Online gaming addiction

I WAS pretty proud of the fact that I had avoided getting addicted to any computer games. I"ve been working on computers seriously since 1991 at WIU and never gotten hooked. I did have a spell where it got close about 4 years ago when everyone at work would spend our lunches playing Half-Life or when Joe and I would go to my house to play DreamCast. But in both those instances, I never felt the desire to start playing whenever I was awake.

Which brings me to yesterday afternoon when everyone else in the house was taking a nap. I couldn't really do any chores around the house for fear of making too much noise and disturbing someone's sleep. So I power up the laptop and check out partypoker.net from the comfort of my living room chair. (wireless networks are cool.) So, I create my account and join a table to start playing Texas Hold-em. They start you out with $1000.00. I cash $25 in to to join this table. 2 hours later, everyone is awake and I don't want to stop playing. But, I eventually prey my fingers away from the laptop and go spend time with the family. We eat dinner together and everything is going fine, when I start thinking about logging on again. Now, I don't really like confict, especially with my wife, so I reason in my head that if I knock something off my "honey-do" list right now, she won't complain when I start playing again when the kids are all in bed. So head staight upstairs to install a ceiling fan in Seth's room. That gets done without a problem. As soon as the kids were all in bed, I drag out the laptop again. It is now about 8:15pm. Brandy goes to bed around 9pm and I follow right behind 2 1/2 hours later. For those of you that know me, staying up after 10pm to play online poker is definately a warning sign that I'm getting hooked. I wanted so bad to keep playing but the thought of my alarm going off at 5am was the needed motivation to stop. I was proud of myself for making it in to work today without logging on and I'm just going to go with the assumption that whatever ports need to be opened on the work firewall are not available so I'm just not going to try. Let's see how long that lasts.

Let's hope I can keep this under control and not let it run my life, like it looks like it might.