Unfinished Business

It seems like I'm pretty good at unfinising things.  Here are a few examples...

1. In 1989 we bought our first house.  I had always wanted to build a balsa and tissue model airplane, so I bought one.  It looked too hard, so I put it away.  The bug to try kept nagging at me, so I bought another one.  This one was marked "Easy."  It's a Cessna, single wing, simple plane.  I got to work on my model, and it went together really well.  But before I could finish, the reality of all the things we had to do to fix up our house set in.  Then we had our first child.

It's 2012.  I covered the wings in 2010.  The fuselage of my Cessna sits on top of my dresser.  It's just the bare frame, without the tissue paper.  It's unfinished.

2. I own at least ten blank books.  I purchased each one with the intention of using them as a journal.  One of them has three pages of entries, two of those pages are drawings.  The other nine or so are unfinished.

3. I love to write with a fountain pen.  I use one all the time.  I won an art award when I was in middle school for calligraphy.  I have always wanted to do calligraphy as a hobby.  Every once in a while I get passionate about it.  I own at least five calligraphy kits.  I found a complete set of Speedball nibs at an antique store and bought them without a second thought.  We're talking 30 or 40 nibs.  I own more than fifteen dip pens.  I have purchased calligraphy paper seemingly by the ream.  I own multiple calligraphy books.  I have bought calligraphy makers (they have never been used so are probably dried out by now).  I have actually "done" (what's the correct verb?) calligraphy three of four times in the past five years.  Another project, unfinished.

4. Another art project I always enjoyed was painting with watercolors.  Last fall I decided to put some work into it.  I bought some watercolor paper on sale at Michaels and a set of paints at Hobby Lobby.  I painted two weekends.  What I produced looks...  I'm not sure how to describe it.  Let's just say my paintings don't look like they were done in watercolor.  Today I noticed that my paint box has a nice layer of dust forming, another silent example that I have left another hobby unfinished.

5. I dabble in game design.  I was quite active in the Michigan game design "scene" in the early 2000s.  There are several published designers who would get together infrequently.  I attended the Protospiel convention for a number of years.  I got some really good feedback on several of my designs.  I checked my notes the other day as I moved a box of prototypes from one spot to another in my storage room downstairs.  2004.  There are maybe five or six games down there, unfinished.

There are probably more examples.  I wanted to wrap this up with something insightful, but can't think of much more to say than this: Thankfully, despite everything that is unfinished, there are many examples of projects I have finished.