My brother and I played video games, even though we couldn't find any of the good ones that involve shooting each other. So we played good old Tenchu, stealth assassins, for old time's sake. We played 2-player co-op, and got to the level that took us months to beat last time. The level is a source of the ever-funny (to us) phrase: "OK, sis, you stay up top, feed 'em the rice." We tried that twice before remembering "stay up top, feed em the rice" had NEVER worked as a plan, and that's why we'd stopped playing it years ago. FYI: poison rice is basically useless in the Tenchu game, as it likely would be in a real-life ninja scenario. Who just picks up rice off the ground and eats it?

Friday's "impulse buy" (pictured previous update) has this additional story: Our old TV would take between 30-1200 minutes to warm up, and also it would not tell you for sure if it was on-and-warming-up, off-but-on-standby, or completely off. So if you turned it "on" but lost faith in yourself after an hour or so of staring at the blank screen and pressed the power button again, you might be turning it off for real this time--but you won't know for sure until 30-1200 minutes have passed. Anyway, Thursday night we all as a family sat and stared at the TV for about 3 hours, talking mainly about whether or not we thought it was going to come on. Friday, dad got a new TV.