Happy New Year!

Every New Year's Day, Ben and I sit down and evaluate the past year, then use those evaluations to set goals for the next. Confessions of a Gamers Wife scored really high in my 2010 Evaluation and I regret that the project came to a screeching halt as soon as I tried to throw a couple other activities into the mix. I started an etsy site with my amigurumi creations and have had so much fun working on it and learning a new craft. I have a lot of work to do on that project, too, as Christmas did a number on my etsy shop (ohnoitsjess.etsy.com)



I don't regret the time spent on that project. I just wish that I could do everything more quickly...or I wish that I had more time each day. But I am pleased with how much I was able to do last year and I want to see CoaGW continue. I don't want to make a resolution that's impossible to keep like I did last year when I exclaimed that I would stop watching all reality television. If there were a reality television program in which people had to see how long they could keep their resolutions to win a million bucks, I would most certainly have been the first one voted off the island. So in an effort not to disappoint myself, but also continue CoaGW into 2011, I've decided to give myself a little slack on each entry....they don't need to be three page essays every time. I can blog a bit more casually about gaming experiences I have and what it's like to be married to a gamer while occasionally taking extra time to write a Good Piece when the mood strikes.

I don't have a new game to discuss this first blog post of the new year, but I can relate the Christmas drama that always unfolds for this poor, poor gamer's wife every year. What does a gamer's wife buy for her husband when he pre-orders every game he wants? Plus, even when I do buy him games, I've grown tired of giving him a small pile of identically shaped game boxes. Console years have been good to me. He remembers past Christmases as the “PS2 year” or the “Nintendo DS” year. Those good gamer wife moments are a couple brightly lit bulbs on an otherwise dud strand of attempts to surprise and match my husband's eerie ability to find me just the perfect Christmas gifts every year. This year I didn't fail him as much as offend him and it's all because of the World of Warcraft. I hate that world. Oh, how I hate it so.

I knew it was coming. The Expansion. He would mention it occasionally, feeling out the situation. Treading lightly. I would brush it off with a joke or an eye roll. Then he called me from work one day and I knew things were getting more serious. “Hey, some people at work are betting that you got me the game for Christmas and that's why you won't let me buy it. I told them there's no way you would ever buy me that game.” I too-quickly replied, "You win the bet! I'm not buying that game." I would not, could not, buy that game. But I think he was disappointed to have heard it stated so definitively. I have always been one person who gets him exactly what he wants for Christmas. What he wanted for Christmas was the special edition World of Warcraft expansion that was quickly selling out on Amazon, an observation not-so-coincidentally made the same day as that phone call.

He talked me down, as he always does, with rationalizations, usually monetary in nature. He wouldn't buy new games if he only played WOW. As usual, I grew tired of the subject and eventually said, a bit too loudly, perhaps, “Do whatever you want! Buy it if you want it!”

So he did. And so did my mother.

My mother also enjoys pleasing people at the holidays by granting them their gift wishes and she does not have the WOW stigma that I have. For some reason it didn't occur to me or to Ben that anyone else would ever buy that game for him. Oops. So he found himself with not just one copy of the game, but two. It occurred to me that I could play with the second copy, but that thought, like a gnat brushed quickly off my arm before it barely tickled a hair, was brief. Instead the second copy was returned to the Best Buy from whence it came and I was stuck with another extra large box on a shelf and a husband glued to his computer.

In fairness, he doesn't get to play WOW nearly as much as he would like. And he plays a bit more than I would like which is a compromise and that, everybody, is what marriage is all about.

Maybe my first game review of the new year will be Gran Turismo, since the gaming gift I did get Ben this year was a pretty new racing wheel. Racing games are like Ben's hot bubble bath after a long day at work.

He will certainly have many long days at work in the new year as he prepares for that next Madden launch. Somehow high-speed turns around a track helps him unwind. I plan on taking slow, cautious, responsible turns in my new ride, a Christmas present for us both, but mostly me. I call our new gunmetal gray Mazda 5 micro minivan the Mom Bullet and it is loaded with explosive hugs and an aux jack.

Happy New Year everybody. Thanks for your support of this project last year. It really meant a lot to me.