Help me baby Jesus, help me Oprah Winfrey!

A Side:

The Lt continues to alienate himself with us. Remember how I told you, in the Dane Cook post, the Lt wanted to increase our work day to a 12 hour day? Well, he didn’t get a 12 hour day, but he did get an increase of 2 hours.

Yes, an additional 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. We all agree that he’s a retard. If there was a reason to increase, say we knew our workload was increasing substantially, then it would be merited. But there was no need for this. We’re pretty damn productive with the time we have. He’s just increasing it to increase it. He has yet to give any of us a reason why there was a perceived need to increase it.

We now start an hour earlier and get off an hour later. What that means is that V and my morning workouts will just about be eliminated. Either that, or my calls home will. While Heather and I do talk a good bit during the later part of my day through IM and email, I still love to hear her voice in the morning. Even if it’s her just repeating what she put in her emails.

It’s just… frustrating to say the least. I look for ways not to be around the Lt anymore. Whatever it takes, I try to distance myself from him. He won’t chill the hell out, relax and get into a normal groove. When I am around him, I try to ignore him to the best of my abilities. I turn on the “wife ear” and go from there.

Every married man has a “wife ear”. It’s when you tune out about 99% of what your spouse has to say, listening for the part where you either a) hear your name or b) need to give an opinion. When you hear one of those two, that’s when your brain disengages the auto-conversation drive and you’re back at the helm.

And before the ladies start to give me crap about it, I know women have the “hubby ear”, so don’t go acting all indignant and holier than thou!

B Side:

I figure I had best fess up about this now, rather than be outed about it later. Last week, I resubscribed to World of Warcraft.

*GASP!*

Yes, it’s true! But, for pretty good reasons!

A) There’s absolutely nothing here to do besides work.

B) I’m bored out of my skull!

We do have TV here, AFN (Armed Forces Network). Only thing is, it shows TV programs from last season. Basically, everything that I watched last year is being played currently like it’s new. On top of that, not everything that I watch is on. AFN only has 10 channels of programming. I’m very glad we have that because it only use to be like 2 channels of programming a decade ago.

The one thing that is current are all the sporting programs. They do show a couple of NFL and college games live, but because there is an 8 hour time difference, I can only catch the first quarter or so of games before I need to hit the sack. But that’s ok, because a little bit is better than nothing.

So, besides TV, that leaves books and video games. I’ve been reading a lot, but I can only read so much. Same with video games. I brought the best the PS2 had to offer, about 6 really good games. I’m going through them, but I still want to do something else.

Two of the guys here play WoW, so I got the discs from them and reinstalled it. Took forever, but that’s ok. I had fears about reinstalling it, mainly the fear of becoming a WoW addict again. But this time is going to be different. With the way my schedule currently works, between work and working out, at the end of the day I might have about an hour to play. That’s if I even decide to play. So far I’ve only logged about 9 hours on a new character on their server. The majority of that came on my day off last week when I had a chance to just sit and play.

I figure that my chances for relapse are significantly lower this time around. Two reasons:

1) My connection. I’m playing over a satellite, which means that I have pretty bad latency. 1.5- 2.5k ms latency to be exact. That’s pretty standard, and it sucks. It takes about 3- 4 seconds for me to finish casting spells, even instant cast spells.

2) Time difference. Even if my connection wasn’t crap, I’m 7- 9 hours ahead of my two previous servers. I can’t raid with them even if I wanted to. The times they start, I’m asleep, then I’m at work. So even if wanted to get back into raiding, I can’t.

I’m enjoying this new found casual freedom. I’m finding it much much easier to just turn it off and go do different things. Last night I logged in just long enough to finish a quest that just had me run to a few different places, pick some flowers, make some potions and then I logged off. It took maybe 45 mins, but once I was done, I just logged off. Simple as that. No pressure to keep going, no need to keep leveling, no need to “just get this last thing done”… it was nice.

I’m determined to keep my play style casual. Like I said before, I’m not sacrificing real life for this damn game again. As dorky as this sounds, Luke Skywalker said it best. To be able to know the dark side, you have to have lived it and served it, then you know its power and how to defeat it.

Yes, I’m paraphrasing the farm boy, but he had it right.

BONUS:

Speaking of WoW, my friends found this and I can’t help but post it here. It’s pretty damn funny and it fits with the B topic. FOR THE HORDE!!!

-M

I’m thinking about my doorbell,
when ya gonna ring it?
when ya gonna ring it?

Explore posts in the same categories: Over There, The Grind

Tags: addiction, boredom, casual, Dane Cook, exercise, For the Horde, Star Wars, time management, workout, World of Warcraft, WoW

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