to learn more about what we’re working on. The most challenging aspect of this endeavor (other than financing it) has been growing our social media presence. I’ve always preferred the anonymous nature of something like Reddit over the personal feel of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s taken a lot of effort to commit myself to posting each day and engaging/networking with other accounts in the board game space online. It also feels pretty random if a post will succeed or not, though I realize there’s plenty of the system that you can manipulate in your favor.

Some folks have asked me why the company is called Nic James Games when my name is Alex. My business partner Nic and I met in 2005 in Grapevine, Texas and immediately bonded over our love of board games and zombie movies. Nic had made a huge grid on a piece of tagboard, displaying 1v1 fight matchups of all of his favorite fictional characters. He asked me who I thought would win some of these matchups, and we argued excitedly over the ones that we disagreed on.

Over the following two and a half years of high school, Nic introduced me to lots of board games and some excellent cajun food. His drive to create and explore ideas was a perfect match for my constant daydreaming, and together we ended up theorycrafting all kinds of gaming experiences. That energy and passion infused most of our hangouts and kept us from drifting apart once we moved to new parts of the USA for college and careers. When we decided to actually print a game and needed a company name, it seemed only right to name it after the guy whose passion and wackiness continues to inspire me every day.

In the past 3 months we’ve nearly gotten our first skirmish game, The Power Generation, across the finish line. We’ve also gotten two other games pretty far into the design phase – Amino Station, a game about trying to escape a space station being shredded by meteor showers, and World War Bug (working title), a real-time strategy game about armies of bugs adapted into a tabletop wargame. There are almost a dozen other concepts we’d like to develop, so I’m really hoping that our first launch goes well enough to fund more projects.

As part of my attempt to save money, I stopped hiring out for lawn maintenance. I inherited an old John Deer 345 lawn tractor from my parents who had recently upgraded, and decided this past long weekend would be a good time to try it out. As a pampered child of upper-middle class suburbia, this was my first time ever attempting to mow a lawn. It went about as well as you can expect, given that fact and the following realities: I’m a large, large man, and my property is several acres on the side of a hill in rural Virginia.

I didn’t know how high a normal lawn is but the dial on the tractor went from 1/4 inch to 4.5 inches, so I decided to cut the grass at 1.5 inches since that’s about how long I keep my hair. An inch is pretty big anyway, or so my wife keeps assuring me. After doing a single run at the front of my yard, I assessed that it might be insanely short for a lawn, and all the grass looked like I had just killed it. So I dialed up to 2.5 inches and kept on trucking. About 3 passes in, I realized that I shouldn’t be blowing the clippings directly into the path of where I was going to mow next. I learned this lesson after the mower shut itself off a handful of times. My next lesson would come when I tried to drive under the canopy of what I thought was a small tree, but was actually some kind of thorny bush. This surprise distracted me enough that I didn’t realize I was barreling up the hill toward my backyard fence at an odd angle, and I barely had time to realize I was about to hit it. I swerved as best I could but ended up banging into the fence, catapulting myself off the mower and down the hill. Thankfully, the 345 has an auto-shutoff if it doesn’t sense weight in the seat. No limbs lost, but a pretty good bruise on my hip and my ego. I got back on the horse and finished the front yard. It looks like a mess and my whole body was vibrating for hours afterward. Can’t wait to do the backyard, which is at a lovely 30 degree incline the whole way across.

Maybe the most disappointing failure of my time away from work has been my inability to lose weight or improve my health in any discernable way. I had intended to work the treadmill into my morning routine, but it lasted a single day before getting replaced by additional sleep. It really would have been smart to stick to it. While on COBRA insurance, my diabetes medication went from 80 bucks a month to $1100, so I went back to just taking metformin and my average blood glucose has paid the price. It doesn’t help that I’m a stress eater and having no income is great at spiking my anxiety, especially while trying to shoulder business expenses for a company that has no products for sale. I also significantly cut back on the meal service I had been using to avoid eating poorly. All this amounted to seeing my A1c raise by a few points, not life threatening but certainly a disappointing backslide to what had been a decent run of proper diabetes mitigation.

One of the best surprises from the past month, I ended up joining a board game group. In order to get professional photos for our website, I hired someone to photograph our board game. During the shoot I mentioned I was looking for playtesters and he recommended a friend of his. We got in contact and he invited me to a game night at his ranch. I was pretty curious to see what playing board games in a horse stable might be like, so I agreed and ended up playing until the sun came up. It turned out that they weren’t much for playtesting or skirmish games, but we got along great and I’ve been going over there every Thursday and Sunday from 7pm to 3am each of the last 4 weeks. I won’t be able to stay that late once work kicks back in, but I’m making the most of the opportunity while I have it. It’s also pretty fun to play games right next to horses.

This has been a pretty long and egregiously self-centered post, so I’ll get out of your hair. Only a couple months to go until kickoff, then I’ll revert back to my NFL-horror-posting self again. Hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July for those who Murica and I’ll catch you next time.