Wii

Christmas came early here. No, actually it came very late. Alison gave me a Wii as a birthday present on April Fools. For the uninitiated, a Wii is a game console; a box you attach to your TV and play games on.
These boxes however are really in short supply and it took us a couple of months to acquire one. Unlike in Europe, were friends of my, just put their name on a list and received their Wii [link in Dutch] six weeks later, here you have to visit the shops every day and ask if they have Wii’s. Or buy one on eBay or Craigslist for 100 dollars above the normal price.

We didn’t do that, because we are cheap, patient and not very close to a electronics stores. So we scoured the Internet, put the Wii product-pages of a couple of internet shops in our browser’s bookmarks and reloaded them every day a couple of times. And lo-and-behold, after many, many weeks, Tuesday one of the shops (I’m reluctant to tell you it was Futureshop, since I try to avoid them as the plague) had Wii’s in stock. Sixty of them when I started my order and nervously punched in my credit card number, and they had only 15 left after I received my order confirmation.

This morning the letter carrier (I can’t use the word “postman”, Alison will flog me) rang twice and handed me a big box. Inside was a much smaller box and I’m dying to open it but I’m going to wait until Alison returns from Toronto tonight.

After all, it’s my birthday present from her.

Update: she came home, tried to wrap the box, I stopped her because I knew that access to the wrapping paper was kind of blocked (that part of the basement is still a mess) and then she sang me Happy Birthday and the French equivalent.

And then we played boxing, bowling and tennis for a couple of hours. It was fun! Even though Alison beat me at bowling.

Can you believe it that this is the first game console I ever owned in my life? And that I used to make all my money making games?