Hello all. I’m back. Back from meeting guildies and from meeting up with old friends. Back from a land of warmth and freaking amazing Tex Mex (duh) and being able to purchase wine from regular grocery stores again. I miss being able to do that.

I spent a lot of time around the Azzah clan and had quite a few instances of being wildly amused at some of the things the middle child, Squishy, had to say. He’s recently started playing WoW, you see, and is so damn proud of his characters and his mount collection that I can’t even stand it. And like most younger people, he’s pretty sure he knows pretty much all there is to know about the game. I had knowledge about hunter abilities and which zones are the most awesome dropped on me by someone who is less than 10 years of age and doesn’t have a single level 85 character.

Like I said, it was completely amusing. And totally adorable.

The best part was when Squishy piped up from the backseat: “Hey, Alas? Um, I know you haven’t played WoW very much-” and was interrupted right about there as At, Azzah and I all burst out laughing, but continued on once the hilarity had died down, nothing impaired: “-but I was wondering. What is your favorite part of the game?”

“I’d have to say it’s raiding,” I replied.

“Oh,” said Squishy. He thought about it for a moment and then asked. “Do you like to collect mounts?”

“Well, I have over 100 of them.”

“Oh.” And then he was off again, happily chattering away about his own achievements.

I was left with a distinct impression that Squishy doesn’t really think that I have played WoW very much, despite my telling him that I have played for five years and have 5 level 85′s (not to mention the 6 more characters I could get there without too much trouble if only I could be arsed to put myself through Cataclysm content again), have been a GM, a raid leader and am enjoying peon-ship. In fact, I think the only one of my “stats” that ended up making any sort of impression on him is that I have the Over 9,000 achievement for achievement points. I think that he believes that girls just don’t play WoW seriously.

Part of it is that Mrs. Azzah is very much not a gamer herself, so it’s really just the guys in the household that play. I hope I made a a bit of an impact on Squishy during the time we spent chatting about gaming. Because there’s no way he isn’t going to grow up gaming and I’d like to think that the next generation of gamers will accept female gamers even more than this one does.

And I sort of want to have my own mini-gamer. They’re just so enthusiastic about everything and it’s nice to see Azeroth being such a place of magic and wonder that I suspect it would eclipse even Disney Land.