While I was doing that I saw an advert for “Plants vs. Zombies” and tried the game out. It’s very fun. I went ahead and downloaded it to the computer, and over the course of the past three days have been able to beat the game; but am still playing the puzzle and mini-game section on and off. The game is a lot of fun, as I’ve said, but then anything with zombies tends to have an appeal to me.

The game involves using different sorts of attack plants to fend off zombie invasions in your front and back yard and eventually on your roof. There are various different types of zombies, some tougher than others, some which have to be fought off with very specific plants, others which just succumb to the constant barrage of peas from various plants.

Despite the simplicity the game is very addictive.

Fun was had though. For a little while we played Wii Sports Resort, and then we switched to karaoke. It was mostly Kore, myself and our friend B whose house we were at, which she shares with her long-term boyfriend S, who has been a friend of ourself and hubbie since high school. We had a lot of fun singing random songs and playing back-up dancer for munchkin to lalalala into the microphone. I suppose I should also say that it was Max who was there not myself, so while the rest of the account is in first person, it’s not what I did.

Then after half of the group went home, upon finishing a D&D game they were running, those of us remaining played Rock Band for a while. It’s the first time I’ve played. I was singer for the night because I can’t play guitar as it locks up my hands after a while, and I felt that I wouldn’t have enough coordination and rhythm to manage playing drums, but I might give that a go if we play again. B and I would duet some of the time while the guys played guitar and Kore did the drums, then after a while we switched out and did various iterations. By far my favorite song is “Bring Me to Life” because the range is perfect for me and I could sing my heart out. The most funny song was “Chop Suey” because the lyrics are so totally crazy and the way you have to chitter them really messes you up to sing the actual lyrics at the right pitch, or at least it does us.

I say it would be interesting to see what happens if others of us try to sing. I know at night if we’re singing to the munchkin before he goes to bed he tends to ask certain songs of certain of us. Like Max he’ll ask anything from but he only ever asks Max for “Morning Has Broken” none of the rest of us, and Jay gets the honor of the “Skye Boat Song”, which I find is interesting.

Back to the original point Rock Band was really fun, but not only could we not afford one of our own we wouldn’t have room to put the accessories anywhere. It’s a very cool set-up though, and munchkin was even able to play a little once we put it into ‘no fail’ mode. Though him hammering away at the drums could be a little distracting some times.

However if I was looking at something online while watching a movie or something like that…I tend to have more than one thing going at once because it actually helps me stay focused. I believe that’s something to do with the multiplicity. If I’m trying to just work on this blog post for example, there’s lots of voices in the back of “my” head making commentary about this and that, but because the munchkin has a PBS show on they’re mostly distracted with that so I can actually maintain my focus and write. Though FrankenStan couldn’t handle that because his RAM was reduced in capacity, so if I was typing the TV show on the computer would start freezing and skipping or the sound would get ahead of the picture.

Speaking of TV we also recently upgraded our TV. I know that sounds horrible because we’ve had so many financial issues, but we didn’t actually buy the TV, Kore and our future room mate Z did. They were initially looking at a Samsung HDTV but then we went to Sam’s and they had such good deals we wound up with a Philips because it was 6 inches larger and had a higher resolution and was only $50 more. I’ve since seen the same TV at Wal-mart for $80 more than we paid for it; and when I looked at the specs for it online it was selling for $300 more than that. So, I maintain the Sam’s card more than paid for itself with that.

Last time we were there Mum picked up the Wii Fit with Plus for $40 cheaper than we could have gotten it elsewhere. We lucked out with that one too because she doesn’t have a Wii of her own so she’s left it with us. She comes by every other day to use it and in the mean time the rest of us can use it to work out. According to it I’ve lost 7lbs since last week; so that’s nifty.

Our one year warranty, of course, expired a week before the first red ring affliction, but XBox will cover repairs for the red ring of death for an additional two years after the date of purchase even if the main warranty has expired. So once the box for shipping gets here our little XBox will be wending it’s way to XBox for repairs.

I hope my husband can survive the two-three weeks it’ll take to come back to us without it. We’ve lost the charger cords for both his MP3 players as well and he’s been listening to his music through the XBox USB slot. I can see he’ll be abducting the Wii back to his room upstairs given I’ve been trying to finish up Final Fantasy XII lately rather than playing Okami.

I love playing The Sims 2 but have been disappointed by a few things, like how hard it really is to tell the difference in body shapes as Sims get out of and in to shape, and also that it’s kind of a chore to set up all the different areas of the neighborhood and do things with them, like the downtown and the business communities and the universities. I have all the expansions, as I tend to put them on my gift lists and just bought Ikea Fun Stuff with a gift certificate I got for my birthday.

However 3 looks very interesting. They’ve actually just recently posted a video showing some of the features on the EA website and I was watching with anticipation this morning.

It’s not going to be out until next year, but maybe I’ll be able to get it for my birthday then

Well, off to run errands for me. We’re out of printer ink thanks to some liberal character sheet printing over the past few days, and I really need to print out a lot of stuff. I need to send my therapist the information about the Parity act, and I need to print out the rules and background info I’ve been writing out for the Space Age Savage Worlds game I’m running, although that’s not quite as urgent.

I also need to finish tidying up the house and clearing paths for furniture to be moved in and out tomorrow. I’d hoped we would be rid of our couch today. Someone said they were coming to get it yesterday but they never called back. Perhaps they will call today, yesterday was very dreary and rainy, it’s hard to move furniture when the weather is like that.

I haven’t played our 360 in several months. Hubbie had borrowed Soul Caliber IV from a friend and had been talking about the game non-stop since, and I was eager to try it. Last night I figured since I was having an easy evening after driving to Gainesville and back that I would try the game. Hubbie was looking up some things on the computer and said he would join me in a moment.

So, I booted up the XBox and it wanted to do an update, it did the update and rebooted right into the game. I realized that my controller wasn’t connected so I tried to reboot the XBox and those three red lights came up around the power button.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I turned it off, disconnected everything except the power, turned it back on nothing.

I called hubbie. He came rushing up from downstairs…he tried various different things, still those red lights blinking at us ominously.

Well, he said, at least it’s still under warranty. Still…I hated to think about the fact that I had broken the XBox I figured it might be the update, maybe it would sort itself out. Hubbie came down and began to google things. We found a video on Youtube which said that wrapping a couple of towels around the XBox for 20 minutes might fix the problem, so I went to the laundry to grab two dry towels figuring it couldn’t hurt.

Then I went upstairs and turned the XBox on and it came on!

I was SO RELIEVED.

We played Soul Caliber IV for a while, and I have to say that it was a lot of fun. I’m hoping that was the last we see of the red ring of death, for ever.

He was spoiled rotten really. I’ll post some pictures tomorrow of the amazing cake that my friend made. She made him the dragon last year, and this year she did a cake with several characters on it seeing as we couldn’t decide, so it had Sarah from “Land Before Time” on it, Clifford, Curious George and Elmo all sitting around presents and a little birthday cake. It was amazing. She’s apparently made a Smurf house before too. I’d love to see pictures of that one.

The munchkin himself got a nice list of gifts.
From my Mum he got two sets of pajamas, 101 Dalmations pictures for his room, a Thomas the Tank Engine interactive DVD/book, two plushie Cars from CARS.
From our friends he got sidewalk chalk, a ball, a training bicycle, $40, pillows, bed sheets, a toy chainsaw, and some clothes.
From us he got the party, Curious George in a police car, several board books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Very Busy Spider, Cookie Dance) and a t-shirt that says “Reasons why I’m in Trouble: 1. Won’t Share 2. Won’t Give Mum a Break 3. Refuse to Nap 4. Keep Breaking Stuff”
My Gran sent him a cute pants/t-shirt set that says “Cheeky Monkey” on it, and a Paddington Bear book and a teach/turn book which is neat, I haven’t seen anything like it before, it shows you how to tell time and count by turning dials on different pages to match the story.

Last Sunday we had a mini-party at my FILs and they got him a neat phone which you can record messages on so that you can talk to the child through the phone and a dump truck to play in the yard with, and a couple of outfits, a plushie basketball and a bubble wand.

One of our friends showed up early to clear out brush from the back yard so that we had more kindling for the fire pit. It kept a nice fire going for most of the afternoon so we were able to randomly make smores, and toast marshmallows, and then we also made hot dogs and burgers and turkey burgers, and our friends brought meatballs, black bottom pie, tiramisu and the one set brought the birthday cake.

We have tons of leftover food so we should be going for a few days. So, that’s nice. I’m tired after all the prep work over the past few days and definitely don’t want to be cooking or anything like that.

I think I’m going to go have myself a piece of birthday cake given I didn’t get any really today. I had a bit of the black bottom pie and the tiramisu though. It was so funny, the munchkin was so excited when I lit the candles that he didn’t wait until the end of “Happy Birthday” to blow them out. I wound up having to relight the right as the song was getting to the end so that he could blow them out again.

I think he had a fun time though. There was one hilarious point where a friend of ours was spinning the laser pointer around the living room floor and the kids were all going nuts chasing it. The grown ups had some fun tag-teaming each other in “Super Smash Brothers” which we got for the Wii last week. That was my game treat seeing as hubbie has “Grand Theft Auto IV” on pre-order.

Hubbie was feeling sorry for me and we got another of the HDMI switches for the downstairs television and have moved the PS-2 and the Wii downstairs so that we have gaming systems on both televisions now. I still haven’t played on the video games much. We’re missing part of the cables for the PS-2 and I just have so many other things which are more pressing that I feel I should be doing, or that I want to be doing so that I can spend time doing things which don’t involve staring at a screen while sitting on my butt.

Ah, well. I do like the switch set up though, it does make it easier to play video games. I remember the dark days of having to climb behind the television any time you wanted to do anything to get tangled in cables and switch them all around. Now you just push a button.

In case anyone is not as geeky as me that’s the T.A.R.D.I.S which is The Doctor’s time travel device in Doctor Who.

While I don’t really need a video game console. There’s an extremely geeky part of me that’s wondering if it would be possible to set up something like that to keep video games and books in or for keeping the computer in.

I think ‘Army of Two’ might be the one to get now, but I’ll have to have a look and a think. He hasn’t been playing the Wii too much so we moved that downstairs so I can finally play ‘Elebits’ which I got for Yule. My husband has pronounced the game insufferably cute. I could always buy him another ‘Katamari’ game as a gag, but I think that might be grounds for divorce in this house.