Wii

For Christmas Stephanie and I were blessed to get the curse of a Wii from her parents.  I say curse because all of our spare time is now spent not on catching up in classes, but playing Mario!!  (it's not quite that bad, but I am wary of the entrapment that it represents).

For the last couple weeks we've been involving ourselves in playing Super Mario Bros Wii, and I just realized that we did a pretty good job of beating the game in just a few weeks (we started Sunday Jan. 1) considering: we did it together, we never played by ourselves (we each had our own games for when we were home alone).  We went through every world, although we did earn the trip to some world-skipping cannons, we went back and beat every castle the levels.  We even spent some time playing finding missed star coins and earning extra lives in World 1.  

And for the visual enjoyment of all.  This is how you beat Bowser.  You avoid one half of the screen while not falling into the lava.

And how do you do it?  (notice the mario in the above pic?  yeah, you pretty much have to fly.)

in my head

I'm standing in the MARB waiting for a class, there are people all around, sitting on the ground mostly reading or texting.  There is also a girl who looks and sounds Russian talking on her phone, in Russian.  I begin to wonder what she is talking about, is she a spy, a terrorist, a scientist looking for high tech secrets, or perhaps passing info on the education system here back to top officials in Russia.  She is speaking quickly (at least it sounds fast to me) and seems a little stressed (or maybe distressed).  

Then her Russian is broken by something I recognize, 'Ma, Ma, Mama!...' and she continues complaining to her mother about how hard of a time she is having here at the beginning of the semester.  She's not a spy after all, she's just a normal student, having normal problems that her normal mother still doesn't understand.