I have an artist (which hopefully wont bail)
Ah yes one of my biggest problems.
When I get bored I write DOS games. They may seem like a horrible waste of time being so out of date and all that. However when you write one of them you learn a lot about the hardware you're using and there great fun. You don't have to worry about your code getting to complex because a really complicated program wont run on most dos machines. They are usually quick and almost every line is important and you learn a ton about optimization. So next time you feel like this I would get started on one of those and like me you will wish modern programming was like this.