Stoke of Midnight 2015…2016?

Stroke of Midnight

For the past few New Year Eve’s, my family and I stayed home. Our main reason is to stay off the roads both for the safety from strangers and also so we can partake more in the celebratory ale. For the last four years, we started in a new tradition on New Year’s Eve with an all day family gaming event. It’s a day where we make a huge pile of board and card games to play throughout the day. We try to see how many games we can get through. I think this year ended up being slower than other years.

Our first year of this tradition was ruined by my work and an all day escalated issue. At the time I was an on-call management style person for a large data center. To make a long story short, my evening started off with me trying to place last minute storage units of computers on a commercial airline. The flight continued without the parts but I lost a good 8 hours of my holiday.

The next year we decided to step up our game and introduce Nerdy the Elf to the mix. (AKA Nerd Y. Elf) Basically, he is one of Santa’s little slave helpers who goes around hooking up nerd based families in their nerd type traditions on NYE. (See a pattern going on here?) Nerdy likes to leave games at our house for us to play. So far he (or she) brought us Munchkin and Qwirkle. This year was another great add to our night. Nerdy brought us Exploding Kittens. This was a fun Russian Roulette style card game. Easy to learn, easy to play. Nerdy also leaves us a letter. This year’s letter made reference to HoHo the Naughty Elf. That got a good chuckle from my oldest son who is familiar to the Comedy Bang Bang podcast I got him hooked on.

This year we started off playing a few hands of Gin Rummy with our new Princess Bride playing cards which came from our Lootcrate subscription. My wife and I saved up a few months of Lootcrate deliveries and came up with a great advent calendar of toys for them. We had a few items leftover for Christmas Day and this was one of them. I forget the rest of the order but we only ended up getting through Gin Rummy, Exploding Kittens, Munchkin Legends, The Office DVD Game, Ticket to Ride, Chopper Strike*, and Apples to Apples.

*Chopper Strike was actually the first game my sons and I played in the morning as a warm up. Chopper Strike is a 1976 strategy game that the kids got from a past school teacher.)

We usually get through more games but we broke a few times for food. I think we ate too much which slowed us down. We all had trouble keeping our eyes open for the last 30 minutes of 2015. Shortly after the countdown it was lights out.

We still have a pile of games to play this weekend in our traditional first few days of the new year playing all the games we didn’t get to in the past year.

Goals/Gameplan for 2013

Here we go again. It’s a new year and it’s time to post up my list of goals to do this year. These aren’t resolutions because resolutions never last. I will probably break a resolution by the time I am done typing this post. This is also not meant to boast because I think I am far off from others on being able to boast. I am just throwing these items out there into the blogosphere to create some sort of accountability that I need to accomplish more than half of the items below. I feel better about myself when I can physically see items being crossed off of my list. Sure, I can easily keep all my goals in my head but it is not the same.

It is not specific but the items towards the top of the list are more important to me than ones towards the bottom. They all carry some weight in the grand scheme of things but I would rather take my kids camping than replacing all the light switches and outlets in the house. Scratch that. I’m not going to waste any brain cycles on prioritizing them.

So without further ado, here is the 2013 goals:

Gamestop Ruins Second Christmas

Tis the season to be merry and buying presents that will wipe out your bank accounts. Our family Christmas went well. The boys were excited and got some tech items they wanted. Eddie got an iPod Touch and Mason got a Nintendo 3DS. I even did good this year and bought Sarah something she really loves. I guess I can pick out good jewelry. I knew she always wanted something with her birthstone on it.

The boys also got a ton of gift cards. They always ask for Gamestop gift cards because they love the 2nd Christmas festivities they get to partake in with there dear old dad. For years, Gamestop always held a buy 2 get 1 free used sale right after Christmas. We take all our gift cards and spend them all in one shot and usually walk away with 6-9 games. We renew our Gamestop Rewards card and also grab a new controller for one of our systems. We don’t buy video games for December 25th. We let the boys pick out what they want.

For some reason Gamestop is not holding their holiday tradition and they are holding some other bogus sale offer. The kids are heart broken. Gift cards sit there burning a hole where ever you set them. Mason is wanting a Mario game for his 3DS. Eddie is looking forward to being a Spartan in Halo 4. My friend who works for Gamestop is also surprised that the sale is not going on. It’s not like Gamestop needs to offer this sale every year and they don’t need to explain why it is not going on. I’m just saying its a let down.

I do hope the B2G1 sale occurs before January 25th. Why this date you ask? That is the first day of Wintereenmas, a 7-day holiday celebrating video games. It was created by the crew of Ctrl-Alt-Del comics to help pass the late winter months when no good gaming titles are released. It’s not like I’m going to let the boys play for 7 days straight but I’m sure they would rather play with something by then instead of staring at the gift cards one month after Christmas.