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I am a stay-at-home mom of two sons, 12 and 10. I used to be an advertising manager. I love my new career and have thrown myself completely into it.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Action Replay and Skateboards

My two sons are in the middle of a 3-week break (they go to year-round school). I thought things would slow down a bit and I had a (apparently delusional) plan to sort through our clutter during this 3-week hiatus. Instead, I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off and dealing with the strangest issues that I had no idea were going to come up.

First was Action Replay. If you don't know what this is, it's for games played on Nintendo DS and it gives players cheat codes to help them figure out how to play the game and get more points (I think - I don't know it as well as my son does). With previous games, he's just used Action Replay when he's wanted to and everyone's happy and I don't have to get involved - because I know nothing about these games or how to operate a DS. Then he got a new game: Pokeman Soulsilver. It just came out recently and I was surprised he wanted it because he hasn't been interested in any of his other Pokeman games for awhile. Well, Action Replay doesn't have codes for Pokeman Soulsilver. I was told that I could go on their website and manually download them. I went on their website, my husband went on their website, my son went on their website. We couldn't figure out how to download these codes. I tried calling their customer service number for about a week and even tried their automated help line when I couldn't get through to a live person. It was just so frustrating! I tried talking to the store where we get all our games (Gamestop) and after talking to three different employees, nobody seemed to know how to do it and they referred me to Action Replay's website (not going to help!) Finally, finally, one morning I just kept clicking on different areas on their website and got to an area where it seemed to tell you how to manually download codes. I called my son and had him get me to the right screens on the DS as I followed the instructions - it worked! Hallelujah!! However, you should see how many numbers and letters you have to download! I told my son I would download maybe 3 or so a day until we had them all. I felt suddenly very tech-savvy and proud of myself. Now a week later, somehow everything's gotten erased on his DS and he's not sure how. So, I get to re-download all the codes and cross my fingers that it doesn't happen again this time.

Then there's the skateboard. I had the foolish notion that you could just go out, buy a skateboard with your son and be done with it. Silly me. The first skateboard was fine at first, but after a couple of days, it started veering to the left. My husband tried fiddling around with various screws and such and nothing helped. So we took the board back and bought a different one. This one started veering to the right almost immediately. When we went back to the store, an employee told us to spray graphite on the wheels. We tried that and it didn't do anything. So we took that board back and went looking at different stores. After going to about four various sport and board shops and talking to various people, we bought our third board. We made sure this board rolls straight and my son tried it out and liked how it feels. All this took about a week to finally figure out. Is he outside riding his board now? No. He says it's too loose, even though the person at the shop said it was a tight board after he got on it. So my husband will tighten the d#mn thing and hopefully my son will decide it's fine to ride. Otherwise, he pays us back.

One more week of Spring Break to go. Will I ever get to our clutter?

2 comments:

  1. I Love your blog and the way you write. Thanks for visiting our blog and for your wonderful comment!

    Come Back Soon :)

    -Angela & Angelica
    http://groovybabyblog.blogspot.com

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  2. Thanks, Angela & Angelica. I'll keep checking your site for more useful information. Have a great day!

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