How to lose your mind and save money while you do it!

Looks like I'm going to be an uncle.   My sister is only a few weeks preganant(despite her bizzare ability to consistantly fall down stairs), and I know its early to be telling people, but since only a select few of you know my real name, and none of you know my sister, I think it is a safe bet it will have no impact....but it is relevant to my blog, so there it is. 

Going to be an uncle, I don't even know that to think, yes my sister has been trying to have a kid for a long time, and I'm happy for her....but I have piles of fears building up.  I'm normally one of those people who hears a crying baby, and I walk the other way.  If the kid is too young to hold a controller, I am completly lost.   I can normally get away with being the "guy with the camera" and no one every bugs me to hold the kid, babysit, ect.....I doubt I could get away wiht it this time (being family and all).   being one of the older of 45 cousins(many of whom have kids of their own), I can only remember one time that I held one of the younger ones when they were babies, and that one time, the kid puked and shat on me simultaniously, it was not a good experience for a 14 year old version of me. 

So, yes, that was a bad experience, I know it happens, and I know the importance of building a relationship with this kid....but there are issues.  I am not exactly a reliable person.  I am selfish, (more than most) not just for myself, but for my wife as well.  if something does not directly concern either of us, then I don't exactly care.  I feel like I will have no concern for this kid, despite the feeling that I should.  I feel like this should impact my life, but  I can't seem to find a scenario where it would.   I strongly doubt my sister would choose us as godparents, more likely she will chose her husband's sister and her husband, or any of her 50 close friends over us, (due to my unreliable nature).  Nor do I see her ever asking us to babysit since she lives a few hours away, and if she is in town, our parents would insist on babysitting so there is no worry there.  Also, I would picture my sister not wanting us to be around too much to avoid risking political contamination of her childs mind as it grows to the age where that would become suceptable to such things...we are concervative libertarian, she is what I would call a Super Liberal (aka Hippie) and would take severe offense  to our lifestyle/beliefs, being imprinted on her kid.  and our nature of spend tons of money on tech, games, and generally fun stuff, we would be a magnet to the eyes of an impressionable kid.

So, I'm not convinced this will really impact me, but I'm also not sure if I should let it, or encourage it to affect us, or even try to get involved...Things I get involved with have a tendancy to fail in spectacular, firey, and/or destructive ways. Not sure what to do...should i even do anything?

In other news,

A big thanks to someone (you know who you are) for peaking my wife's (and thus my) interest in WoW.   This may be the first time ever that WoW SAVED someone money.   We had a Comcast issue last week, on Sunday, the service Tech came out to get us a new modem, turns out he was an active gamer.  So, as we waited for our new box to update, he started playing around with our connection, testing and replacing wires, and a few calls to his dispatcher and our internet speeds went from 6mbps on a good day to a consistant 26mbps on a 20mb service.   That was awesome....but the best is yet to come. 

After watching a few episodes of Star Trek we switched over to watch True Blood....and nothing, no TV, not even basic chanels....GRRRR!!!!!.....so I called Comcast Tech support, and after 20 min of talking with a woman who had what can only be described as someone from India doing their best impression of a deep south accent as interpreted by someone from Boston....it was not good.  But after a few rounds of "wait, what did you say?" and "can you repeat that?"  I learned that the dispatcher from earlier in the day managed to accidentally delete our TV service from their records....Just great.   well, please add it back onto the account....."oh, well, I'd love to, but they don't let me do that", well, is there someone else I can talk to?  "um....no, I don't think so, you'll have to call back tomorrow."  GRRR.....by this time we missed 45min of TrueBlood and it was looking like we'd miss Top Shot.  FINE! WHATEVER!  The call ended.

I decided to try an approach that always seems to work, I called comcast back and went for their billling section, (when in doubt call the accountants we always know what is going on)  with a quick peak at our account the lovely woman on the other end (Angela) had us set up, TV working, Internet still running at peak levels.....and she mentioned that the she loves having her internet set up this way as well, because high speeds make WoW so much more user friendly...."o- rly?  you are a gamer?" said I, "yes", she answered, "I even mold my work scheduel around running raids with my clanmates" .....'o-rly?' said I.  we are gamers as well, my wife has even mentioned an interest in getting into WoW!.  "o-rly?' said she. 'Well, let me take a look at something before I let you go' , she clicks a few buttons, and presto! our bill is $100 less per month on a promotion that is not normally mentioned to existing customers unless they ask for it specifically... I mentioned a rapidly developing desire for romance between the two of us (resulting in a slight scowl from my wife from the other side of the room) But alas, it was not to be, I wished her well in Cataclysm, she wished me well in my XBL exploites and told me to look her up if we find ourselves serving The Hoard in the near future. and we parted ways.

Gamers stick together, no longer do we have to be restricted to a parent's basement, or tiny low rent apartment, we are a unified force.  This is a lesson I learned a while ago, but to see it in action is always an amazing feeling.

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