Archive for category wii

My Weekend

I had one of those weekends where I really didn’t do much, but somehow felt busy. Those are the worst because it feels so unproductive.

Jamie left work early on Friday with the news that the last ‘class’ she has to complete for work is available either in May in Chicago or June in Dallas. First thought was a chance to check out the Texas parks by piggybacking onto her work requirements. (a situation we’ve taken advantage of many times in the past) So I spent a bit of Friday trying to figure how viable it was to think I could get all four of us to Texas for a week. Two days later and we’re still pretty undecided, but I’m really liking the idea of a ‘surprise’ trip to Texas falling into my lap. At this point as I already have much of (ok, pretty much all of) our travel plans set through the first week of July and Texas would require both a restructuring of time and money. I might even be willing to give up the trip to Tennessee (Dollywood & Ghost Town) to make Texas happen. We’ll see, I guess.

Friday night no one felt like cooking so we did Chinese take-out. Mongolian Beef is good. Then my daughter and I ran out in search of a new Wii game for little man. He had to have a tooth pulled Saturday morning (long story) and a spacer put in. So being as this was his first ‘big’ dentist visit I wanted to be able to hook him up with a little sumpin-sumpin if he did well – and he did ridiculously well with the whole thing. Especially given that we had to be up and on the road by 7am to make his 8am appointment at the dentist 47 miles away. (another long story)

They didn’t put him under to pull the tooth, but rather gave him what I refer to as ‘silly juice’ when we got there and we had to sit in the waiting room for about 45 minutes for it to totally kick in. The kid rewarded me with 20 minutes of the funniest action I’d ever seen performed by a 5 year old in my life. I’d try to describe it but it won’t be nearly as funny in words, if you weren’t there and if you don’t know my kids. Three strikes there for almost everyone who’ll read this. But those few moments when he started getting silly until he got called back had us in tears from laughing.

So he was a champ and we left the office with his tooth and a plethora of ‘prizes’ fom the dentist and I gave him the game for doing so well. We ended up deciding on Wii Play just because it was the short, simple, multiple game type of title that we could all dig and it hooked us up with another Wiimote. We spent a little time playing when we got home. Good stuff. A little shallow. Ok, a lot shallow, but considering the $40 remote is included the other $10 for 9 mini games was an ok value. Nothing groundbreaking and it even feels more shallow than Wii Sports, but it’ll be fun to pop it in every once in a while and screw around. Plus, it includes a tank game that feels an awful lot like a 2007 version of the old Combat game on the Atari 2600. That alone makes it worth it to me.

I crashed for a couple of hours in the afternoon (I’m not a 6am kind of guy) and after dinner we watched “Stranger Than Fiction” – decent enough movie but with the obvious happy ending. Whatever. The kids crashed and the wife and I decided the catch up on a bunch of episodes of Desperate Houswives that had accumulated on the DVR. (no snide comments from the peanut gallery please)

So it turns out we haven’t seen it since before Thanksgiving. We had 7 unwatched shows. At 11:30 we started the first one and in typical lame-ass fashion got interested and kept saying, “Just one more” until…well…we finished the last one around 5:30am. Man, that’s so lame. But at least I’m caught up on my Housewives. (rolleyes here)

Late start for all on Sunday. We dragged our asses to Meijer around 1pm to pick up some things. Stupid crowded and the closest I’ve ever come to physically attacking morons in a store. We were glad to leave, but spent way too much on way too little.

On the way home as we turned into our little subdivision, we noticed a sign for an open house relatively close to our place. (why we’d be interested is another ‘too long’ story for this post, but we were) So on a whim we went to check it out. Decent enough place. Not something I’d buy in the end. A few things we liked a few things that wouldn’t work for us. Still our first hands-on look at what the money (this was listed at $225,000) buys you in this section of the world. I still have no idea of our long-term plans in regards to the area, so scoring another house isn’t exactly priority until we have a better idea. It blew a half hour, what can I say?

Spent the afternoon/evening getting some house stuff done. Everyone crashed in the living room watching TV, so around 9pm I got them all to bed. Did the podcast (just Jeff & myself this week) and headed on over here to finally add this entry. Plan on either catching some TV tonight before I get around to bed or hitting shuffle on Winamp and working on the website for a little while…or both.

That was pretty much my weekend*.

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*I hate telling stories like this because I either get too long winded and essentially too boring or I try to keep it short and leave out all the details that make reading something like this worth it and it becomes boring. I’d really love to find that balance between telling a good story and telling a short one. Clearly, I’m not there yet.

Mii Family

Here’s the whole family – Mii Style.

Mii Family

Wii Fun

Wii has kind of become our little “family thing” to do since Santa was kind enough to drop one of at our house. It really is a simple, easy to enjoy system. With the right game selection (Wii Sports, Raving Rabbids, Wario Ware) you get easy-to-learn gameplay that really is pretty evenly matched for ages 5 to 105 and all experience levels.

And it doesn’t even stop there. Tonight we must’ve blown a good 45 minutes challenging each other’s best times doing the ‘puzzle’ thing in the photo channel. We also dig the new Everybody Votes channel as a family. It’s admittedly dumbed down and trite, but something we can all do together. The simple poll questions, the predictions, the data, the statistics – it’s all easily digestible by the kids (ages 5 & 9) and still mildly interesting enough to keep my wife and I involved. Even the damn Mii channel is a fun group activity – we’ll spend time trying to make little fictional character, famous people or people we know. The kids still check the Mii parade every day to see if anyone new came along. (we’re up to 29 in our parade)

And hell, the fact that my wife even picks up the remotes and plays, let alone plays well amazes me.

I just need more people I know to score one and swap out friend codes. (more Mii migrations, send messages and photos, and supposedly online gaming in the near future)

Basically we spent this evening just wasting time together with the Wii and it was fun as usual. (I’m such a dad…)

Speaking of which, I think I need to get on there now and check out the Virtual Console downloads…I do believe I saw Kid Icarus available. (I had that one way back in the NES days)

Wii Lost A Tooth

(sorry for the play on words in the title – that’s so lame)

Little Man lost his first tooth yesterday during dinner. It had been loose for ages and he wasn’t real keen on wiggling it out so we just let it ride. The last night he’s eating and suddenly proclaims, “My tooth came out!” At that moment the look on his face was priceless. It was like here wanted to jump up and cheer, cry and scream, “WTF!?” all at the same time.

He kind of finished eating and then went to lay down on the Papasan chair and crashed. I’ve never seen a kid have that reaction to loosing a tooth before. I think he was kind of sad in the end. Like part of him fell off or something. To make it worse, he didn’t even get to put it under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy because he crashed early.

Today he seems totally fine with it though and now he’s all excited because tonight he can make the deal with the Tooth Fairy. He’s been trying Since X-mas to save the $10 to download Mario 64 for the Wii. The kid’s obsessed…like ‘for real’ obsessed with getting it. He played it a bunch in the hotel room when we moved and dug it. He beat Mario Sunshine ages ago and Mario Galaxy doesn’t look to be arriving for the Wii anytime soon, so this is probably a good choice for him.

Anyway, he has $7 saved so far – I think this just became a $3 tooth.