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Matthew M Monin
United States
Branford
Connecticut
8/8 FREE, PROTECTED
513ers Assemble!
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I anticipate this first blog entry will be longer than usual as I lay out what my typical day is like.
I'm a stay-at-home-dad to an almost 2 year old boy. Most of my day is taken up by him, and I wouldn't have it any other way. The typical day sees me waking up at 8:30 am to take over for my wife, who wakes up an hour earlier. She takes off for work and from then to approximately 6pm is a flurry of non-stop activity with a two hour interruption of calm during his nap time.
I do actually get some work done during that part of my day, though not anything in-depth. I'll use this time to weed through the email we get at our Contact Us email to separate the spam (~60% of it) from the actual messages which I will reply to later. I do something similar with my subscriptions. I am subscribed to several forums on the site and separate the resulting subscription list into threads I'm not interested in, threads I'm personally interested in, and threads that I'm following as a moderator.
If I've been a good husband I'll have dinner ready by the time my wife gets home. I enjoy cooking, so I'm a good husband more often than not  The next few hours are spent catching up on each others' day and playing with our boy until bed time arrives around 9pm. Most nights my wife turns in around the same time, but sometimes she'll stay up and we'll enjoy a show on the DVR together (we're currently in Season 2 of The Wire).
After she turns in I get the bulk of my work done. Geekmail never stops coming in. Nor does email. People don't stop posting to the forums. And in addition to those constant streams I need to attend to, I also have a wide variety of other duties. I'm a man of many hats around here and my main challenge is in keeping all the balls in the air as I juggle them.
Fortunately, I love what I do. A lot of my public activity (ie forum moderation) involves playing bad-cop, but most of what I take care of behind the scenes in responding to emails and such involves helping individuals. I can imagine burning out from the negativity forum moderation brings if that weren't balanced by all the gratitude I get from people I assist privately.
Anyways, what you may have noticed is that all the above leaves little time in my day for games. ANY games. The backlog of video games I want to get to (BioShock 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Dead Space 2) grows and grows, and I've got games acquired at BGG.Con (Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game, 51st State) still in shrink!
Friday provided a small gaming oasis in my typically barren week. A couple friends (Matt and Joshua) that had midday Friday free so I scheduled some gaming to happen at my place during my boy's nap time. Matt had never played The End of the Triumvirate so I went through the rules and then we got to business. It ended fairly quickly with Josh taking a military victory in the second year (mostly my own fault for creating the opening).
Matt didn't love it, but the constantly shifting alliances reminded him of Chaos in the Old World and thanks to the quick first game we had plenty of time to get that out as well. My son woke up around when we were getting started, so I let him enjoy The Land Before Time (his favorite movie) in the other room. The game marked my first ever win as Tzeentch (a dial victory) and capped off a fun day. All this gaming meant I hadn't prepared dinner (bad husband!), but my wife felt like picking up some fast food anyways (yay!).
Last night's project was my continuing effort to put BGG Secret Santa to bed. We had over 1700 participants and I've only had to match up about 1% of them with new Santas due to gifts not arriving. I think that's pretty amazing! But all the geekmailing to investigate the situation and keep things moving has been a substantial drain on my time and I'm looking forward to having that time to devote to other projects. Still, knowing that no one is being left without a gift makes it well worth the effort.
That sums up yesterday Sorry for the length! As I've laid out what the standard day looks like, future entries will be shorter and focus on unique elements.
Thanks for reading!
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for being a great dad.
Hopefully there is a twice-as-big gaming room waiting at the end of the project 
