This post is really from 2010, but I wanted to blog about my most recent "staycation," so I thought I'd bring this over from my ancient blogger site:

For the 2nd year in a row, I took 3 days off of the week immediately preceding the start of Laura's spring semester. This gives us a chance to spend some quality time together after the hectic holidays and before the busy back-and-forthing to Waco begins for her anew.

Last year when we chose to do this we were neck deep into our remodeling fiasco and we needed some time to escape and not spend money. We decided that since we own an absurd amount of video games (that we BOTH like to play) that we should dedicate our 'Staycation' to playing games that we already own that we've neglected since purchasing.

Because last year we had no kitchen (not exaggerating) we bought a bunch of food items that could be prepared in the toaster. -Not even trips for food will keep us from our lazing about at home- We kept the 'toaster trash' tradition alive this year and our menu included such classics as pizza pockets, bagel bites, taquitos, snickers ice cream bars, and a grocery store party tray sampler with cheese cubes and salami.

So the staycation came and video games were again the primary focus. We also sprinkled in some massages and a Dallas Stars game just for kicks.

Here are the rules for the gaming:

-We both make a list of all the games we own that we want to play. The list should be longer than what you actually have time for

-We rate the games on our list to determine which games we'd most like to play

-Once prioritized we evaluate what systems the games are on and then set up 2 different TVs with the consoles least likely to conflict with each other for game time

-When play on one of the games begins we set a 90 minute timer. When the timer goes off you finish up what you are doing in the game and switch games.

The switching means that we get to play different games. Seeing as how the point of this is to play games we've bought but have neglected, this method lets us dust off the most neglect possible from a high variety of games.

There were probably about 25 games on my list with priority ratings from 1 to 5. The 6 high (5) priority games this year were:

-Chrono Trigger (played on a PC SNES emulator)

-Knights of the Old Republic (XBOX)

-Zak and Wiki Barbaro's Treasure (Wii)

-No More Heroes (Wii)

-Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (360)

-Dead Space (360)

Lower priority games I also played were

Beautiful Katamari (360)

Rayman Raving Rabbids (Wii)

De Blob (Wii)