I’ve seen Amazon advertise their Trade-In program a few times, and I’m trying it out!

First, I grew tired of MAG, and I’d rather play MW2 with friends, so I’m selling it to max out my value while it’s still pretty new. But feeling lazy and not wanting to bother with Ebay, I decided to check out Amazon’s trade-in program.

It’s run by a third party, but it’s super easy to do. You search for the game you want to trade-in, if they want it, it shows a price. Since I was going to send one game, I figured I’d look around and find other games I never play and see what I can get for them. Turns out I’ve got 26 games I never play…so might as well trade them in!

Once they give you a price, and a free shipping label, you have seven days to send them in. The only iffy thing I see is that if the items are damaged or not what you were supposed to send, they won’t send it back. For videogames they say:

For video games and movies, this includes the correct disc(s), manual, cover art, bundled accessories, UPC, and case.

I have all original packaging and manuals though, so I’m not worried about that.

Total I’m getting $170 for all of it. Everything from Zelda: Twilight Princess on Wii (booooring!), to Rogue Leader on the GameCube (hey, $1.75 is better than nothing!). I could probably get more on Ebay, but the hassle of running 26 auctions, many of which probably would get me nothing (seriously, who wants Rogue Leader from 2001?), and it just made more sense to get a nice chunk of change with practically zero effort.

Once I get my Amazon gift cards I’ll comment to let you know how the process went. They also take trade-ins for dvds and textbooks too.

I’ve only missed a Thanksgiving post by a full week.

The baby is doing great. He had an ear infection that had spread to both ears, but two weeks ago he got a super antibiotic shot, and he’s all better now. Got our 8 month shots finally, and he weighed in at 23 pounds on the nose (at 8.5 months now).

On Thanksgiving Day he started to crawl, and it’s on video! He wanted Great Grandpa’s cane, and he pulled himself a good 4-5 feet across the floor to get it. Right now he mainly uses his right arm and his legs, and just leaves his left arm tucked under him. His favorite destinations on the floor are the Wii Fit and the cables on the front of the PS3. When Stacie asked me what I was going to do about that, I said I was going to place decoy cables around the room. Then he will crawl to the decoy cables and not mess up anything. I’m sure it will work.

I haven’t mentioned anything about my novel in months. I sent off two copies of it to be edited, and I now have them both back in my possession! My next step is to read through my editors’ notes, take some notes about any major changes I want to make, and then I need to go back through the entire thing one more time. My goal is to have it done by March/April because that will be two years since I started it. Originally I had hoped for Christmas time, but that’s not going to happen. Thanks again to Kevin and Joanne for all their hard work.

There’s a quick update on things. Baby pictures in the next one, I promise.

Now that I’m waiting on book edits I’ve turned into a lazy bum. I felt so much more productive when I was spending a couple hours a day working on it.

I’ve been playing a lot of Mario Kart on Wii. Too much. It’s addictive, and a ton of fun.

We finished watching all the TV shows we had recorded. I’ve been recording reruns of the Big Bang Theory, so we started watching that tonight. It’s super geeky and funny.

I watched the show “Wanna Bet?” and it was absolutely terrible, but Tom Green was on. It reminded me about his website, www.tomgreen.com, and when I went there I started to watch episodes of the Tom Green Show. I’ve only seen a handful of them, but they’re super funny. They’re totally stupid, but still very funny. After that it reminded me that I was going to buy The Jamie Kennedy Experiment on DVD, another funny show. Maybe with my DVD profits I can get those.

I saw The Dark Night on Monday with my brother and sister-in-law. Heath Ledger was super good. Even if he wasn’t dead people would be talking him up. The movie itself was entertaining, and without spoiling anything I think it just went a little long. The story got sidetracked and wasn’t as tight as Iron Man.

Another movie I saw a little while ago was Wall-E. Like all Pixar movies it was breathtaking and a technological marvel, but there was something that bugged me the entire movie. Without spoiling anything, the premise of the movie is that humans have ruined the earth with trash and are now living in a space “cruise” ship. I couldn’t help but feel like I was being slapped in the face the entire time. Humans are stupid and ruining the planet, and it’s all the fault of evil corporations. I understand we need to take care of the planet we call home, but the movie builds on the stupid belief that we’re years from all being dead, and we’re not. The anti-capitalist message is almost laughable considering Pixar is making tons of money because of capitalism.

Took me two weeks to finish my editing of the book. That’s spending 3-4 hours at the library almost everyday. I went to Kinkos and had two “books” printed to send to my editors, Kevin and Joanne. Once I get back their edits, and incorporate them, I can start working on putting it up for sale!

A friend of ours got me Mario Kart for the Wii, and it absolutely rocks. Today we played it for over five hours. The are a ton of online options, tons of characters, and it’s super fun. I have Kurtii on my friends list, but he’s never on, and Paddy hasn’t even registered me yet. Anyone else have Mario Kart for the Wii that wants to play online?

I’ve gone from 109 dvds for sale down to 20. Pretty darn good for only a week and a half.

Now that the book is mostly done it’s on to other summer projects. I need to edit lots of video, and I have a huge box of negatives from my parents house. I have hundreds of pictures to digitize, so I might start working on that…

…or I could go play more Mario Kart.

I was tired of the Wii’s super slow wireless connection. Granted it sits below the TV, a terrible spot, but downloads would sit and sit and do nothing. Finally bought a Wii Lan Adapter. The Wii is now hardwired just like the PS3 and downloads and internet are quick and reliable.

There is a new channel on the Wii called “Check Mii Out.” It lets people post their Miis and other people can rate them. The best part is that they are having contests where you have to design a Mii for a specific topic, and then judge them. So far they’ve done Mario with no hat, and someone who would be at the first thanksgiving. My first entry in the Thanksgiving one was a skinny white guy with a lot of hair and a bushy beard, but my second try was 100x better. It’s an Indian looking guy named Squanto. Maybe I’ll win!

We’ve been playing Zack and Wiki, and I must say it is way cool. Solving the puzzles in this game are much more satisfying than solving a puzzle in Zelda. I think Mario Galaxy would be fun too, but I’m too busy playing The Show on PS3.

Stacie got a gift card to Best Buy for her birthday, so we’ve been looking for a good video game for her to get. We decided on Zack and Wiki for the Wii. It’s basically a point and click adventure game kinda like the old Monkey Island games. I’d been pushing her to try out Mario Galaxy, but the videos and more intense control scheme didn’t excite her as much. Zack and Wiki is a very easy game to control, but is difficult enough to challenge an adult. Last night I headed over to the local store to get it, and so far she really likes it! Mario Galaxy does look like a lot of fun, but I’m still playing my baseball game on PS3, and I still love it. So much fun.

An update on the dog…last you heard we had left our bedroom door open, and everything was magical, but it didn’t last. What I think happened was the dog thought we weren’t really leaving, because we always shut the doors upstairs when we do, but after a few weeks she realized we were still leaving for long periods of time. She went back to her anxious pooping and peeing in the house behaviors. Tired of it all, I went to the pet store and bought a crate. She’s slept in it every night since, and things have improved a great deal. As we prepare for the baby too, it will be nice not having the dog run around and go crazy every time we wake up.

Speaking of the baby, we’ve got about a week and a half until we find out what it is. My kids have been asking me, and every time I tell them we’re having a human. They look at me strange for a moment until they finally get the joke. We both want a boy and girl at some point, and the order isn’t particularly important to us. I would say that Stacie really wants a girl, and I lean slightly in that direction. Ultimately I’ll love the baby no matter what it is, so putting too much hope in one sex or the other means I could potentially be disappointed in what we get, and I don’t want to be disappointed in the baby.

Dennis Prager was talking the other day about spirituality versus religion. I was going to try and explain what he said, but then I found you can download the whole half hour discussion! This is the first time I’ve looked into a podcast of any kind, and I plan on downloading and listening to a lot. No commercials, you can listen again…it’s great stuff. Visit this link, and go down to H3: Ultimate Issues Hour: Is Spirituality Enough? You can click listen now and hear this great discussion. If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, fast forward to about 20 mins when he talks to Kent. Very good stuff.

If you’re not using Google Reader, you should be! It makes reading and keeping up on blogs quite easy. It also has a cool built in “trends” option. From there it shows who has been posting, and how frequently. My list has pretty much everyone on it, but if you’re not there I apologize. Let me know so I can add you to my google reader.

Here are the number of posts over the last 30 days, so keep in mind, the minute I post this it will become old data. The nice thing is it gathers all the info on it’s own, so no extra work for me!

IGN Wii comes in first, but that’s not really fair. Comments on Andrew’s website come in second, haha. That’s because he has an awesome wordpress plugin and people are always asking questions about it. I come in third, but I’ve been helped by my almost daily roadtrip posts.

So take a look and see where you rank. Kind of fun, no?

When I get something in my head it’s really hard to get it out. Usually this is tied to desiring new technology or something of that nature. Luckily I have a wife who tempers that urge to buy every new gadget the minute I want it. Sometimes that means I don’t get it, or instead I think of inane arrangements to justify my purchase.

The wheels in my brain are still spinning about wanting to play the latest and greatest baseball game on PS3, so I start to find all these ways to pay for it, without actually spending money, which of course is ludicrous. But it sounds like it’s not costing any money, which is the genious of my plan. You might remember my WoW fast back in ’04. I could pull a similar stunt here, but it would take a while. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

$60 – Money left in my old Wamu checking account that’s been there since we got married.

$170 – Money I made at school doing supervision, like watching kids on my lunch break. (This is above and beyond my regular pay, so it’s easy to argue that I can do whatever I want with it, like buy videogames.)

$80 – Money in my paypal account from selling the old Gamecube (which was supposed to pay for the Wii. Shhhh!)

$50 – Approximate money I could get from selling my original Xbox since I wouldn’t need it anymore.

$27 – Money I could get from selling Zelda: Twilight Princess. (I tried to play it over the weekend, and I almost went insane it’s so boring. But my new found distaste for adventure games is another post entirely.)

Sub-Total: $387
Remaining: $313

I’m still well shy of my $700 target. I’ve made almost $250 on my Nintendo stock, but I’m not sure I can justify including that in my scheme.

Time to look around the house for stuff to sell.