Peteosaurus
Occupation: Pharmacist
Weapon of Choice: The Needler
Strengths: Always is in position to cover teammates. A model cadet, follows orders from commanding officers with an emphatic “Sir Yes Sir!” and a crisp salute.

Weaknesses: As alluded to above, if there’s ever a situation where Solo merely wounds me with friendly fire, Peteosaurus is always there to finish the job.

As a prospective teammate, this worries me… Will you have to ask your wife if it’s ok to provide cover fire? Before grabbing a rocket launcher, does your wife need to give you her blessing? I can’t stress this enough, we’ve got enough distractions on this team (The Chizzler) without wives/girlfriends going Yoko Ono on this outfit…

The best advice I can give you is to not even ask for permission. If you weren’t smart enough to include Xbox ownership in a prenuptual agreement, there’s no way you’re getting one now. Your wife can detect when something might bring some happiness into your life, and her intuition is in place to stop it. Your best bet is to simply apologize, and buy her a new “DVD player” that coincidentally has “Xbox” written on it…

The topic of children was brought up as a “solution” to the problem of not having enough team members. I am prone to believe that children only add to the problem. For instance, without a kid to buy diapers and food and clothes for, and having to make time to play with her and read to her, I’d have plenty of time and money to join the team. Not to mention that gaming is impossible when she’s awake due to her love of yanking on cords. Things being as they are, joining the team any time in the near future is probably out of the question.

I would like to elaborate on a couple of points mentioned above. Cons-diapers. Couldn’t agree more. The changing isn’t really the problem, you get over that. But you’d think the freaking things were made out of titanium as much as they charge for them (on a side not, the money you save on diapers is well worth the trip to COSTCO, sorry DA).

However, the raising the next generation of gamers and the beer-fetching parts can be quite rewarding. Avery won’t be two until the end of May, but she’s already in training. A couple of weeks ago I found a Shark Tale handheld video game in a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Since I was able to beat in on the first try and it no longer presented a challenge, I put Avery to work on it. My only further comment is that she’s a quick study. She’s quite adept at dodging the fish just as she’s supposed to. It won’t be long until she beats that game and we can move on to Madden or Ghost Recon.

Also, just last week she finally realized her dream of opening the fridge. Due to a lack of height, before she wasn’t quite able to get enough leverage to break the suction hold on the door. But once she got the door open, as well as the fact that she’s known “beer” for months now, we were able to put two and two together. I can now sit back comfortably in my favorite chair and say “go get Daddy a beer please” and I don’t get any whining, or a comment about how lazy I am, or told to get off my ass and get it myself. I just get a cold, fresh brew right in my hand in under 30 seconds. Now in my book, that is definitely a pro to having kids.

Pros:

–Never-ending supply of pre-teens to kick around on-line.
–In the event of a team loss, you can always order the other team to bed.
–IF (and I do mean IF) you can keep the wife’s opinion out of it, there will be no more complaining from the other side about, “mom sending us to bed.” Just think how great it would be ORDER the other side back into the game (“I say when you’re tired junior! Now back to the game, Booth’s kid has twice as many kills as you!”)
–You could make the opposition bring you beer after wiping the cyber-floor with them…AND, as they would be too young to drink it, you would not have to bring them beer on the off chance you lose.
–You will be in charge of training a force of gammers to carry on the tradition long after your gamming days have turned to cyber-dust.

Cons:

–Diapers.
–You will have to wait at least five or six years before the next generation can kick some serious arse without getting nightmares.
–Snot nosed punks all around you, and you can’t even drink and reminisce about high school with them.
–The enemy lives at your house.
–We all know that the younger generation will eventually learn to kick the crap out of you at prettymuch any online game…and after all the crap-talking you all are likely to shove down an enemy’s throat, they are not going to be gentle.
–Cost benefit analysis: average price of raising child through graduation is over $300,000.

Well, personally, I think the last figure is the important one. It probably is easier to pay some random geek you meet online to lose to you than it is to actually raise a child. But on the off chance anyone is already having a kid, think of an in-house XBox partner as another potential upside to the deal.

babs rambler