Something I notice these days is that we go through “fads” of activity. I was like this before, in the stick house, but it’s even more pronounced now that we have such limited space. I’ll go through phases of hobbies– for a few months, I’ll obsessively knit. Or I’ll want to do nothing but work on my novels. Or I’ll spent a month training the cat (yes, you read that right– my cat does tricks.)
With the cat getting sick last month, and my grandmother’s death this month and all the visiting that’s ensued, at the end of the day, we’ve found ourselves wanting to do little more than curl up with some DVDs on the sofa.
Except that, during the course of hanging out at my grandma’s and playing around on Facebook, and maybe in part as an extension of our recent obsession with Carcassonne, my husband re-discovered video and online games. Now, we’re far from the cutting edge of computer games– we play a couple of things on Facebook, online poker, and solitaire. He also re-installed Angband, which is an ascii-graphics computer game from about 20 years ago. And this morning, he actually pulled out the Playstation 2, a relic from our more acquisitive past.
I will not bore you with the details of the video games he’s into right now. It’s enough that he’s doing something fun and entertaining (and almost entirely free, since we already have the system and several games to play). This dusting off of old pastimes to re-kindle an interest is a great way to put some controls on the endless rounds of building walls of clutter around us.
Originally posted to Life on the Road.