Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged wii
Long Weekend Report
Feb 19th
For many in the US, they're just coming off of a long weekend due to president's day. I'm one of those people. I also didn't really feel like posting running updates, so you're going to get the whole thing right now.
Saturday
This weekend was another one of those weekends where I headed over to my friends house for a lot of general hanging out and doing stuff. I had placed an order for a Gamecube controller for in store pickup at Circuit City because I needed one to play Tales of Symphonia on my Wii (very nice RPG so far). It would also be useful there because we had planned on Smash Brothers Melee and they only had one Gamecube controller. I figured that going the in store pickup route would be faster and I'd just pick it up on my way to my friends.
Well, I was wrong. The guy in front of me in line at Circuit City was trying to return some car speakers. And they wanted to exchange them for a different model, but he wasn't having any of that. This argument took at least 10-15 minutes, so had I not already paid for the controller, I would have taken one off the shelf myself and tackled a salesman so they could ring me out and been out of there faster than if I did the in store pickup. Bah.
I arrived at my friends about a half hour later than I had planned because of the Circuit City incident. Most of the afternoon was spent just watching Slayers (An anime series. A very good anime series) and general hanging-out. After dinner (pizza) we were going to go bowling, but unfortunetly, all of the lanes were booked until 8pm which was a little late for us, so we headed back to their place for some margaritas (with an awful lot of tequila) and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Followed by the now traditional late night game of Trivial Persuit which lasted about..3 hours. But it was a fun 3 hours. After that, Robot Chicken and then I dropped off at about 1am. I really suck at staying up late these days. Must be getting old.
Sunday
The next morning I went off to the gym with Wassy because Jay sleeps in late and doesn't usually get up in time to hit the gym in the morning. I really wish I had a decent gym within a close driving distance to me because it was pretty nice having all that equipment right there. But unfortunetly the only close gym is nearly 20 minutes of driving time away and I'd never go regualrly so it wouldn't be worth it for the membership.
I hung out around their place for a while longer and watched some more Slayers, then headed home. Not too much to talk about Sunday really. Just a lot of relaxing and doing not much of anything.
Monday
Monday was the day where I was supposed to get stuff done. The plan was, do laundry, get the low tire pressure light on my car to go away finally and get some homework done. The first two worked out pretty well. As it turned out, my tires were just slightly low (all 4, so it wasn't a leak or anything) and adding a pound or two fixed the problem.
The homework didn't go so well though, since the site hosted by my school where I had stashed all the work was totally dead, so I didn't really have anything to work on. So that pretty much killed my productivity for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can make it up tonight (if I have the energy to do so that is)
All Christmas-ed Out
Dec 26th
Yesterday I went over to my parents house in the morning and hung out there pretty much all day, playing various Wii games. We started with NBA Live 08 for the Wii (without looking at the instructions, so we were lobbing shots at the basket from the other side of the court) which was…fun. Like the reviews said, it wasn't a really great game but it was entertaining enough that it was interesting. Probably not in the ways the game designer intended though.
I managed to get my dad to play a game of Mario Party 8 which I thought was fairly good but he didn't enjoy it as much. My mom ended up winning the game. After that my parents played some tennis and I ended up falling asleep for a little while on their couch. After I woke up, we played some Wario Ware Smooth Moves which my mom really enjoyed and my dad, predictably didn't.
My grandparents (mothers side) came over for dinner and to play some Wii sports after, which was cool, and they looked like they enjoyed themselves.
But, as a result of all this activity, I'm totally Christmas-ed out. I need to take today to clean up my living room a bit, call school to get my registration for my capstone project fixed up and generally relax.
It's A Penguin Christmas
Dec 25th
Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.
I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.
Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)
It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.
In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.
Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.
And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.
My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so…it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.
We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.
Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.
Snow-geddon 07!!
Dec 16th
The northeast is currently in the midst of a the first real winter storm of the season. Lots of wind at the moment, blowing stuff around. Kinda normal for the area. But you would have thought the world was coming to an end yesterday.
I had to go grocery shopping and it was a madhouse. The had every cash register open and the lines to check out were still crazy long. Haven't these people ever been through a winter storm before? I was surprised that the laundry place wasn't that busy. I would have figured people would want to try to get that out of the way as well. I guess they were all grocery shopping.
I spent my last remaining day on earth (because we're all going to die in this snow storm of course) over at my friends house where we watched some Anime (more Fushigi Yugi) hung out and also played Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii. Trauma center is really cool now since it has an actual co-op mode that works really well. There's some nerve wracking surgeries in this game now and it puts the two player option to good use. The difficulty may have been a little exaggerated due to the fact we were also drinking… The skin graft operation, in particular was very, very difficult.
In any case it was a good way to unwind after my stressful week. We'll probably keep playing the game Wednesday or this weekend (between my holiday festivities)
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I'm Thankful For Exploding Pies
Nov 23rd
Well, another fun thanksgiving this year. As always, we like to keep things fairly small and just have a nice dinner with the immediate family.
Before the activities officially started, I was watching the Today show on NBC and it quickly became apparent they had run out of stories to cover. They were doing a story about a kid (couldn't have been more than 7-8 years old) who choked on a cheez-it at school and his best friend saved him by performing the Heimlich maneuver. The bad part about this story was the fact they had both the kid and his friend on to interview them. It was…painful. Both kids were camera shy and had a hard time saying anything. I had to turn the channel for a bit since I couldn't watch the trainwreck any longer.
The day officially started out around 9-10am when the traditional assembling/decorating of the Christmas tree while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade took place. As always, my dad supplied the "It's too early!" comments as we were putting up the tree and my mom continued to want to put the lights on as we went which is totally against the tradition. Dunno how much longer that tree is going to last though. Getting kinda ragged and the base is a bit tippy this year. We also watched a little of the National Dog Show (long enough to see the dog that looked a lot like a mop) before switching over to football for the rest of the afternoon.
I ended up falling asleep during the Green Bay/Detroit game because it was kinda boring. Apparently, I slept through the interesting part of the game where Detroit tried to mount a comeback. I woke up a few minutes into the Dallas/Jets game to find that my sister and her husband had arrived. We hung out around my parents house for a bit and then we headed over to my place (minus my dad who was watching the jets get creamed) for some Wii bowling.
We headed out to Buffalo Head, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner location when we eat out (which we did this year, as opposed to my mom cooking last year). The roads were a little icy as my dad found out several times We thankfully arrived in one piece, but it was scary there in a few spots. True to past thanksgivings, nobody had the turkey special. I ended up with some stuffed shells that were pretty good. Somebody else in the restaurant had ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie for desert which got me wanting some pie. Apparently my mom wanted some too since she said she'd make one when we got home.
I hung out at my place for an hour or so before heading back to my parents for pie and to watch Grey's Anatomy. The pie was a little more eventful than expected. A couple bites into his, my dad doubled over and made something of a surprised noise. I can't remember exactly what he said, but when he straightened up again it had looked like his pie exploded all over his shirt. We're not entirely sure what happened, but it was very entertaining. Well, for us anyway. It's not like he shoved the pie towards him when he was taking a bite. Straight down fork movement. The best theory we could come up with is some kind of sabotage.
The Biggest Blue Light Letdown…
Aug 11th
I came home from work today to the soothing glow of the blue light of my Wii.
I had a message! It must be important…new channel…better software update…what was it??
It was a stupid Metroid Prime marketing channel that played videos. Granted the game looks cool, but why'd they have to send a message out for THAT?
I just realized it's kinda sad when the first thing I think to post about what happend during the day was the blue Wii light and a marketing message…but here we are. I was so excited I even took a picture.
You let me down Nintendo…I'm never going to forget this.
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The Weekend Update
Apr 23rd
This weekend started off with some Final Fantasy 7 and a little bit of City of Heroes because I'm starting to feel the desire to play it again and I had a little bit of time.
My friends and I went out to the local (really local) Zoo and wandered around for an hour and a half. We saw all of the exotic animals. The wolf/dog hybrid…the porcupine… Ok, so it's not a world class zoo, but it was a really, really nice day out and it was a nice walk. One of the best parts about a smaller zoo like that is that you don't have to rush everywhere to make sure you see everything. You can hang out and watch for extended periods of time. Although it would have been a lot better had we not just come back from the National Zoo in Washington DC last month.
It was at the zoo I discovered that the LCD screen for my camera is busted. I'm not sure what happened to it..probably got some pressure put on it at one point. I wanted to take a picture of the dog 
Anyway, the camera still works, just the LCD is busted and I'm not sure how successful trying to get a repair done on it would be. Heck, I'd even be willing to pay for the cost of replacement, but I don't want to buy a new camera. It still works though, so it's not entirely unusable. Sigh. Just another thing on the pile.
After the zoo, Jay had to take off to meet with a project group at his school, so Wassy and myself hung out for a bit. The plan was to meet up later and go to Riggiefest…but I'll get to that later.
We joke a lot that we do "stuff" on the weekends usually. That stuff generally is planned out ahead of time, but someday, we'll get to the mythical place of "stuff", no planning…just…"stuff". And if "Stuff" is attainable, then we certainly got close to it there. We wandered around a bit, attempted to bug my sister at her job while buying some tabs for a binder, browsed through a pet store…
Then we met back up with Jay and off we went. Unfortunately, we missed Riggiefest by a couple hours (who has a festival that last 3 hours anyway??) so instead we went to one of the participating restaurants as the next best thing. Riggies, for those who don't live in upstate new york, are kinda a local favorite. They're basically rigatoni in a marinara sauce with chicken and spices and you get tossed out of the area if you've never had them.
After dinner we rented SSX Blur for the Wii which wasn't quite as fun as anticipated. It's not a real good rental game…it's got a bit of a learning curve. So instead we did other stuff until finally settling Karaoke Revolution Party, which I'd rather not talk too much about…
Sunday was mostly boring chores and homework.
The People Are Listening!
Mar 31st
Last night was my Mom's birthday, so the whole family got together to go out to dinner and then we went over to my place to play some Wii type stuff.
At dinner I discovered several surprising things:
- After 2-3 years of having nothing in my AIM Profile, most of my family actually still checks on what appears to be a daily basis to see if I've decided to put something in there.
- My family reads this Blog (Hi!)
- Pretty much every amusing story I brought up was followed by "Oh yeah, we saw that on the blog"
I got my sister to sign up for an account on Vox as well.
Back at my place, we quickly discovered that one of my Wii remotes was non functional. The buttons worked, but the motion sensing is all broken. I put in a warranty repair request to Nintendo to try and fix it. We shall see. It's a good thing I borrowed another remote from my friends. I had intended on having 4 remotes, but…at least we had 3. We did some Wii Sports bowling and a little Tiger Woods golf.
And we had pie! Lemon Meringue, specifically.
The Blue Light!!
Feb 14th
I woke up this morning to the soothing blue light on my Wii that says I have a new message.
Apparently Nintendo added a new channel. A very, very odd channel.
Everybody Votes! Allowing you to answer a question and see how other people answered it. It also allows you to predict how people are going to answer the question.
Its…odd.
Sick = Bad
Feb 6th
It’s been a little while since I posted, but I’m sick now and I can’t sleep, so I figure now is as good a time as any. But more on that later.
This weekend was busy, as they seem to be these days. I hung out with some friends on Saturday and we worked out the general itinerary for the trip to Washington DC next month.
Sunday was mostly spent doing half of the required reading for my Western Civ class, and then going over to my parents to watch the Super Bowl that night. Not a terrible game, but not a good one either. And the commercials weren’t all that great. It was that night where I started to feel a little weird.
Cut to 3am Monday morning and I woke up with a stuffy nose and a headache. I tried to sleep again, but only managed a couple of hours here and there. I ended up calling in sick to work, which was also probably a good thing because we had a massive lake effect winter storm yesterday too, which may actually still be going on. I can’t tell since it’s dark out at the moment. My temperature kept fluctuating yesterday, between 97 and 101 F, and I slept a whole bunch. The one good thing I can say about yesterday was Nintendo released Super Mario World (the SNES game) on the virtual console, so I was able to get some quality time in while laying down on the couch. Oh, and they canceled night classes yesterday, so the fact that I wasn’t able to finish the homework wasn’t much of a problem.
I woke up at 3 again this morning and haven’t been able to get back to sleep yet. I think I’m going to call in sick again today…
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