*awkward silence*
Right...
It's been over 5 months since my last visit here, last post was on April 3rd
*sigh* Feel a bit strange suddenly coming back after all this time, but it had to be done sooner or later. First off, i'd like to apologise to anyone who was looking forward to any more add-ons from the website, or emailed me and never got any response. I should have posted this months ago, but I recently got the necessary reminder, which prompted me to "get off my ass and do something about it" as it were. (You know who you are, Frank. Whoops.. 
)
I suspect a whole new gang of regular posters have developed since last I visited, in addition to the old guard- so in case you don't know me; My name is Jack Higgins, was a regular poster and add-on maker from roughly Christmas 2002 - April 2004. My website of add-ons is still located at http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/
So... What's happening? Where have I been etc? A number of things happened, which all contributed to my prolonged absence. Ever since about last christmas, i'd been beginning to unfortunately lose interest in the program celestia itself. My interest in space science and astronomy is stronger now than it ever was, but I couldn't get that same excitement from Celestia as I used to get, back in the day, when I was burning through a couple of model releases a week!
Around the same time, I suffered a fairly minor injury, a dislocated shoulder, while on a skiing trip in Italy. Nothing serious, but the fact that I couldn't really use the computer keyboard/mouse for a while got me out of the regular loop of visiting the forum and doing my usual stuff.
The school workload began to also increase, and that other wonderful thing, the teenage social life, began to develop. (About bloody time, some might say)
School and social stuff began to gradually take away from the time that was previously devoted to celestia, until it got to the point when I was no longer using it regularly, and posting here became a chore that I really couldn't be bothered about. April 3rd was the date when it all stopped, pretty much- School exams were the 3rd and 4th weeks of may, supervision of the leaving cert exams for the first 3 weeks of june, going into the city and friends' parties, occasional work for the following.. well until the end of august really! I know it sounds like I did nothing all summer (I didn't go away anywhere except a 3-day camping odyssey out on the west coast, but that's another story) but it's amazing how the time went past so quickly, and how it really appears as though I achieved very little. Met a lot of really great new friends, people who I hope to still know in many years time... Had a lot of fun too- this was by far the most enjoyable year of my life so far.
This year, i've got the leaving cert exams next june, and since I went back to school last week, i've been overloaded with work from the word go. The little free time I have on weekends etc will be mostly spent with friends I expect- leaving a little time free for the computer etc. I may start using celestia again a little bit during the year, but not in any serious amount for the forseeable future.
Basically this means that my website won't be getting updated again for a very long time... (so a continuation of the situation since early this year..) And apart from the occasional lurking post, I probably won't be around this forum very much for a long time either.
Sorry about this... And sorry to be going on about myself so much, but for you to know exactly what the story was, I had to fill in a bit of background... Some of you will probably be a bit annoyed at me, it really wasn't my intention to leave things slide for so long before posting. Hopefully things will calm down a bit in school where i'll have some more time to visit here again, some time soonish.
Then you've achieved something. Always remember the immortal words of Mr Meat Loaf: "A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and respected old age." And with little more than a minimal sense of life's balance, coupled with a moderate degree of luck and good judgement, it's possible to achieve both.
,Jack, I had hoped you could model the landing cracked capsule on Utah to finish your 'Genesis' probe 
(Sorry!) 
