Previous Fridays

1. I love when you hold doors open for my Gramma.

2. I love that you found Dragon Age: Origins just for me!

3. I love your brilliance, even though it means you usually win.

4. I love you making me breakfast, especially when it involves French toast, eggs, and/or bacon.

5. I love watching you with kids.

What it is – What it do!

Leave, in the Army, is taking time off from work. Basically, it’s vacation time. You save it up and then spend it, similar to how you save and spend vacation hours at a civilian job.

Block leave is a block of time usually several weeks long when the whole unit takes leave at the same time. Block leave is usually given around holidays such as Christmas and before and after deployments. It’s supposed to be optional (after all, you’re “paying” for those days with your “vacation hours”), but usually soldiers are all but forced to take block leave because, if they don’t, the officers in charge have to come up with work for them to do and people to supervise them.

Pre-Deployment Block Leave

It has been going well for us so far! Hubby and I took a short vacation that included a lot of time in the sun. Two all-day trips to amusement parks and a day and a half at the beach! Hard to decide which part was my favorite! I think Hubby’s favorite was Six Flags Fiesta Texas, and I do have to admit that was quite a fun day. We rode the Poltergeist at least three, maybe four, times. That is my new favorite rollercoaster!

The beach was, of course, lovely. The only downside was getting stung by a jellyfish for the first time. I couldn’t believe how many jellyfish were in the water! I’d never seen anything like it! Sea World was fun, too. The sea lion show was my favorite part of that day.

I was somehow able to make it through the whole trip with very minimal burns. Hubby got to worst of the sun, but he has a nice tan to show for it now. Finally his torso skin color matches the color on his hands and neck! (Silly Army tans are even worse than farmer tans.)

To sum things up, here are some pictures from the trip!

Tumbles: You’ve really gotta stop sharing your wine with me…

Several blogs I read are participating in this weekly meme that was created by Wife of a Sailor. She has a linky to all the blogs that are participating, so if you’re interested, head on over there!

1. What is something you wished you’d learned to do earlier in life?

I wish that I had learned to make daily exercise a habit when I was younger. I never really exercised as a kid or teen. Now, I’m trying to do it, and it never seems to stick. I have to fight myself every step of the way because I’m just so un-used to it. This is one thing that, when I become a mother, I really want to help my children learn early on. Be active every day!

2. What is your biggest pet peeve with the military?

I just hate the disorganization. You’d thing the MILITARY, of all things, would be the most organized unit. Our country needs the military, right? We need them to be able to take care of certain things – quickly and efficiently. Argh! If I were running things, by golly, they would be running much more smoothly. Communication, people! Seriously!

3. What tourist attraction near you have you never seen?

Hrm, I don’t know! I haven’t seen the museums on post, for one thing. Does that count? There aren’t really any tourist attractions in central Texas – that I know of!

4. What are you avoiding doing right now?

I’m avoiding my habit of worrying. My hubby and I are leaving on vacation in a matter of hours, and we’re not finished packing, he’s still at work, and I’m due at the doctor’s office in 10 minutes! Hubby is supposed to be picking me up. So, rather than stress about that, I’m using the spare minutes to update the ol’ blog.

5. Wine, beer, or liquor?

I’m very picky about my wines. If I can find one that basically doesn’t taste alcoholic at all, I’ll take wine over anything else. But otherwise, shots are the way to go. Get it over with.

Previous Fridays

1. I love you for saving me from a billion crickets every day! You’re my hero!

2. I love you for taking turns cleaning the litter box.

3. I love when you help me cook by chopping the chicken/veggies/whatever.

4. I love playing Ragnarok with you.

5. I love your non-scrawny-ness.

I started watching Army Wives while my husband was at JRTC. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, and several friends of mine regularly watch and enjoy the show. But Hubby…he’d seen bits and pieces before and had decided that he didn’t like it, so I knew I needed a chance to watch it alone. A show just for me. I finally got that chance when he was gone for a month.

The Differences

So, he left, and I watched…and watched, and watched. I watched all 3 (complete) seasons of Army Wives within the first 2-3 weeks of JRTC, and I was sad that there wasn’t more to rent from Netlix. The first episode caught my attention right off the bat. Within the first 10 minutes, a soldier proposes to a girl he’s known for only a couple days. Hey, I thought to myself, I know a couple like that. I knew I’d be able to relate to the show… and that incident was just one of the commonalities I’ve found between the show and the real thing.

However, there are a lot of differences, too. If you’ve watched the show but never really been part of the Army life, you may not be aware of these:

1. FRGs – Army Wives implies that there is one FRG per post, and the woman in charge is the wife of the highest-ranking soldier – or something like that. This is not the case. FRGs are normally organized at a company level. If, for instance, there are 2 divisions on post, you’ll have about 3 brigades, 9 battalions, and 45 companies, which would mean 45  different family readiness groups. These aren’t exact numbers, but you get the idea. And these are not always headed up by the company commander’s wife, though from my understanding that’s not uncommon. I can’t speak for how FRGs in general tend to work as I’ve only been a part of one, but I can give you a little peek inside ours, and maybe some other wives can chime in with how their FRG has worked or not worked in the comments.

• Meetings once a month include all families in the company, not just a select few.
  Our FRG meets once a month. Generally speaking, one member of each married couple in the unit is required to attend. If my husband can’t make it to the meeting and I don’t go in his stead, they can scold and/or punish him for it. Sometimes, to encourage soldiers to go to the meetings, they have been known to give them a day off from PT. Sometimes, they bribe us with food… Basically, the FRG meetings are supposed to include all married soldiers and spouses.
• Meetings cover upcoming events and training schedules.
  Usually, the company commander or another officer goes over the schedule for the upcoming month. They’ll tell us when our soldiers are supposed to be working late, working normal shifts, or getting days off. (It’s a nice little fantasy they have since nothing ever goes according to plan.) Then, the meeting is turned over to the FRG leader, who goes over upcoming events and fundraisers, talks about how they need volunteers, et cetera. If we’re lucky, the meeting ends there and we can either eat, if they’ve brought pizza, or go home.
• Women either try to be involved or try to stay out of it.
  In our company, I seem to see two groups of women: The “FRG Ladies” and the we-don’t-do-that-stuff Ladies. It’s a kind of strange division. I haven’t figured it out completely yet.
• The purpose is to provide information, not take care of individuals.
  Unlike on the show Army Wives, our FRG does not organize things such as taking care of new mothers and newly widowed women. That is the job of another organization (they mentioned it recently, but I can’t recall the name of that organization). The FRG is here to make sure the families are at least as up to date as possible on the unit’s schedule – be it training schedule or deployment schedule. They relay information from the company to the families. And their secondary purpose is to provide some companionship for the ladies when the men are gone. For example, when the boys were at JRTC, our FRG meeting was held at the bowling alley. Fun! I will definitely appreciate that aspect of our FRG more once the men deploy.

2. Deployments – They are a little different, too. Yes, you can be deployed unexpectedly. But, generally speaking, you’re going to know when it’s coming. Units deploy on a schedule, so you know that if they got back at this time of year, they’re going to be deploying about the same time a year from now, unless something unexpected comes up. We’ve known that Hubby was going to be deploying this fall ever since, well, last fall. We didn’t know exactly when, but it’s not like on Army Wives where they call you up out of the blue and say, hey, you’ve leaving in 3 days. And I’m very glad it’s not like that.

3. Station – For for the rest, a lot is unfamiliar to me because the show revolves around officers and one NCO. Keep in mind that there are a lot more enlisted in the Army than officers. A lot more. (One website I checked claimed the enlisted to officer ratio is 6:1.) It didn’t fit in to the show for them to include these families – perhaps because it’s harder to show a realistic friendship between a group of wives that diverse. But there are a lot privates, privates first class, and specialists in the army who are married and who live the army life just like the rest… only different. They have less control, less stability, fewer expectations placed on them. Does anyone else feel like the show is a little TOO centered around officers?

I Love It!

As for the drama in the show, well… a show’s gotta have drama. That’s what makes it interesting and intriguing to watch! The writers/producers are trying to pick up on all the stresses that can and will happen in Army life and concentrate them on one small (very small) group of people. I think they do a grand job of it. Hopefully most of us don’t have to go through ALL of these things, but we’ll know people or know of people that do.

I can relate to Army Wives even if it doesn’t exactly represent the Army Wife Life I live on a day-to-day basis. And for that, I love it!

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Two things I want to cover. One is D&D, both tabletop and electronic. The other is gaming before marriage vs. after marriage. I’ve been having a lot of discussions about these topics with friends, lately, so I decided it was time to bring together all my thoughts.

Dungeons and Dragons

The beginning of it all, right? D&D was the first commercially available pen-and-paper role-playing game (RPG), if not the first invented. It started the industry of RPGs, a type of game which is my favorite because it serves the purpose of encouraging social interaction as opposed to competition, according to this article. In tabletop D&D, the players and dungeon master (DM) gather around a table with all their supplies and act out their respective character roles in a story through “a process of structured decision-making.” They have character sheets which list all of their equipment, armor, weapons, spells, hit points (health), background, and abilities, and they use that information to determine what the character would do in any given situation. On their turn, they state what their character would do and often have to roll a die or dice to determine whether the character can successfully complete said action. (In other cases, players may choose to play a live action form. This is less common and, in my opinion, weird. Just saying.)

Pros:

• face-to-face interaction
• feeling that the dice rolls are real and determined only by natural chance

Cons:

• difficult to limit out-of-character talk
• tends to be slow-paced
• must schedule a meet-up at the same time in the same place

The alternative to tabletop D&D is to use a program on the computer which tracks character information and electronically rolls dice at your command. The DM can easily manage multiple maps while hiding from the players anything of which they should not yet be aware. Rather than shuffling through papers, all the information needed is essentially at your fingertips and available at the click of a button. By creating buttons that automatically roll the necessary dice for any individual action, you can save on time. The pro/con lists should show you which version I prefer.

Pros:

• turns seem to take less time
• easier to separate in-character talk from out-of-character
• easier to imagine the scene through textual descriptions
• less distracting to get up from the game to do things like get a snack, use the restroom, et cetera
• can play from a distance by using the internet

Cons:

• no face-to-face interaction
• dice rolls sometimes seem less random when done by the computer

Girls and Gaming

Let’s face it. There are fewer girl gamers than guys. Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe not enough girls had older brothers to introduce them to games at a young age, like I did. Maybe parents tend to work harder to discourage girls from gaming. Whatever the reason, girls make up decidedly less than half of the gaming population.

But, when I started moving from Mario and Spyro to RPGs and MMOs (short for MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game), the percentage of female gamers was closer to 4% than the 20-40% you find now (depending on your source of information). 4% is quite a minority!

Its Place in My Life

One might think that now that I’m married I would have outgrown gaming. But no, no such thing has happened.

Perhaps if I hadn’t married a fellow gamer.

But really, gaming as a wife is even better than gaming single! Now, I have a partner almost any time I want one. And I felt a lot less like a loser playing Rock Band online on Christmas Eve since I was playing with my husband rather than with strangers.

Gaming definitely has a place in my life. It’s something I enjoy, and more importantly, it’s something my husband loves and we take joy in doing together. Which is great because I don’t think I’m ever going to want to go camping with him as often as he would like. Gaming is great shoulder-to-shoulder time for us, especially when I’m able to reign in my temper over things not going like I want them to…

While it’s important to balance recreation time with other responsibilities, I still think it’s good and even advisable to have some good recreation time – every day, if possible! Gaming in its various forms helps my husband and me relax together, helps my friends and me connect, and helps me take a break from reality when reality is especially trying.

What are your thoughts? I know a lot of wives are more of spectators than participators when it comes to gaming, but are there any others who do enjoy a good video game sometimes? What do you enjoy about it? What games do you play?

Guys, what games do you enjoy? And what do you think about marrying a gamer or non-gamer?

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