Archive for July, 2007

Two More Sleeps

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Just two more sleeps and Holly will be back! Hopefully then I’ll start sleeping again. It has been so strange not having her around that I’m not even sure I could truly capture it with words.

I just don’t go to bed any more. It is like I don’t know when bed time is or something. I also can’t seem to get out of bed in the morning. I can only equate it to something as monumentally odd as waking up one day and the sun being gone, but the rest of the world hasn’t noticed.

I find myself completely losing track of time. I wake up what feels like a hundred times a night and toss and turn. The cats are acting strangely. They’ll sit looking at the door, or sometimes wander from room to room meowing; looking for Holly.

While she’s away I no longer have something to look forward to every day. I normally always look forward to going home and seeing her. Just that is enough to make every day better, worthwhile. It seems like now I just go home and sit there listlessly while I play video games or slip into a vegetative state while the images on the TV screen flicker by. Before I know it it’s 2am and nothing has happened.

I miss my Holly.

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Chore Wars

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Chore Wars is just too funny as a concept. Yet, I can completely see how it would work.

Essentially everyone in your household creates a character and you form a group. Then as chores are done it logs them and assigns XP to the character that did it. Every 200 XP you level up.

Now, initially when I heard about it I thought that it was completely ridiculous. Then when I thought about it, if Holly and I were to do this (admittedly she does way more housework than I do), and her character got ahead of mine; I would feel the pressure to “level”. After my years of WoW, I can completely see me putting in a few minutes here and there, grinding vacuuming to increase my strength, etc.

The game preys on the hard core gamer mentality that you are letting your team down because you aren’t keeping up the leveling pace. It also gives you a measure to see that you are letting the group down. That is the key. The ability to track a metric.

As a general rule of thumb when you create what the chores are and how much XP they give, they say you should reward 1 XP for each minute the task should take.

I think one thing it should add, that it doesn’t have yet, is the ability to make a task worth more for some people. As an example, I loathe cleaning the cats’ litter box. It would be nice if I could get double XP for that. Holly hates folding laundry, it would be cool if she could get double XP for that.

When Holly gets back from her trip, I’m tempted to set this up and see how it goes…

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A Quick Update

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

It has been a long time since I put words in this place.

I guess it has partially been because I have been too busy with work and partially because I just didn’t seem to have anything to say.

Work has been… intense. That’s a sugar coated way to say crazy. Last weekend was the first weekend I’ve had in as long as I can remember. One good point of my first game job was that, while we might have worked absolutely insane numbers of hours during the week; we always took the weekend off. People need that time to keep from burning out.

As I haven’t had that time, I have been burning out. I’m blackened and crispy.

But, enough about work. It depresses me.

This Friday, I guess that’s tomorrow, Holly is going away on a trip with her Girl Guide Troop. She’ll be gone for 7.5 days, which is 7.4999999 days too long. We haven’t been apart for that long since Christmas. I am already missing her and she’s still here.

I honestly can’t remember what life is like without her. I don’t want to. She’s so wonderful. I love her so much. She makes me smile every single day.

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