Zelda freaks - on the SNES!

When I was a kid, I always wished that I had the cool toys that the neighbors had. I especially wished that I had an Atari, and then a Nintendo, and then a Super NES, but I had to just go over to their house and watch them play. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would get a turn playing something.

Soon after I got married, we bought a stereo, a Super NES and some other electronics for like $100 from a friend who goes through new technology like water in a sieve.
That same game system has lasted us 7 years and we haven't gotten anything 'better'.

We started out with only Donkey Kong Country, Toy Story and Animaniacs. The system came with DK Country. Our friend bought Toy Story, which is an OK game to play, but it seems like it was cobbled together quickly before the release of the movie by 3 different development teams and one guy stuck it together without music between levels and NO ending music. It just basically says "Thanks for Playing!" Kinda lame.

We have occasionally went out and got 'new' games, which are really used games that work just fine. They end up being anywhere between one dollar and 10 dollars. Compare that with the price you normally pay: $20 if you are lucky to $60 plus.

For Christmas, we got a few 'new' games, and I was excited to see that my wife had found "Zelda, A Link to the Past", since it is one of the best games of all time.

My son wasn't all that excited at first because he didn't know what it was like, but soon we found ourselves stuck in Zelda's world. I wanted to conquer the game as fast as I could, and so did my son. Since there are three available save game slots, we had three players: me, my son, and my wife.

I soon discovered that it takes forever to get through some of the secrets of the game unless you get help. It sucks away enough time to just play it already knowing what you are doing. I can't imagine playing the game and not having help available online. Instead of calling the help 'Cheats', we just call it help, because we don't want to promote the fact that cheating is OK. Getting help from others is an important thing to learn in life, though... especially if you are doing something that you aren't that good at, you can get it done better and more quickly if you have help.

Anyway, a few sites became my lifeline, especially GameSpy and RPG Classics; then I help the rest of the family through all the dungeons and secrets. My son caught on quick. He soon was thinking about Zelda day and night. We took a break to go to my brother's house in Idaho, and luckily no-one had a problem with doing something else for a while. I guess we weren't SO addicted to the game that we couldn't take a 3-day break.

Anyway, after around a month of playing, and in 89 tries, I finally won the game.



My son completed his game a day later in 131 games; my wife is still working on hers about once every other week, so she should be done in about a year.

I wonder if the Force is with me...

Ultimate? Garage Shelving

This last weekend our family drove to Boise to help my brother install shelving in his garage. We made it up there with a pretty good gas mileage for our minivan of around 23 mpg. It took us around 5 hours to get there since we stopped to get lunch at Jake's over the top and again to use the bathrooms at some Chevron. The kids had a great time playing with their cousins over the weekend and we got to finally see my brother's new house.


The shelving project itself went fairly well. My brother just bought a table saw and was planning on using it to cut through the 12 and 15 inch wide shelves. Unfortunately, that width was too big for the small table without additional cutting aids that we didn't have or have time to make. Luckily, I had brought along my new Ryobi tools. I already had a 14.4 volt Ryobi drill since around 1999, and when I asked my wife for a power tool of some kind for my birthday last year, she went and bought me the 18V circular saw thinking that the same battery I had would be interchangeable. Since the circular saw doesn't come with a battery, I went to go buy one, but found that the battery was around $30. The saw had cost about $60. So that would have been $90 for just the saw and one battery. I decided instead to buy the cordless circular saw, drill and flashlight combo because it comes with two 18V batteries and was priced at $110. So for about $20 more, I would end up with an extra drill and an extra battery, plus a flashlight and a sander by rebate for free. Pretty good deal.

My brother had a cordless screwdriver, but not as heavy duty as my cordless drills and his battery died kind of quickly for how many screws we needed to put in. It was great that I had two 18V batteries, plus my other 14.4V drill. That meant we could both have a good drill for driving screws and drilling pre-sink holes when needed. Plus we ended up cutting almost all the wood with my circular saw.

The project took us half of Saturday and most of Monday. Now he has a 6' shelf around his whole garage, plus 3', 4.5', and 7.5' shelves in certain spots and a 9' shelf in the back. He bought good brackets to mount to the wall that we could space every other stud (32") and they should hold a weight of 750 pounds for each pair. I'd say he could hang his cars from the shelves and they would just about hold.

We did pull ups from them and sat the kids on top to prove to ourselves that we are studs... I mean to prove that we screwed the shelves into the wall's studs.
I'll try and get a picture of that from my brother...

Car problems in a blizzard
Our only problem was that as we drove home through somewhat treacherous snow on Tuesday morning I noticed that the gas pedal was suddenly not doing anything, and intermitently the check engine light would come on. So I pulled the car over and opened the hood (the wind was terribly cold), and noticed that the water in the car was very low. I thought that maybe the air was cold enough to make the car not overheat, but that the water being low had caused some sort of computer in the car to trigger the car to not accelerate so that I wouldn't burn up some component. It was a guess, but not a good one. After a few more minutes, I got the car started again, and it worked intermitently again, but I was only able to get up to about 40 mph on a 75 mph freeway. I drove about three miles with my flashers on at the side of the road and then the check engine light came on steady. That's when we decided to not try to go on. We were in the middle of no-where. We were about 40 miles from Burley, Idaho and about 50 or 60 miles from Tremonton, Utah. Those were the only places around that would have a car repair shop. We called information and after a few tries got a hold of a tow company to come and get us. The said they'd pick us up in about 45 minutes.

It was somewhat difficult to stay positive with the kids in the car, but having them there made it a bit easier to put things in perspective and be glad that everything was OK, and that we were all together. The tow company was supposed to take us to the Dodge dealership and I was hoping they'd be able to fix our car by 5-o-clock so we could get home that night. We already figured we would miss our kid's singing lessons that day. The first lesson was at 4-o-clock, we still had a couple of hours to drive home and it was 2-o-clock when we broke down.

The tow truck didn't come in 45 minutes. I wondered why. Although it was snowy and windy, the road hadn't been very bad and I figured it should only take about 30 minutes to get to us. (After all, we had traveled the same 40 miles at 75 or 70mph and it didn't take too long.) An hour went by and Michelle called the company again. The driver said that he was almost to us, but he had stopped because there was an accident that happened right in front of him. Apparently the weather had gotten worse since we had stopped an hour before.

The tow truck driver finally got to us and we loaded all 5 of us into the dual bench cab and we started off. The weather was pretty bad and the driver had a problem with both of his windshield wipers because they kept getting covered by ice and not working. The driver would be talking on his radio or cellphone and roll down the window and thump the windshield wiper at the same time. I tried to stay calm and my wife did the same. I think the kids definitely were happy about going through this strange experience, although we had been happy that we would be home that day.

It turned out that it was 5:00 when we got to the repair shop. The Dodge dealership would have been closed by then, and so the guy took us to his own shop (they are probably cheaper anyway). They figured correctly that it was the fuel pump or fuel filter, but they would need to call around to get the parts. We waited an hour or so while someone took our car apart and since there was no-one around to take us to a hotel yet (the driver had left to pickup another of the many accidents that were happening because of the snow) we watched Barbie in The Princess and the Pauper with our kids. Then we watched part of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I was glad to get out of the office when we finally were able to pack up some of our stuff onto another tow truck, but kind of wanted to see the rest of the movie.

We went to the Best Western and lugged all our luggage :P into the lobby and then found out we would have to repack it into the tow truck to go around to the other side of the complex for our room. At least we had a room. It was 8:00 at night, and we hadn't eaten dinner. The hotel restaurant was excellent, but more money than we would have hoped to pay for our next two or three meals.

The next morning we slept in a bit since we hadn't went to bed until past 10:00 and had breakfast about 10:00 or 11:00 and then checked out at noon. The hotel let us keep our stuff in a backroom since we had no car to put it in yet. Then we crossed the cold and windy streets and walked about a quarter mile to WalMart. Never have we spent so much time letting the kids look at all the toys and spending as much time as they wanted. We had hours to kill, and we spent about 2 and a half of them there. Michelle kicked back in the lawn chairs (which apparently are on a really good sale during the winter.) Finally we went back across the street to the hotel and waited around another 20 minutes or so for the tow truck to come pick us up.

$589 later we were on the road home. We got home just as it was getting dark (about 6:00) and I quickly shoveled the 2" of snow off the driveway that had fallen that day so that we could pull into the driveway. It has almost never felt so good to be home!

Sabrina, the Kid Jedi

Just two days later, my brother and family came down for my sister's surprise 18th birthday. My brother came over on Saturday and we ate dinner and played Scrabble. The kids also played and Ethan showed Sabrina how to play my Jedi Lightsaber game that plugs into the TV.
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The funniest thing happened when Sabrina tried playing the game. She would try and hold the lightsaber with two hands with one hand on the handle and the other on the blade, and then just shake her hands like crazy. As she was doing that, and getting whooped in a training match by Anakin or Obi-Wan, she said: "I wonder if the Force is with me..." in her loud and animated way. That was probably the highlight of the evening since Scrabble is a pretty slow game. We were playing it to see if Michelle would be better at that sort of game where there is less strategy involved and more brain power. We all did well, but I ended up winning.