No exclamation points at the end of that sentence, which means I am serious this time and not ranting. I will not return for any of my progressive teams, including the 3 that I run -- JFK, Jackie Robinson, and What If Things Were Different -- so all my teams in those leagues as well as others will be available as soon as their current seasons end. I have put this off for months because as the player with the 7th-highest Live rating, I would feel partially responsible if I stop playing should Live go under. This used to be a lot of fun for me and it still is more fun when I am winning, but overall I no longer care. That and I need to focus on my life goals -- my career, my kids, and my offline social life. It has been frustrating for me when other longtime players disappear without a trace, and when theme leagues that used to get 24 players -- all different owners even -- have to make do first with multiple owners, then reduce to 16 teams, then fade into oblivion. However, I will honor my existing commitments as long as those leagues end up actually running. I am not expecting a Jeter / Rivera type tour, just telling you all this because it's better than leaving without notice.
Since joining this site on March 12, 2002, after seeing an ad for it in what was then called
Baseball Weekly (
USA Today's
Sports Weekly), I have played over 36,000 Live games (the Live part since its inception in 2003, actually) -- over 30,000 under this ID and over 6,000 as yankeeman69 up until the end of 2005. (I actually did quit the site for the first 8 months of 2006.) I have played an additional 15,000 or so games that simmed. Side note: I gave myself the Trump moniker in 2004 solely because I was a fan of the new hit show
The Apprentice, and I had no idea that the real Trump ended up being serious about running for President. In fact, I had meant to use that name for football only and I called my only WifS league football team the New Jersey Generals with the home field being the Meadowlands. I even had Herschel Walker on my team! When I rented the basement apartment from my parents and they called me up for dinner, I would sometimes be a few minutes late because I was finishing a game. They reluctantly understood, even when it went into extras. When I was married, my then-wife got sick of this site. Even after we divorced, she got disgusted at the mere mention of it whether by me or by one of my kids. I even remember when my older boy was a toddler and then a preschooler all the times I would sit him on the left side of me so he would not mess with the mouse while I played, and also wondered how so many people could miss obvious subs since for the first several years I
never did!
Fourteen years later, I am tired, and at 42 years old I finally need to prioritize! I am attempting to start a new career in real estate (which would require nights and weekends which would otherwise be spent here), and if that doesn't work out, then I will go back to accounting, but even before I took any real estate salesperson classes, I was seriously considering walking away from this site. God knows I missed countless hours of sleep by staying up very late to play Live games. Some of you know when to shut it down for the night, but I don't, because I just hate to see games sim. If I stop now, that won't be my concern anymore. Even now I am zombified as I play Live!
Last May 30th, just two days before the Caitlyn Jenner issue of
Vanity Fair was released (I had not planned that coincidence, by the way; this is just a reference point), I told you all about my own similar transition. Certain close relatives did not talk to me for up to 3 months, and I am one of the lucky ones in that each and every one of my family members either accepted me immediately or eventually came around to doing so. My transition is
not the reason I am leaving this site. On the contrary,
every single one of you has been nothing but great to me, and I thank all of you for this! Another sidenote: A couple of you were maybe a bit
too supportive! Two WifS players hit on me in the past several months -- not naming names, but neither one was a regular, and one of those had even been hostile to me years earlier over a trivial matter. And here I was thinking that this site was the only place I could go online without getting hit on! I quickly learned that the Internet is different for a woman! To everyone else, I am glad that we could shoot the bull just like we did in the first 12 years of Live play. I feel as if I was the Christina Kahrl of WifS!
Thank you all for a great 13 years on Live and 14 years overall on this site! I am Sarah Katherine Renzetti (my full name) on Facebook and Sarah247NYC on Twitter, and
[email protected] is my E-mail address if anyone wants to stay in touch. I will still be on this site for about the next 2 months. Hug your significant others and your children tightly! Nothing is more important than family! I wish all of you the very best in life!
Love,
Sarah