I love the Wii

A quick post from Wenatchee this morning…

For her birthday, Megan’s dad got her Wii Fit for our Nintendo Wii.  For those of you uninitiated into the cult-of-Wii, Wii Fit is a game that tests and improves your strength, balance and cardio through the use of a platform that you stand on.  I know, sounds idiotic, but in reality it does what it says it will do and is fun as hell.

We set up our Miis this morning (the avatar of yourself that lives in your virtual Wii world) and played a few games.  My favorite, more than heading soccer balls and having hula hoops tossed at me by a virtual Chuck Norris, had to be the step game.  A cross between step aerobics and Dance Dance Revolution, I was moving and grooving like I haven’t done in front of a small crowd since, well, maybe ever.

I’m going to try to stick with Wii fit to see if it can’t healthy me up a little before the holidays come in and kick all of our asses.  And this is why Wii Fit is such a brilliant idea: it makes exercise a little fun for lazy guys like myself.

But Wii Fit wasn’t the only game in town last night.  Grandpa Dan also picked up a copy of the Wii version of Mario Kart.  A classic, old-school Nintendo game updated for the motion sensing controls on the Wii.  We have two steering wheels and Simon, Dan and I were up past 11 o’clock last night playing.

This adds two more games to our Wii system and I really want to emphasise the word ‘our’ because it is rare that the Wii gets fired up without two, or all three of us, ready to play.  For a family, it’s great fun.

Befitting a first grader?

Last week, Simon climbed into bed and farted on me.  A good one, too.  It’s a game we play with each other (I know, incredibly mature) along with what I will call “shove the other person into stuff at the grocery store” and “Do you know how I know you love Hanna Montana?”  What’s scary is that Simon, at age seven, is already developing a sense of humor very much like my own.  Silliness and sarcasm are always on the table and if you can poke fun at someone else’s foibles?  Perfect.

Simon and I at Wall Drug, somewhere in a Dakota

 

Who knew that a seven year old could get humor?  Case in point, yesterday Simon sent me the following email:

I got my check from the Fair. i got $1.20. It is bush leeg!

As a dad, I couldn’t be prouder.

Fight, fight, fight…?

You get used to the bottom of the standings when you’ve grown up a Coug.  It’s what makes those times when everything goes right, those years of Rose and Holiday and Aloha Bowls, so incredible.  Inevitably, though, the world is righted and WSU sinks toward the bottom of the standings again.

I have never seen the student section so empty fifteen minutes before kickoff at Martin Stadium

But I can’t remember us ever sinking this low.

There’s something personal about being a fan; something that is bigger than yourself.  It’s not just me and the team that I am referring to when I write “I can’t remember us ever sinking this low.”  It’s all the fans who sat through the beating dished out by the Trojans yesterday at Martin Stadium.  It’s all the fans who listened to Bob Robertson on the radio and the fans who read about it in newspapers and blogs the next morning.

We, the team and the fans, have hit bottom.  There is no better demonstration than this than the empty student section just minutes before the game along with the apathetic play on the field and the unbelievable pathetic play calling by the coaching staff.

But these are easy observations to write about.  I’m going to put on my Yellow Hat to try to come up with positive, supportive observations a day remove from our worst ever loss:

• The whole “longest win streak in the country” monkey is finally off our back.  It is sort of a bogus stat anyway because to say that we have been consistently competitive since 1981 is complete bullshit.  With that pressure gone, the team can start looking forward instead of backward.
• Next week is a bye week.  Think of this loss in the terms of getting too drunk.  The next morning, you’ve all said it, declaring “I will never drink again.”  You did drink again, and even drank way too much again, what you needed was some time to recuperate.  Sure it hurt like hell.  A drunk like this, or a loss like this, just take a little extra time to get over.  The bye week provides that.
• We’ve played four of the five top teams in the Pac 10. Only Arizona, at home on November 8th, remains.  You can also throw in Arizona State as one of the better teams of the Pac 10 that are left on our schedule, but other than that we’re matching up with teams that we might be able to compete with.
• The rose is off the bloom for Coach Wulff and his staff.  If Wulff is the coach and motivator that Jim Sterk thought he was getting maybe yesterday’s shit can somehow be turned into tomorrow’s fertilizer.

Or, maybe the sky is falling.  Maybe bringing in a coach from Eastern Washington University wasn’t the right decision.  Maybe we will never recover from the loss of Mike Price or the gap between recruiting in Pullman and Los Angeles just got too big to overcome.  I don’t like thinking that way, though.  I want to believe that this team, this coaching staff, these players, can turn it around and we can finish the season playing at a level that we can all be proud of.  Maybe I’m a dreamer, I just hope I’m not the only one.

Leave your Friday with a clean desk

There will always be better things to do than clean your desk, office, workspace, what-have-you on a Friday afternoon.  And why take the time to clean your desk when, really, you just want to get out the door maybe a little early?  I’m with you.  I totally get that.

My clean desk

But there isn’t a better way to start a Monday than coming back to an orderly office.

Pumpkin Patch

I wish I was a little bit taller
I wish I was a baller
I wish I had a girl who looked good
I would call her

“I Wish” by Skee-Lo

I do wish I was a better blogger.

I haven’t written here for months and, really, there’s no good excuse for it.  Sure, my life isn’t especially interesting but it isn’t completely boring either.  I’m lazy, I guess, and that’s the only excuse I have.

A quick sidebar on the above Skee-Lo lyrics… My freshman year in college, me and my suite mates had the CD single of this song which included no less than six versions of this forgettable rap classic.  We’d put it on before going out on the weekend.  That and the soundtrack from Rocky.

Back to the regularly scheduled blog…

Last weekend, Megan and I took Simon and Owen to a pumpkin patch outside of Colton.  In addition to pumpkins, which were overpriced, my culinary hero Smokin’ Papa was there.  In fact, Smokin’ Papa was so popular that they ran out of food, served from their red trailer, before I could get my order.  No matter, I substituted my grilled sausage with a pulled pork sandwich and suffered through deliciousness.

Simon (7) and Owen (16 mos) at the pumpkin patch

The boys had a great time.  Simon enjoyed walking through the crafts and playing at a table full of peas or lentils or something else harvested.  Owen enjoyed wandering around the grounds.  Both boys had fun on the hay ride to the pumpkin patch.

It was an interesting Saturday.  Not only did we venture out to the pumpkin patch but Simon had a soccer game and I had breakfast with a buddy I hadn’t seen for five or six years.

The soccer game went great.  Simon is really improving and his team is much better than the one he was on last year.  What impresses me the most about Simon’s game is how well he dribbles the ball and how aggressively he can play defense.  Yes, there are occasional lapses in concentration but cut the kid some slack, he’s seven.

Simon playing soccer.

After the game I had breakfast with Geoff and his dad, Bob.  We met at Old European while they were on a break from hunting deer.  Geoff showed me some pictures of his little girl and said that there might be another one on the way (they were going to find out on Tuesday).  

Visiting with friends from a lifetime ago, and finding out that your new lives aren’t so different from each other, is always sort of surreal.  It makes you laugh a little bit about the person you used to be and proud of the person that you, and your friend, have become.