May 24, 2003
Rainy three day weekend
Luckily on Thursday I got home early enough to quickly give the lawn a mowing. It was getting pretty long and straggly and wouldn't have made it through the several days of rain that would follow. It rained Friday and is expected to keep raining throughout this Memorial holiday weekend.
We went to the YMCA this morning for a step class. While the boys were napping this afternoon Michelle ran some errands including picking up a new Nintendo GameCube. I asked around work but no one knew much about the GameCube. XBox and Playstation are more well known for their graphics capabilities, but I was interested in a platform with games that Michelle, Claire, and Abby would enjoy. We didn't care about who had the most realistic first person shooter environment. The other major factor is that next month Nintendo releases the GameBoy Player adaptor for GameCube which allows all GameBoy cartridges to play on television via the GameCube.
Sony and Microsoft have had recent price cuts on the Playstation and Xbox but the GameCube was already down to $150 prior to their price cutting. So Nintendo opted to offer a game bundle where you get a game with purchase of the system. Considering the games run around $50, it's a pretty decent deal. In the end we chose to get the Mario Party 4 game with the system. Claire and I played it for an hour or so this afternoon with some looking on from Michelle and Abby. It's pretty fun and yet not so intimidating to shy the girls away from the game. The BlockBuster down the street also rents GameCube games.
It's still supposed to rain for the rest of the holiday weekend. I'm glad we didn't wait a few more weeks to get the system. We could be housebound a lot over the next few days. On the plus side, it's making the lawn really, really green and thick.
In other "odds and ends" news, our replacement TiVo has been up and running and last night finally updated it's internal software to the latest revision, 4.0. This is key for me to enable it's wireless networking capabilities this weekend. We also got our push mower back from the repair shop this weekend. Our push mower is used for those parts of the lawn that the tractor can't reach, kind of what a weedwacker is for some yards. ;-) And even though Abby knows how to ride a two wheeler, Michelle picked her up a BigWheel this weekend because she was always taking the boys' trikes while they were circling 'round the driveway. We got three boxes of little boy clothes in the mail from Michelle's sister, Gina, late this week so Michelle used the "homebound-ness" of this rainy weekend to sort through the clothes for the twins. Thanks Gina! I was excited because there were a couple of T-shirts from Rose-Hulman, my alma mater. The Do-Bees will look cute in them, but I'm very biased!