We sat down last night and had the discussion. With surgery and hospital bills looming in the near future, we made a list of all the things that we could cut out of the monthly budget that weren’t necessities. I know that insurance will cover a good portion of what’s coming, but it’s not going to cover it all, that’s the nature of the machine. In the end it would have been cheaper to pay for a 400.00 flight to the UK and have him stay with his parents until it was done, but that wasn’t realistic with his job and whatnot.
Do we need extra cable channels, netflix, games, etc…nope, even though we have always justified them as cheap alternatives to other activities. It is definitely cheaper to pay 10 bucks a month and get movies delivered to the house that we want to see than go spend somewhere in the 30 dollar range for the 3 of us to go out to a movie. The games are the big one, but we’re also looking at the time sink that they cause.
All together if we dump everything we don’t really need, including a land line into the house (we all have cell phones so not a big deal) we could save over 2k a year in expenses. It would also free up a lot of time that gets obligated to do other things together. There are a few variants that we’re looking at, but there are definitely some changes coming to the house.
A long time ago, on an internet far far … ummm yeah… Remember MUDs, MUSH, MOOs and all those lovely text based environments? They’re still there. I was an active player of DragonRealms for many years, but I got away from playing and forgot about it in the fog of 3D graphic environments that suck your life away into the void. The kid has gone on a Terry Pratchet reading binge as of late, mainly because the husband and I have been throwing the books at him for long enough that he’s tired of being bruised and gave in. This has led to a lot of giggling, snickering and general silliness in conversations around the house, which in turn led us to talking about a MUD based on Discworld that we both remembered.
I had never played it, but I knew it was there, and the kid took it upon himself to not only find it but to start playing, and that led to me creating a character as well, because, honestly, how can you not want to be a witch and squint scathingly at people and watch them wince in pain. It’s been a fun distraction for all the serious stuff going on around here with the upcoming surgery. If you want a unique way to kill a few hours, by all means, go have a look.
With the pending stuff that I’m not going to talk about today, I decided last night to reinstall Diablo II on my desktop. It took some proding to get it working under Ubuntu, but there are some awesome guys over in their gaming forums that have figured out all the hard bits. I had forgotten how much fun it is to run around and bash the crap out of tons of little baddies.
I love the fact that as old as the game is, that the playability is still there, it’s one of the reasons I love Blizzard games so much. I will say that playing in an 800×600 window is a bit silly when using a widescreen monitor, but it didn’t take long to get used to it.
There’s also a nagging voice in the back of my head that wants to redesign some things around here. I’ve been looking around at other sites and have gotten some ideas, but if I do this, I want to make a point of creating something from scratch this time around. Oh god, she’s going to code things!!!! The internet may not survive.
