I’ve added another game to my recent Wii addiction, Mario Kart. I picked it up from Sears over the weekend using one of our wedding gift certificates, plus we got another steering wheel. And that pretty much sums up our Saturday night, Kim and I played for hours and hours. It was fun to get online and race against people from around the world, and we had a good time just racing against/with each other. I don’t think this game will be leaving the system anytime soon. It’s highly addictive. If anyone out there also has the game, let’s trade code numbers so we can play online.

Thanks to my brother, I’ve been playing our new Wii nearly every night. He gave us one of my favorites of the wedding gifts, though there are some others that I may write about at a later date. I must say that boxing can be quite a workout! The rest of the Wii Sports package is really entertaining though, as I’m sure many of you already know. We also have Wii Play, which included a second controller. Despite costing just a little more than a controller alone, the games in this package are equally entertaining. I’m a pretty good fisherman, winning the platinum medal already. And I’m getting much better at laser hockey, which I thought was really tough at first. I’ve got a stockpile of Sears gift certificates, so I’m hoping I can add even more games. Any opinions?

I had my first experience with the game Rock Band over the weekend, and I am addicted. If I had a copy of the game at home I don’t think I’d do anything else, so maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t. My brother hosted a leap day party featuring the game and encouraged everyone to dress in their favorite rock attire. He had a killer Bret Michaels (of Poison fame) costume, complete with eyeliner. Fortunately my mom was there with her camera to capture pictures of the night and a couple from a disco party the next night.

I’m not a big gamer at all, especially when compared to some of the people I work with who will play World of Warcraft for hours at a time. But I’ve discovered an insanely addictive online game that is very simple graphically but so much fun to play called Desktop Tower Defense. I’m trying not to play it until work is over and it is very hard to do. I’m warning you, only click this link if you can spare quite a bit of your time because I’m betting that you will get sucked in too. If you do decided to play, let me know your scores. I’ve played the medium level and average around 2,000 points, I think.

With spring upon us there is one thing I cannot wait to do, play cornhole. I’ve already seen the boards out at one of friend’s parties here in Denver, but I haven’t busted out our boards yet. Before I can do that the boards need a little work: maybe some new tops, and the legs definitely need to be reattached. Anyway, I wanted to post a link to Cornhole “The Movie”, the mockumentary that is scheduled to be filmed in June 2007. For those in Cincinnati, this may be your chance to be a movie star! Thanks to Amy for the heads up on this.

We spent this past Friday night at Dave & Buster’s for dinner, drinks, and the best part, video games. We ate dinner first and decided to make it simple and eat at the restaurant inside D&B. The food was actually really good, but maybe a tad on the overpriced side. Service was good too, despite the fact that Kim later told me they were supposed to bring me a birthday treat, which they never did. If it involved singing and such, then I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.

With our bellies sufficiently stuffed, we headed off to the game room with a stop along the way for some drinks. Is there anything better than playing games with a drink in hand? I think I won just about every game we played. It must have been all of the training from my brother when we were growing up. Air hockey was a little closer, but I still managed to win the majority of the games! It was my birthday after all (well close enough). The final game of the night proved to be the most interesting, Derby Owners Club. The premise is simple, you train a horse to win races, but it was surprisingly addictive and equally as expensive. I really enjoyed training “Mr Ed” to not finish in last place.

After work on Friday Kim and I headed to our local Target to pick up some supplies for the weekend and also for this coming weekend. We bought some cheap bag chairs, a new flashlight & lantern combo, some buy spray and some other stuff. From there we headed to Doni & Phil’s to have some drinks and play some cards. We decided on Pitch, a game that Kim and I are picking up on pretty well. I still don’t think it is better than Euchre though.

Saturday morning we woke up fairly early so we could get out to Salina, KS for the Smoky Hill River Festival which VACO was playing at. We met up with Steve Christy at our hotel and shortly after were on our way to the show. Salina is not a very big town, but the festival was packed. Either everyone from Salina was there or there were a ton of out-of-towners in attendance. Either way this is a pretty well planned event. An $8 button gets you unlimited access to the park and festival, and you can bring your own cooler in. We took advantage of that and brought something like two cases of beer in. I believe we got there around 2 and VACO first played at 3. It was hot and the local freaks were out in force (check out the pictures). We saw VACO play two sets that day and although they were short they were a bunch of fun. The festival was over by 10 I think, but we left shortly before then. We headed back to the hotel and were out around midnight. It was a fun day!

Sunday we woke up to a rain filled day. VACO was supposed to play again that day at 4, but we left town before they started. The rain was showing no signs of stopping and there is very little cover near the stage they were playing at. We hit some nice storms on the way home but made it back eventually. It would have been an even scarier drive if we would have realized that our brake lights weren’t working. Yeah, you read that correctly. We have yet another problem with the car, but again I think this is something I can do myself pretty easily. Perhaps I should consider a career move though.

It’s so nice to be able to say that today is Tuesday. We are that much closer to another weekend. As for this weekend, here is a recap.

Friday started off well with some drinks at our apartment with Joel and Amanda. Mike decided to skip the show on Friday since it was his buddy’s last couple of days in town. We took a cab over to the Beaumont and attempted to get in to the show. As I mentioned last week, I was taking my gear hoping to tape the show. Beaumont has historically been one of the most difficult places for me to get my gear into, even though I only tape bands that officially allow fan recordings. Anyway, the bouncer immediately tells me no. I ask him to find someone with the band, and a guy from pipeline productions comes over and says no as well. I told them all that according to Better Than Ezra’s website they are completely okay with it and ask to speak with someone from the band. We stand and wait at the entrance for probably 45 minutes. Kim finally asks the first guy if he ever heard anything. The guy turns into an even bigger asshole and starts going on about how he already said no. I calmly exchange a few words with him and decide to give up. Luckily our friend Courtney had her car in Westport, so I stashed my gear in her car and we all headed in to the show. Pomeroy was good as always and they even busted out a few tunes that I had never heard before. You might remember Better Than Ezra from their big hit “Good” back in 95. I believe this was the second song in their set. I recognized a couple of other songs they played within the hour or so of their set I watched. I was not really impressed by them though, maybe it was the struggle I had to get in the venue or maybe it was the suddenly chilly temperature outside. Regardless we all headed inside of the Beaumont for a couple more drinks and then headed home. Despite all the crap that happened I still had a good time and I think everyone else did as well.

Saturday seems like so long ago, I am struggling to remember what exactly we did. I do know that we headed up to the pool at Woodside with Mike. We met up with Doni and Susan and “laid out” for a couple of hours. Mike and I quickly grew tired of that and had to come up with something else to do. After watching him, Kim and Susan take some dives off the diving board we decided to move on from the pool. After quickly cleaning up we decided to head out to the Great American Barbecue. This appeared to be similar to the American Royal but we quickly learned that it was on a much smaller scale. It probably didn’t help that we got there at 5PM on the last night of the competition. One of the reason we decided to go was that Tanner Walle was playing later in the night. We hung around for a few hours until his set and managed to entertain ourselves mostly eating, drinking and watching the mechanical bull. Tanner’s set was short but sweet. We got to hear a few new tunes as well as a great new cover of “Super Bon Bon.” Hopefully we’ll make it to see him this Thursday, which appears to be his last show in the area for quite some time.

Sunday we decided to have a little barbecue of our own with some corn on the cob we had picked up while down at the City Market earlier in the day. Mike came over with some chicken to help out. We also tuned in to the end of the Indy 500, which ended under a unimpressive yellow flag. For the rest of the afternoon we just chilled out until it was dinner time. At that point we headed over to Westport again to Thai Place, one of Kim’s favorite restaurants. I was not all that impressed, but maybe it was just the dish that I ordered. We then picked up a couple of movies and headed home. My choice at the store was Spanglish, which I assumed would be funny since Adam Sandler was in it. We put this on first, and boy was I disappointed. I tried to stay awake but was less than amused by the movie. However Kim seemed to enjoy it and watched the whole thing. Talk about a role reversal!

We spent most of yesterday over at Doni & Phil’s. Phil and his buddy Chris Martin were smoking some ribs for the better part of the day. We stopped off at Home Depot and bought all the supplies we needed to make 2 sets of cornhole boards. Mike came over and helped out with the construction. When we left we had the boards completely built and had put on three coats of paint. I would say that they are just about done. Well besides the fact that the first design we came up for the folding legs doesn’t seem to be working so well. The second design is working much better, so we will have to convert the first set into the second set design. The only thing left for me to do is buy some bags online, which I hope to do today. If everything goes as planned next Monday’s blog entry will be all about how much cornhole we played over the weekend!

Where the hell did today go? Feels like I just got into the office a few minutes ago, and I’ll be out of here in just over 2 hours. I guess I’ve been busy all day learning some stuff since I’ll be filling in for my boss next week while he is on vacation. Woohoo! :|

We have a great concert lined up for tonight! Better Than Ezra and Pomeroy under the stars in Westport. I should be recording the show too, something that I haven’t done in a long time. I hope I still remember how all of my gear works. Anyway, we are heading up there with at least Joel, Amanda and Mike. I’m sure some others will be up at the show as well. It should be a great night!

As for the rest of the weekend, we’ll probably spend some time lounging around a pool. We might also take some time to build those cornhole boards I keep talking about. We should have ordered some bags online so we would have them for this weekend, but we forgot. Guess we can take a couple days to get the boards ready though, and start playing next weekend! Have a great holiday weekend…

I did have exactly three margaritas last night and they were excellent. Nothing else was really accomplished other than watching about 3 hours of TV.

This weekend is going to start off with us hanging out on Mike’s rooftop deck, cooking up some food and drinking some beers. From there I am probably going to clean the new tank tomorrow and finally install the new router. What’s funny is that the current router hasn’t been causing any problems in the past few days. I probably just jinxed it, but it will be removed soon and possibly sold on eBay. Not much else is planned right now, but there has been talk of attempting to build some cornhole boards.