Wii Won!

So last night Seth and I got all dolled-up and went to my company holiday party. We got to the Hilton hotel downtown at the end of the "social hour" and to our dismay the parking at the hotel was full. So, we hurried and parked across the street in a pay lot. The line to pay at the little kiosk was huge and people are generally clueless about how to use them, so I convinced Seth to just forget about it... we'd come back and pay later.

We get inside, find a table and go about eating and socializing with my co-workers. After a lag in the conversation, Seth decides he should go pay the parking fee and I go stand in line to get us some drinks.

When I finally got back into the main dining room, I noticed they'd started calling out names for a prize drawing. I walked over to our table and everybody was like, "Karen! They called your name! Go up there!" At first I thought they were just screwing with me, but then realized they were being serious. "What? What did I win?" "Just go up to the front of the room and draw a number!"

So I walk up to the front and draw a card from the lady standing there and wait for a moment with all the other "contestants." About this time Seth comes back and has a confused look on his face. I motion for him to come over and proceed to tell him they'd picked us to compete in a dance contest. I wait until I see the panicked look on his face before I tell him that no, we're not really in a dance contest, I've just won something and I'm waiting to find out what it is. He breathes a sigh of relief, tells me to win the Wii, and sits back down at the table.

I'd chosen prize #4 so it didn't take them long to get to my number... yup, you guessed it! I won the Wii! It was awesome! I never win anything! (ok except for that one time when I was like 8 years old and won a giant box of chocolates from Kara Chocolates at the mall). Anyway, we'd kind of been wanting a Wii, but not bad enough to actually fork out the money to buy one (hello, fishing stuff is way more important), but now we have one and it was FREE! Sweet! I hooked it up last night but we didn't actually play it. We just relaxed and basked in the faint glow of its gloriousness. Or maybe it was just the red "power" indicator light.


Anyway, we're totally going to be onto you if you suddenly start coming over to visit us. And we decided we're cool with that.

Yeah, I Remember Records

I never called them 45s, but yeah, I remember records. My parents had a whole stash of them and still do. Nothing worth any money mind you, just good old classics like John Denver and Anne Murray. I definitely had a few favorites back in my younger days, most of which were either kids records or show tunes, but they were still records.

I remember putting on "Annie" and running around our cream colored couch with big brown flowers on it while listening to "It's A Hard Knock Life." I always thought the "Fox and the Hound" record was the coolest because instead of black vinyl it had an actual picture on it. We also had "The Muppet's Rainbow Connection." There was an "Electric Company" record but I think that show was a little before my time and I had never watched it. I never listened to that record because I thought something called "The Electric Company" sounded really boring. We also had a "Raggedy Anne and Andy" record that told a story. It was kind of creepy to me back in the day. Something about the voices I think. Of course I thought that the red cheeked grouchy puppet that lived in the spinning carousel type house on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was creepy too.

I also remember when CDs first came out. My family was pretty technologically advanced for our time and I remember my dad bringing home our first CD player. I used to love to just hold a CD and look at it. They were so beautiful with all their rainbow colors compared to cassette tapes and records . For the longest time we would go to the mall every Saturday and my parents would stop into the music store and buy a couple CDs. That was back when they used to come in long skinny boxes, not just wrapped in a plastic coating like today. It's amazing how much technology has advanced in my lifetime. CDs are already becoming obsolete with IPODs and other devices now that can hold your whole music collection on something less than half the physical size of a CD. Makes you wonder what it'll be like in another 20 years.

Computers have also come a long way since I was a kid. I don't ever remember not having one at home. We used to have all our games on the big 5" floppy disks and we'd type a run code into DOS to get it to start. Occasionally we'd forget what the special code was and have to call mom up at work to get it. When it came to computers mom always had the answer.

Around that same time in my life was when Nintendo came out. That was the coolest thing in the world. Three buttons was all you needed and as far as I'm concerned it's still superior to all the new complicated gaming systems out there. What other gaming system can you fix by blowing on it? We had probably 40+ games within just a couple years. I wish I still had it. Believe it or not, the Nintendo caused the breakup with my first boyfriend when I was about eight or nine years old. He never let me play. To this day many men still favor gaming systems to women. Some things never change.