cindy's world

TurboTiger had recently acquired the new Nintendo Wii video game console after standing hours in line in the cold, cold night. In his recent post, he gave the console pretty rave reviews altho noting that the graphics aren’t much superior to the competition.

The unique thing about the Wii is that instead of pushing buttons and directional joysticks and triggers on a control pad, you actually hold a handle-looking controller and make large swinging motions to get your video game character to take the same action. I was actually getting impressed reading TurboTiger’s gaming experience, until I got to the part of the post where he says his arm’s actually sore from all the gaming action. And then a new thought dawned on me.

Do you find anything ironic in the fact that the success of today’s games is to make an action so advanced that you’re simulating actually DOING the activity in real life (like using “Guitar Hero” guitars and “Donkey Konga” bongos as controllers), and people are shelving out big bucks for this imitation, when THEY CAN DO THE ACTUAL ACTIVITY FOR FREE?! Somewhere, the video game industry is laughing at us. Probably in Japan.

P.S. This reminds me of when GigaPets backfired on me. I was in high school and these little keychain simulated “pets” were all the rage. Remember Tomaguchi or something like that? Anyway, you have these little digital creatures on a tiny console that have living-creature needs. For example, my cat would get hungry, so then you push the button to feed it. Then it’d eat and poop. When you see piles of poop, you gotta push the button to clean it or the cat will get sick from being around its own pixelated feces too long. You also have to train it by throwing a ball of yarn around so it can get some exercise, otherwise its spirits go down and it gets sad and sick. I’d wanted a housecat all my life, but when I lived with my parents, my mom’s allergies made cat ownership impossible. So I got the GigaCat. This cat would wake me up at 3 or 4 in the morning with its little electronic cries because it was hungry or there was too much poop gathering on the screen, or sometimes it’s just lonely and cats are nocturnal and it wants to play. Don’t tell me it didn’t know what time it was, cuz that keychain sucker had a freaking CLOCK function. If I don’t wake up and take care of business, the cat gets really sad and ill in the morning, laying there all skeletal and weak, unresponsive to the yarn and sometimes even to the food. It freaking broke my heart. So I did the good pet owner thing. I fed it, cleaned it, kept it happy, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and, after deciding my mom was right about how much it’d suck to own pets, I let my digital cat die. I think I may have cried. Now that I have Dodo, REAL CATS ARE SO MUCH FREAKING EASIER TO LIVE WITH THAN STUPID DIGITAL CATS! I was sure then, too, that the inventors of these digital pets were papercutting themselves to death rolling around naked in our hard-earned cash laughing at us.

Here are photos of what I was doing this past long weekend. Rest the mouse pointer over the photos for captions.

This is what I looked like in Mr. W’s first 50 photos of Thanksgiving Thursday, no matter if I was in the foreground, midground or background:

We went for a stroll at an upscale outdoors mall, and saw these nice decorations.

Here are the Red Rocks shots.

The unveiling of Mr. W:

Thanksgiving weekend was really fun. Mr. W and I had planned to fit in at least one day of gym time, he even looked up the nearby 24 Hr Fitness gyms in Vegas, and we thought we’d take in a show on the Vegas Strip. We didn’t end up doing either because we couldn’t fit it in between the family dinners, hanging out with his parents, having dinner with his brother’s family. The only time we hit the Strip was before meeting up with his relatives for Chicago pizza dinner, when Mr. W and I parked in the Harrah’s parking structure, walked through it to get out on the Strip and get to the Venetian to catch Flat Coke & Flies before she and her boyfriend Bat entered their Blue Man Group show. We only got to hang out while they were in the will-call ticket line, but it was fun to hear about all her Vegas birthday surprises. (On the way there, Flat Coke and I were text-messaging each other on our whereabouts, trying to coordinate, and I told Mr. W that I felt like I was going to a BBS user meet that I hadn’t gone to since I was 17. He’d never gone to a user meet before, so the he likened it to a blind date. Which got me thinking — I’m okay with showing up to a blind date and getting disappointed, but it would really suck if the person who was meeting ME was disappointed, ya know?)

We did go to the Red Rocks with Mr. W’s parents on Saturday before we left. He climbed it alone; I stayed behind and took pictures, and hung out with his parents. It was freezing, but all the red stripes on the gigantic rocky cliffs made for some mesmerizing photos.

This Thanksgiving, I was and remain grateful for a great boyfriend who opens up his life and his family to me, and offers me the most stress-free relationship I’ve ever known. In the other direction, I’m also grateful he opens himself up to my family, culture, and greets things new and strange to him with excitement and wide-spread arms. I love that he spoils me sick with all the little and some not-s0-little things he does for me without so much as thinking twice, and he in turn appears surprised that I appreciate the automatic things he does so much to think I’m being spoiled. Last but not least, I appreciate that his brother left behind his Playstation 2 and Guitar Hero 1 and 2 games with the guitar controllers for us last weekend, which is the reason that I have lost much sensation in my left fingertips. (On Friday nite Mr. W and I were up till almost 3am playing!)

Thanksgiving meal started with lunch. I don’t think my breakfast of cookies and eggnog spiked with whiskey, brandy AND rum counted as a real meal. Lunch was turkey, potato soup, corn cobbettes, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry and orange jelly(?), stuffing, bread rolls, string bean and mushroom casserole, and I’m probably still leaving something out. Dessert was a caramel turtle ice cream pie and homemade pumpkin cheesecake. There was red and white wine. Now everyone’s kinda hanging around waiting for lunch to roll into dinner. There are more relatives of Mr. W’s expected, and two doggies running around the house begging for a scratch with your foot. (Or it may have been asking for table scraps at my feet, I dunno. But I gave it scratches with my feet instead of scraps from the table and it seemed perfectly content with that. Or maybe it wasn’t. I dunno. Or maybe there aren’t even any dogs. I had a lot to drink.)

I think I’m on the verge of a new game addiction. Mr. W’s younger brother brought over his Playstation 2 and plugged in 2 guitar controllers. We played “Guitar Hero,” and I started getting good. This is like a whole repeat of how I got hooked on the bongos (“Donkey Konga”) after playing that game at Vicky’s house a few years ago, and had to go buy GameCube with the 2 sets of bongos for my fix. Mr. W’s brother said they should figure out a game to combine Dance Dance Revolution, bongos, guitar and karaoke games and have a whole band going. That would be very cool.

I only worked out once this entire week. We’re going to go to a reputedly very fancy 24 Hour Fitness Sport tomorrow, Andre Agassi’s club in one of the main strip hotels.

We could leave at anytime for Vegas, depending on traffic. After work, Mr. W and I grabbed some sushi dinner, then went to a nearby 24 Hour Fitness for some whirlpool and steam room relaxation. Now we’re just sitting around waiting for traffic reports to give us the green light. We’ll probably nap first and drive thru the nite, tho.

He wants to go to some red rocks or something, which is supposed to be picturesque. The rocks, according to him, have holes all over them which make for great climbing. So I guess I’ll bring my camera. I totally just had a mental picture of myself clinging onto the edge of a rock, trying to maneuver my camera so that I could take a picture, and then the camera slips and I instinctively grab for it with both hands, and then I just sorta peel off the side of the rock and fall, gripping my camera, backwards off the rock. You see me get smaller and smaller as I fall, and then several flashes as my camera goes off in search of the perfect pre-death shot. Years later, people will find my camera, marvel at the way old technology, and search museums for a computer that will download the photos from such an old medium. And then they’d see these great shots of the ground coming closer and closer. “How’d she take those?” “Must’ve been some great zoom.”

I got thrown into a pretty busy courtroom for this week since my judge is on vacation (altho he did come in today, in a Hawaii shirt and jeans, to throw more work at me, I relate affectionately) and I’m still at work now!

Okay. Let’s see. What’d I do this weekend?

Friday – I don’t remember. Maybe we watched a DVD movie or something.
Saturday – In the morning, Mr. W repaired bike tires as I washed my car. Then in the afternoon, we met up with my gym trainee and her 10 year old son at Santa Monica Pier, where we rode our bikes down to Venice Beach, parked them, then strolled the street faire that’s always going on. I bought a 1.5ft-long hand-carved wooden (black rosewood) dragon for my parents for xmas, $175. We had dinner at a Mexican food restaurant on the pier, then separated. Mr. W and I wasted some time hanging out in the sand on a blanket in the thick fog before we left for home. Man, the fog rolled in suddenly! It was freezing and we couldn’t even see the water. Oh, and my crotch hurts. From the bike seat, pervies!!!
Sunday – Mr. W and I visited my parents, my mom steamed crabs, we ate like kings and queens. And then Mr. W and I went to Disneyland to stroll around and look at the Christmas decorations. We were there almost 3 hours and all we did was walk around and ride the train around the park once, and then rode Storybook Land on water once. “You want an exciting time at Disneyland, you come with ME!” Mr. W announced.

Okay, time to go home and do laundry. I suppose I oughta clean the house, too. This is all in preparation to go to Vegas for Thanksgiving to hang with Mr. W’s family. Hey, maybe I’ll run into Flat Coke & Flies there while she’s doing the Amandapalooza thing.

I fell in love with this bed at the Getty. It was taken from Paris in the 1700s. The embroidery is beautiful on this robin’s egg blue silk fabric, and the detailing is amazing. The tassels were neat and different, the top corners of the canopy had plumes of real ostrich feathers. I’m bummed the photos didn’t come out (no flash allowed in museums).

My mother, ever the muse for my runaway imagination, said, “Maybe you like that bed so much because in the past, in another lifetime, that was your bed.” Well, in that case, I think it’s really messed up that I used to run from across the room and leap onto the bed, and it was my bed, and now, just because it’s a few lifetimes later and I’m in another body, I’m not allowed to even touch my own bed anymore. Hmmph.

Today Mr. W and I took my parents to the Getty Museum. My mom had been wanting to go, which my supersleuth powers picked up through her barely perceptable hints, as follows:

Mom: Have you ever gone to the Getty Museum?
Me: Yeah, I have, with my friend Lily.
Mom: Oh. I really want to go. I’ve been wanting to go.
Me: I see.

It was a beautiful day in L.A., uncharacteristically clear, after the 3rd day of a long weekend.

Mr. W stopped to take a picture of a pretty yellow flower in the lawn. A chicken stopped by to admire the flower, too.

I can pose for a sculptor, too.

In the gift shop, I found this really cool paper camera with a scalloped lens!

It makes me look like this.

Ha! Stupid kids.

Fun with Mom & Dad!

Afterwards, we all went to Beverly Hills for some garlic lunch at The Stinking Rose. It was a very nice day.

All photos courtesy of Mr. W (except for the one of the kids crying, which I took on his camera). Roll mouse pointer over photos for captions.

In no particular order except the order in which my eye spotted them on the thumbnail lineup…rest mouse over photos for captions…

If you have Internet Explorer, resting your mouse pointer on the photos will bring a pop-up caption. *side glance at Wilco, who pointed out the wrong usage of the alternative text tag, but did not educate me on what the correct title tag is*

I walked up to this great sideways-growing tree on the beach, reached for a branch, and all of a sudden, this huge wave crashed toward me! I yelped and jumped on the nearest branch to keep from getting wet. Mr. W, who was on a hill behind me, laughed and started taking pictures.

I was now committed to this tree, as the tide seems to have suddenly risen. I figured I may as well curl up in its protection.

Cradled in this branch, which looks like the tree’s smile, I enjoyed the scenery.

These photos were the ones I took atop the tree:



When I was ready to hop off, I watched the waves and counted how much time I had to hop off and run up the slope before the water came crashing in again, and just when I had it timed just so, I realized that behind me, these 3 or 4 Asian tourists were posing right next to the tree, behind me, taking photos of themselves by the tree! Hello, could you not wait till I got off the damn tree? Am I not ruining your shot?! So I had to wait uncomfortably for these men to finish the pictures before I could hop off and make a run for it.