FETCH ME A TRUMPETER!

Officer Writing a Letter: Gerard Borch (Old Master Picture Gallery Dresden). Yorck Project public domain image found on Wikimedia Commons

You may be wondering at the title of this post. In my reading of the fascinating memoirs of the Sieur du Pontis, who served as an officer in the French Army through much of the 17th Century (during the times of Henry IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV), I stumbled across an interesting tidbit. Trumpeters were used as couriers and messengers, hence the title of this post (which is a snippet from among the anecdotes in the memoir). This makes perfect sense when you think about it. Trumpeters,  dressed in the livery of their regiments, were very much like heralds--and they had to be doing something when their units were in barracks and they weren't out tootling.  At some point, I'll be doing an e-books for antiquarians on this memoir, but for now, we'll leave it off at that. Thus, here is the message that this virtual courier brings...

Regarding the several-weeks' lapse in blogovation here, dear readers, I wanted to drop a line to let you know that it wasn't for lack of hobby related activity--quite the contrary. Energies have instead been directed in following through on something I had long intended (and mentioned in my year end post)--fleshing out my miniatures on a grid system in a share-able form.

Given that I have been running games with this system for years, I thought that I was closer to having a finished product than I actually was. I should have known better: what project ever proves to be less involved than anticipated?  Nevertheless, I have been beavering away at it for several hours per day for the last two weeks now, and have cracked all the major hurdles and produced all the necessary components.  The end is in sight! I expect to have a complete system posted here within two weeks.

   Excelsior!