Embarrassed, old fashioned high tech

I recently have gotten some cool game titles like Halo 2 and NFL 2K5 for the XBox however I am embarrassed to admit that neither of these titles have gotten much play yet, I am spending most of my gaming time playing a game that is probably most popular with kids 8-12 years old, Mario vs Donkey Kong. It is a surprisingly great game considering the GBA’s dimunitive size and limited horsepower. The gameplay is smooth and it incorporates many aspects from previous Mario titles resulting in one addicting gaming experience. The game requires a good balance of thinking to figure out how to obtain the objective with coordination to pull off the moves. If you think I am just further reverting into childhood, I dare you to try it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I forgot to mention the best thing of all I got from the neighbors, a tractor sprinkler. I don’t know what the official name for it is but that is what it looks like, a tractor. I remember seeing these around for years but never knew how cool they were. It’s made of heavy iron and uses the spinning motion of the sprinkler arms to drive gears that turn the rear wheels ever so slightly each revolution. The front of the tractor has a pulley-like wheel that rides on the hose, like a train on a track. The result is I can lay out my sprinkler track with the hose, turn on the water and forget it. This certainly beats what I was doing up to this point, manually moving a set of 3 sprinkler heads around the house every half hour or so. I most have told Ali half a dozen times how cool this little piece of irrigation engineering was.