The End of an Era

Wow, you’re a stay-at-home Dad?  What do you do with all that free time?  Watch soap operas?  Join the town sewing club?  Kick back with a Starbucks and read some books you bought at the CarseatBlog.Com Amazon affiliate link?  Watch the MLB day games?  Take a nap?  Sure!  I do all that.  You know, the bills, house, kids and stuff only take a few minutes of time every day.  Ripping out some blogs and laying the smack down on all the users who get reported every day at Car-Seat.Org only adds a few more minutes.  Being the coordinator of a local non-profit organization and doing child seat safety inspections on the side is nothing.  So what else is there to do when you’re not part of the neighborhood daytime social network?  You guessed it, the same thing more than 10 million other people do.

World of Warcraft.

As my DW (who now lurks here) will be happy to discover, that era is now at an end.  My account is cancelled and expires in a couple weeks.  Cold turkey.  I haven’t logged in since last week.  No regrets.  Still, it was a hard decision to make, after so much time invested and meeting so many online buds who helped slay various dwarves and gnomes over the years. 

Fortunately, most of those buds have also started playing Warhammer Online with me!  Unlike most gamers, I can only handle one title at a time.  It’s hard to keep up with all those kids as it is with one game, let alone if you have to go up the learning curve on many games at once.

There’s pretty much been one fantasy role playing game at a time all the way from when I bought Ultima I with my Apple II computer in the early 80s.  I was a loyal “Ultima” and “Wizardry” series customer through college; back then I could handle two at once.  Linking up computers with a serial cable was fun, but gaming took a big jump with modem games like the original Doom.  It went up astronomically when Diablo was released the internet over 10 years ago and spawned the formation of many online “guilds” of players.  Now, multiple people could team up and kill me instead of just one at a time!  Then came Team Fortress Classic, Dark Age of Camelot and of course, World of Warcraft (with a few others to fill in between the rest or if something got tiring for a while).

Will Warhammer Online really replace World of Warcraft?  Only time will tell!  All our CarseatBlog.com readers are welcome to join in the fun!  More than likely, your kids are the ones who will be brutally slaying my poor, defenseless Zealot, over, and over, and over again.  Please tell them to have sympathy on the old guy who is too slow and can’t click a mouse due to carpal tunnel or something.  Maybe DW will start to play with me and roll a Marauder or a Black Orc to protect me from Order.  Seems like there are a ton of husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend pairs in our guild that develop stronger bonds with each other simply by venturing off and cutting up other couples who unwisely chose to play a high elf or dwarf…

Well, that’s all for now.  Gotta feed the kids and get them off to school.  Then I need to balance the books and pay the bills.  Then catch up on all those emails I ignored during Warhammer launch.  Then I need to approve the few dozen new members on the forums and read though all the reports.  Then I’m getting some new tires for the van.  Then I have to go help my Dad.  Then lunch.  Then take my 3-year old to preschool and help the coordinator there fix the all-in-one fax machine.  Then I have to mow the lawn.  Then I need to get stuff ready for this weekend’s CPS Week safety event being sponsored by my non-profit organization.  Somehow, all those people in Warhammer that have a REAL job and more kids than I do have made it to level 20 and bought their mounts already, so I need to go try to catch up before the kids get home from school!  Maybe they can make their own dinner tonight?  There’s a big guild raid I might want to join…