the WoW diet

Which is a more effective diet: an extreme case of salmonella or an obsessive case of World of Warcraft? The answer is most definitively World of Warcraft.

Since I started playing, I've been so caught up in the game that I've skipped meals. I've dropped an entire size. I don't know how many pounds it has been as our scale is broken. Yes, I know that's a set-up for a great joke -- how fat is the Drunken Housewife? So big she broke her scales!-- but the reality is that some child removed necessary parts from the scale. Unsurprisingly enough, no child admits responsibility. (Similarly no child will cop to having severely shorn the whiskers on Henry the Hairball, our last foster kitten. Lola, my top suspect likes to say aliens and ghosts are all around us and is quite insistent of her own virtue vis-a-vis the whiskers).

My Warcraft character is now a level 36 Orc hunter known as "Hassenpfeffr" on the realm of Drenden, with a level 35 pet cougar called "Frowstomatic." (A prior character, a Night Elf named "Lolathird", was abandoned at level 9 due to my deciding that the elf world was too cutesy. A gnome character came next, but I couldn't stand to see myself so short and lumpy and abandoned her before she even reached level 2. A Tauren hunter looked promising, but by the time she was level 5, I couldn't bring myself to log in. Finally I created Hassenpfeffr, and I haven't tired of her. I'm startled every time someone addresses me as "Hass", however, as that's my nickname for "Iris Uber Alles." Sadly her new helmet squashes down her perky purple mohawk, but she still has sass -- and extra protection from enemies.)

Now that our Christmas vacation is over, Warcraft time is more limited. I need to work in Lola's pre-k classroom tomorrow. The day after that, I'm supposed to spend half the day chaperoning a second grade field trip. Today I had errands to run, children to drive hither and yon, groceries to buy. Meanwhile my Hassenpfeffer alter ego lurks in the recesses of the internet, waiting for me to log on.