Crazy Wii-kend

What a crazy weekend this turned out to be! On Friday night, my friend (and son – not my real son I’m only 23 for crying out loud! Some of my friends call me Dad since I’m a whole two years older than them, but anyway), Justin came over to my house to play some video games with our friend, Chad. If you haven’t played Rainbow Six Vegas 2 yet, you definitely need to get that! Oh yeah, PS3 of course. And an HDTV 32 inches or bigger. So while we were playing my wonderful girlfriend and her best friend Liz came over to drop off my birthday food for the BBQ we had on Saturday. After they left, Justin and I heard a LOUD pop, and we both jumped like crazy! My first thought was that my fish tank broke. I had a tank when I was younger and was watching a hockey game on tv when I was like 10 or so and I heard a loud pop and looked over at my fish tank which had cracked open right through the middle of the side. So I ran to my fish tank and it was fine. Then Justin said, I think some crazy drunk just broke your window. I have a sliding class door that leads to my patio and it was splitting like a spider web (and continued to do so for another hour and a half). So I’m not entirely sure what happened, but my window is now in about a million pieces. So long security deposit..

On Saturday, it was our final preview day for this spring and it would be my only real opportunity to try out my new lens!

I just bought a 70-200 f2.8 last week for my birthday so that I could get better indoor and sports photos. The shots turned out really nicely I think. It was a long morning though of walking around with my now 8 pound camera…I’m really gonna have to start working out again. After that, everyone came over for my birthday bbq and we grilled up some hamburgers and hotdogs. I make some pretty amazing hamburgers if I do say so myself. I’m going to give you my secret because not everyone has the ability to do this. The key is not necessarily in the seasoning or the meat, but rather making sure the hamburger is at least as big as the bun. If you can master that technique (yes there actually is a technique), you will become the “Grill Master.” We then spent the remainder of the beautiful afternoon playing a little football and Frisbee. Well, Frisbee ended when my good buddy Chad broke the Frisbee U of I President B. Joseph White himself gave me.

At 7 p.m., Justin and I were asked to MC a fund raiser for Jump for Joel and UIS students Kenya Trip. A group of six students will be traveling to Kenya this summer to help an orphanage there. More on Jump for Joel here. Everyone had a lot of fun there, and it was a blast getting to do that with Justin. And if you see Justin, ask him what “Pragu” (like the pasta sauce Ragu) is (The answer was “Prague”). After finally leaving around midnight, it was time to go home.

On Sunday, my girlfriend decided to come over and wake me up at 9 a.m. That’s early on a weekend and having gotten no sleep either of the two nights before. We both desperately needed to get homework done, so we were going to devote our day to doing that. Around 4:00 we decided to take a little break. I had to run into petsmart to get another algae eater fish because I thought mine had died. Really he was just in a coma or something for an entire day. He didn’t move for an entire day I swear, so I assumed he lived his life (he was quite old).

Then, I was going to go over to Best Buy to reserve a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now jumping back to that morning. I got my Sunday paper and was reading through it and the ads. I have loved looking through the ads forever. I get to the Best Buy one and I see they have Wii’s. I was like, dang, too bad I didn’t check my computer on Saturday because I would have seen that they were going to have some. I’ve been hunting for a Wii for a long time. I went to a store at 9:30 p.m. one night to wait for them to be put on shelves at 12:30 and was the 16th person in line…they of course only had 15 units… And there was one other time when I went to the store only to see the last one get picked up as I entered the isle…

Anyway, Jordan and I walk into Best Buy and walk past a guy stacking boxes on a table. I was like, oh cool, Mario Cart for Wii. Then I see him put a Wii box on the table. So I ask him, are those for real, and are they for sale? He hands me a box and says yep, so I forgot all about GTA IV and walked happily out the door. It was so tempting once I got home to play some games, but I knew that I had to finish my homework first. Around 10:30, Jordan and I both wrapped up our work, and played some Wii till the Wii hours of the morning. Needless to say, I’m a bit tired today at work. Totally worth it though!