Tissue: A Product Comparison
Since we’ve gone through over a box of tissues in a week or so, I thought I’d share this: Green Forest tissue
I’ve been trying to take advantage of our colds (I managed to find a bright side, harhar) by testing out more brands of tissue with recycled fiber but we’ve had a really tough time finding these brands. We got the Green Forest at Berkeley Bowl and the Seventh Generation at Long’s Drugs, but Target has NOTHING and neither does Walgreens. I mean, not one brand of tissue with recycled paper content of any kind. Is it just the local Target and Walgreens or is this some kind of bad-Kimberly-Clark-tissues-only at every store in the country policy? Hmmph!
Trash
You know how anthropologists and archaeologists say that looking through people’s trash is a good way of knowing what was going on in their lives? (Something like that, I think.)
This is mine today:
Recommendables
I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from the break. If it seems like all we did was eat, play wii, play cards, and play Scrabble, then you got a pretty accurate view of the trip. =) Hope everyone had a nice holiday season.
I’m not much of one for resolutions cos they always seem sort of awful, (or in my case, too easy: read more books! harhar) so I’m going to just do a quick retrospective for the year, which will probably be inaccurate cos my memory is so poor. Feel free to add recommendables of your own, although I guess that’s duh. :))
- Recommendables for 2006
- best purchase of the year: Wii! So excellent!
- movie: Little Miss Sunshine, as far as I remember
- new tv show: Heros
- books: I can’t remember what I read this year and what I read previously, so this is too hard.
- restaurants: I was gonna try and pick one, but it’s too hard! Chez Panisse and Medicine EatStation were the two best in terms of swanky dining. Michael Mina was really good, too, except my fish entree was just a tad dry, which is nitpicking except at a swanks place like that I expect more. But every other thing was awesome. And Sea Salt is our new fave local place. Lots of previous recommendable places are still recommendable, I’m just trying to keep it down to new for this year.
- Wii games: Rayman: Raving Rabbids, Wii Sports, and Zelda: Twilight Princess probably got the most gameplay so far, then Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Monkey Ball has been sort of a disappointment; although the actual game is better, part of the joy of Monkey Ball was always the minigames, which just don’t feel as well done.
- DS games: Pheonix Wright lately for me.
- applications/web stuff: wordpress (so easy, so not crash-prone), feedable (everything has a feed and it’s way too hard to keep up without a reader), and meebo (im anywhere)
- cosmetic/beauty type stuffs: Lorac sparkly eyeshadow/liner, good stuff. And hair straightener, for the days when my hair is shall we say too 3D for my taste. This is probably old news, but somehow I totally missed out on discovering the possibilities of a hair straightener for years.
- feminine product: the menstrual cup! I find tampons way uncomfortable in comparison, especially for the lighter days.
- gadget: none! I didn’t get a new gadget this year! (Am the picture of restraint, clearly.)
And that’s all I can think of for now. Oh except I have one unrecommendable, which is Earth First toilet paper, too chafy. :P
Happy New Year, everyone!
Games
This whole trip has been all about games and no sleep so far. We’ve played a ton of Scrabble (zoa is a v. important word), card games (especially Napoleon, only not with rules I recognize from anywhere online), and Wii. All sorts of Wii. It’s funny how everyone has their own favorite thing. Before I got here, I thought Wii Sports was the best party game that we have. I mean, it seemed like most picked it up pretty fast, and enjoyed it the most. But since I’ve gotten here, CT’s made it pretty clear her fave is Rayman: Raving Rabbids, K really likes Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Yuli’s the most consistent at bowling (she wasn’t around long enough to show a clear preference), and J likes video games, period. I’m glad we brought the Wii home, but it’s been nice hanging out with people who like to play cards, too.
Haha, you thought since I was visiting my parents I’d post about something different, right? But no, everyone in the family likes cards and/or video games to one degree or another. I mean, for dinner on the 24th with the extended family, one member of every family brought a laptop. All the “kids” (people of my generation) played with the Wii, and everyone, regardless of age played cards at some point. Teehee =)
Blacklist
We flew out on Wednesday, the day that Denver was hit by a blizzard, which already made everything extra bad, but worse than that, we flew United. Denver is a major hub for United, so all of their lines were awful. The United agent we finally spoke with (who was very nice) said that everyone was already working overtime like mad, but there just weren’t enough people to handle the situation. Still, none of this would’ve impacted us since we like to travel light, 1 carry-on suitcase and 2 backpacks total between the two of us, except for one thing: my name is on the TSA blacklist. Completely wiggedy wack!!! The TSA never even notified me, or gave me an explanation as to why. I didn’t even find out until I got to the airport and waited in line for over an hour and missed our flight and FINALLY spoke to the United agent. Yeah, when you’re blacklisted, you can’t check in online or the kiosks. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! Flying is going to be (more) miserable from now on. As of right now, I don’t even know how to get off of it, or if there’s even a way. I mean, it has to be a mistake, but I don’t want to have to talk with an airline representative every time I fly. If anyone has any advice about how to get off the blacklist when you’re on it for no reason at all, I would love to know.
I hope it’s nicer there than here.
We’re taking the rest of the week off, yay!
We’re flying all day tomorrow, boo.
Oh well, at least this time my parents and CT’s got DSL. Finally! Hallelujah! (I could go on.)
I wish someone would invent the transporter. Beam me up, Scotty!
Hmmph!
Okay, I know it’s an old article published just one day after the Wii came out, but I just read Nintendon’t: The Case Against the Wii (via kottke), and wow did this Erik Sofge fellow get it wrong!
The dude just nitpicks and nitpicks! It’s imprecise! (Sit back away from the tv or something.) Gameplay isn’t precisely like real life! (I don’t know about you, I don’t know the first thing about hitting a baseball in real life, but I would hate it if I never managed to hit a ball in a video game.) Nintendo wants you to think that you’ll be getting up off the couch but you don’t have to! (Erm, but you could. And it’s funner. I think bowling for example is way better if you stand up.)
I feel like Nintendo set out to make a really fun console that’s relatively affordable, and they succeeded. It’s oodles of fun and only $50 more than the Super Nintendo was when it was released, back in 1997, almost 10 years ago. Inflation adjusted, the Wii is less expensive (source: Gizmodo). I’m not trying to say that the Wii is more fun than the SNES, cos the SNES had Super Mario World which reigns supreme for Super Mario games in my book, more like they’re both fun. I think Sofge is too impressed with his own “hardcore”ness. And he’s curmudgeony.
And the part about appealing to “people who’ve never held a joystick before,” like grandpas?
:P
Hearsay
It’s fun walking around near a college campus sometimes. Today I overheard a bunch of guys walking around. One said to the other “…but he has an enchanter in his level 60 paladin!” Teeheehee:)) That’s all I heard, but they made me giggle a little, it sounded so authoritative. Later, a girl coming towards me yelled, “WHAT? What kind of a FREAK doesn’t get hungry at lunchtime?!” Hear hear!!! Especially since I had just gotten a sandwich:)
Btw, I was going to keep this post wii-free but I really ought to mention that we finished Zelda. Yup 65 hours of playing later (including over 16 this weekend) we got through the whole story. (And multiple fishing expeditions cos I just couldn’t believe there were only like 6 types of fish!) It was damned good, so if you are considering it, just stop considering already. Yut and I really liked it and we both swore off big RPGs ages ago from not being able to finish cos of annoyance and maybe boredom. It’s not really RPG though, so maybe that’s why. But it was a sprawling adventure story, a really good one.
Rabbids on my Mind
I keep meaning to write something about something besides the Wii, but dude, right now, that’s pretty hard. The other day the Berkeley City College Choir came to class to do a short informal practice/preview concert, and before they even started singing, I thought of “Bunnies Can’t Sing” or whatever that minigame from Rayman is called, the one where the bunnies are in a choir and one of them is yowling instead of singing and you have to find the offending bunny and slap him.
