Ground to a halt

Hello all!

I was sitting on the edge of my bed this morning and looked over at my Soyokaze layout on the dresser. I frowned at it. Sat there and frowned at the layout that I loved so much.

The office move from six months ago forced me to pack up my Shizuka City layout, but I continued working on Soyokaze and made a lot of good progress and had a lot of fun with it. However, when we moved into our new office and I was able to re-set the Shizuka layout, it put a downward spin on the hobby for me that eventually lead to me stopping for a while.

And, here we are. Frowning at a layout on a foggy morning in October. :)

When I set the work layout up, the wave of "blazé-fair" swept over me like a big, grey blanket. The idea of setting things up only to rip them down again in the near future was frustrating to say the least. Then a recent venture to see several Bay Area layouts also put a negative spin on things for me.  The space that these folks had was fantastic and the idea of putting both the Soyokaze and Shizuka layouts together in the future was both grand and horrid. I'm not sure when this will happen and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to move forward on things as they stand now.

I have several other projects that are not rail related that have gotten me through, but the next steps for the hobby need to happen so I can get fired up about things again.

• The first thing is packing up Shizuka again - putting the city stuff away save a few pieces I can toss together on a small portion of my desk space at work. 

• I'll set up a few of the buildings I like on the KATO Unitrack panels and populate them with a single tram, cars and people. The rest will be packed up and away. 

• I'll go back to the Soyokaze layout here at the house and make that the main focus of my time and effort. I like the way things are shaping up there and just need to get back into the flow of things. It's also MUCH easier to work on that here at the house. The work layout was only getting a few minutes of time a day on the days when I actually go into the office. (Rare these days)

• I'll go back to writing about Soyokaze when time doesn't allow for actual production. That was a fun process and I'd like to do more of it including some Soyokaze ghost stories. 

It's been an interesting exercise and it's wild to see things go from super fun to super annoying so quickly. This seems to be the way when it comes to this hobby.

Have you ever felt like packing things away and calling it quits?

Happy Hobbying!

~M~