What about my garage full of backpack hunting and camping gear and my extra full gun safe? How do I get around that? Any help is appreciated.
Backpack and hunting gear needs to be linked to an advanced communications strategy the key of which is the message that you - make that
she - needs that gear to prevent you from developing a paunch. Your extra full gun safe is no problem as it should be locked, your wife is probably not interested in guns, so it is just a 'black box'.
If you have the option for a separate garage for the car of your wife, it would save her - make that
you - the embarassment to expose her to all of your kit. What you don't see ain't there... It works for the biggest problems of the world: Climate change, famines, war. So it should be no problem that the lack of sight to your non-ASL toys will work the same way.
Now, we are getting there... As you, poor man, apparently have no hobbies and vices (Did anyone ever see backpack, hunting, and camping gear or guns?), your wife will conclude that you must do
something. Spouses at rest never do for a wife. It is always a good thing not to give you too much opportunities to be distracted by other females, though, so you cannot be allowed to be too outgoing.
If she proposes undesirable hobbies for you such as jogging, yoga, zumba, Tai-Chi etc., this is the time for you to point out that all of these are splendid ideas and that your colleague did the same and made fast friends with a group of attractive very likable and active young women, that even help him with doing the yard since a couple of weeks.
Say that you will indeed consider yoga, or maybe that boardgame that you played a couple of years back as it provides a similar mental balance as yoga, now that you think of it. Your wife will now encourage you to play the boardgame, and as a compliant husband you do, of course, agree.
As not to block the kitchen table, which is needed, it goes without saying, for more important things, you propose that you will find and clear a small spot in the basement. This is just as well, as your wife knows that silly board games belong into the basement. You have now official sanction by your long haired general to carve out a man-cave in the basement where you can agglomerate ASL stuff out of sight. The basement might be closer to the storage fridge with the beer, too. Or to the wine cellar in the East wing of the castle in case of Oberst von Marwitz if your tastes are more delicate.
The added benefit is that your wife knows that board games are cheap - she knows board games passing by the shelves at Wal-Mart while on her way to the cosmetics section. Luckily, she has no inkling that ASL is an other beast of board game, into which you can sink serious money - just as you don't have an inkling that she never actually buys her cosmetics at Wal-Mart but at other, much more exquisite places, into which she sinks serious money.
BUT - if she believes ASL is too expensive, you can always offer to resume backpacking. And hunting. And camping. And Guns...
I hope this communications strategy will pave your way back into the ASL hobby just like a Jagd-Tiger through a flowerbed of tulips.
von Marwitz