My husband and I are doing both Chore Wars and Fitocracy as ways to encourage ourselves to be more active and keep the house cleaner. We are both competitive enough that we will make good use of these tools in order to get more done in a way that stops leaving either one of us feeling that we do everything around the house.
Chore Wars is very D&D style. You have stats and your chores involve wandering monsters and treasure as additional flavor. You have a character class and a character image that is definitely old school D&D with elves and dwarves and undead and various fantastically garbed humans. We added more chores last night: litter box related and dog walking. Funnily, my husband's chores for dealing with the litter box involve fighting elder excrementals and mine for walking the dog involve poo demons. Great minds? I'm hoping that this tool makes it less likely that I will come home and be completely pissed when I see my kitchen a mess, because the mess will be more likely to be picked up as we go along.
Fitocracy has a different feel and is currently in beta. If you want an invite, please let me know. There is leveling, and quests and achievements. People complain how much different exercises are worth, but to me it doesn't matter. The goal is that you exercise in order to level and you want to level and level a lot. I am at level 5 with a vast amount of dog walking, some weight lifting, a bit of bike riding and some running on the treadmill. If I ever make it to the gym again I will be super far ahead. The best thing is that it is an additional encouragement for me to give Victor a walk rather than relying on him having fun in the back yard. I like giving Victor a walk, but last year I was giving him 2 long walks each day and it started feeling like an obligation more than it felt like a companionable time together. He deserves these walks, so anything that makes both of us happy is all to the good.
Now it is time for me to slip on the flip flops and get Victor into his walking gear.
Thanks everybody for the well wishes for Victor. He has an abscess which became infected. He is on antibiotics, and they are already working. The swelling has gone down and his energy has gone back up.
