Geekery Meets Housework

I was doing pretty good keeping up with my weekly blogging until about two months ago. That’s when spring struck! The grass awoke from its winter slumber. The weeds resumed their vigilant battle to make my yard into an eyesore. The rosebushes made their pleas for attention with leafy new shoots in reds, greens, and greys, and showy flowers in pinks, purples, apricots, and whites. How can I find time to write when there is grass to mow and weeds to pull and roses to prune and vegetables to plant and more weeds to pull and watering to be done and ... ?

So, the food blogging is just going to have to slide a little to make for time for chores.

Ugh. Chores.

For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with a little bit of geekery introduced to me by a friend from work: www.chorewars.com. It’s basically a website that allows a family to track household chores. What’s geeky about it is that it’s done in the style of Dungeons and Dragons, the epitome of geekdom. You set up a party for your house or office, and the characters in your party gain experience points (XP) for completing tasks. As in D&D, characters have a character class (fighter, ranger, wizard, etc.) and level up by gaining more XP. Characters also have ability stats for Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom. If you’re familiar with D&D, you get the picture.

Here’s my character:

I named her Veilchenblau after one of the rosebushes in my yard. If you click on the image you can see my character details, including the chores I've completed recently. You can also check out my entire party.

I suppose the idea is to create competition between members of your household so that everyone is motivated to finish more housework. That doesn’t really apply to me because I’m not really competing with anyone. However, I found Chore Wars to be useful anyway. It’s at least somewhat motivating when I can see that the last time I watered the plants was two weeks ago. In fact, I’ve learned a lot about my housework habits. My most common task is doing the laundry, which is completed, on average, once every 2.5 days. Preparing meals would far surpass laundry except that I have it divided out by meal, and I don’t take credit for meals like cereal or reheated leftovers. Other interesting tidbits:

• I miss trash day every other week. (Monday mornings are so hard!)
• I usually bake about once every 1.9 weeks.
• Mom is most likely to help out in a food-related capacity. Dad usually does outdoor stuff.
• I use the dishwasher 3.9 times more often than I wash dishes by hand.

Well, I think that’s all I have to say about that. Besides, it’s been six days since I did a load of laundry, and that probably means I’m getting behind. Happy housekeeping to you!