Happy Belated Tofurkey Day!
November 24, 2006
This Thanksgiving was pretty typical I suppose. We, meaning me, my Mom and Grandma, went downstairs to our cousin’s place for Thanksgiving dinner. I was really hoping that my cousin was going to fry a turkey, but alas, he just baked it and injected it with butter. OMG, the turkey was pretty good. It was so moist and tender, but all of the fat in it made me feel a little ill. I just can not eat really oily foods anymore, unless it is olive oil.
He also baked a ham and had the other obligatory Thanksgiving items like cranberry relish and mashed potatoes.
My cousin’s brother also came for dinner, which was nice since I haven’t seen them in years.
But the big highlight for me came when I first walked in their door and noticed their son playing a video game – on a Nintendo Wii!!!!! Whooooooooooeeeeee!!!! You can read more about the Wii here.
I was pretty surprised at how compact the system is. I remember just thinking “oh yet another video game system, oh brother” when they were first announced. Then I saw a snippet of it on CNN at the last E3, I think it was E3, and it just looked so awesome. It’s seems so different from the other game systems out there because it comes with a motion sensor remote control, and it also comes with Nintendo Sports. I was pretty intrigued when I saw Nintendo Sports because you use the remote to play sports like tennis, golf, baseball, boxing and bowling. So, it’s like you are playing a game, yet you are also moving around so you aren’t stuck on a couch killing aliens or thugs like in other games. It is also supposed to be backwards compatible with a lot of the older Nintendo games so you can get all old school on that thing.
I really wanted to try it out just for that and now I could! Woot! After dinner my cousin whipped it out so we could play sports on it. I was pretty excited to try the tennis game and I completely sucked at it. It is a lot harder than it looks because you really need to get your timing down in order to hit the ball. Someone else tried the golf game and what’s really, really neat about the remote is that whatever game you are playing, how hard you hit or throw the ball is determined by how fast you can swing the controller and when you release the button.
Then we tried bowling and that was so much more fun than I thought it would be. I started to get pretty good at it and then disaster struck. I was standing in front of their couch and I guess my hand hit the couch when I was “rolling” the ball and the safety strap broke and the controller went flying across the room. I felt and still feel so bad about that. The controller was still working, but heck, they haven’t had it for even a week yet. I was just absolutely aghast about it.
My Mom even got up and tried a few games and had a blast playing it – so much so that when we came back upstairs, she asked me how much it was and if I wanted to get one on Friday. I told my Mom that I think I am going to get them a new controller and she said that we could just get the system and trade the controller with them too. Oh my.
Friday is Black Friday though. I was kind of curious as to whether there would be any lines in a lot of places so I headed down to Best Buy around midnight since it is about 5 minutes from the house. I turned onto the street that the store is on and I saw the parking lot was full of cars and I thought to myself, why the hell would the parking lot be this full at this time of night. I didn’t think that people would park here overnight. Then I saw the line. The line went along the side of the store, around the side of the store, into the parking lot and then into the street behind the store, so it was at least 100 yards long. Um Yikes.
I was kind of curious what Wal Mart was going to be like since the Wal Mart store opened at midnight instead of 5am like in other places. I was curious as to how they were going to handle the lines for the door buster items that go on sale at 5am. The store was pretty crowded by the time I got there around 12:30. The first thing I noticed was that they had these pallets out covered in black plastic. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the pallets were also labeled with the door buster item and price and people were already staking claims to items like 4 or 5 hours before they went on sale. It just seems absolutely nuts to me – especially when you can actually buy a lot of these Black Friday special items online – for the same price, plus shipping. Like Best Buy and a few other retailers are selling 1 GB flash drives for about $15. So instead of waiting in line for 5 hours, you could actually just get it online and pay a small shipping fee – something I would rather do than wait in line. I mean, I know that there are some items that will only be available in stores, but nothing I would ever need that desperately to wait in line like that.
At least the people in Hawaii have it pretty good when waiting in line like that. It’s not raining and the temperature is in the mid 70′s. I remember seeing those news stories in Portland about people waiting in line and it would be like 35F out – and some people would even bring their infants to wait with them in the cold – now that is just extra crazy.
I was thinking about working out tonight, but I am just so tired that I don’t think I am going to be able to. I might put a movie on and work on some necklaces or something.
Filed under: Whatever
