i headed out to dan's place in malden around noontime for an afternoon of wii action. the temperature was about 15 degrees cooler (around 40°F) than what was forecasted earlier in the week. the sky was overcasted and there was a fine mist as i rode my motorcycle. i've experienced worse though, and was dressed for the cold so it wasn't a big deal, other than some low visibility through my mist splattered glasses.

cymara answered the door with clarissa, and elias was already in the living room, with dan just stepping out of the shower. we started the afternoon off with elias' super smash bros. brawl. there was no need to share controllers as we each brought our own. my favorite two characters were wario (the bizarro mario) and samus. wario can swallow opponents whole and can conjure up a motorcycle to drive people off the screen. samus had a good repertoire of weapons, including an electrified grappling hook (sort of like scorpion from mortal kombat) and several forms of missiles. dan heated up some pizza in the oven since we didn't have lunch yet.

next we played mario strikers charged, a mario version of soccer. elias and i were on the same team but dan beat us in every single match that we played. that was followed by mario party 8, which was a suped up board game with mini-arcade interludes. that's when mike o. showed up. after mario party 8 we switched back to super smash bros. brawl.

we all left a quarter after 5pm, until i realized it was actually 6:15pm. it had rained during the past few hours and the road conditions were wet. riding in the rain is no fun but at least it was still light out. i managed to make it to belmont in about 20 minutes for dinner. the front of my jeans were soaked and my sister put them into the dryer for me.

as soon as i got there the dog jumped out of her cage and immediately urinated on the living room carpet. pretty much anytime i'm there, i see her going to the bathroom inside the house, which my father and sister try to convince me never happens any other time. the burden of dog ownership got the better of me and i went on a tirade during dinner advocating that they try to give the dog to somebody else. so long as they have the dog it's going to a sticking point.

later i helped my father erase one of his hard drives and install windows xp professional onto it. he has the home edition, which came with the HP computer, but besides the OS it also installs a few dozen expiration and demoware that he doesn't need. we looked for the audio and video driver online until we realized we could get them from the recovery dvd. the product key that i had didn't seem to work for some reason (might've copied it wrong) so in the meantime XP pro is running on the 30 day trial version.

i left well after 10pm. even though it was relatively late, the temperature still hovered around the 40's. cold, wet, and dark doesn't make a good combination for riding but thankfully i only had a few miles to travel before i got home (and mostly green lights throughout the way, so almost no stopping).