The Damage:

The horror!!!

As I tweeted yesterday:

The aforementioned teenager swears that she wasn’t wearing the wrist strap while playing ‘Skateboard Arena’ on the Wii Fit, and accidentally slipped. I need your help in determining whether there is any truth to this, or if there are more holes in her story than a pound of Swiss cheese.

First: Research

A quick search on YouTube will give you plenty of chuckles at people throwing their Wii remotes, verifying that such incidences have and will occur. Such as:

…or my personal favorite, from a ‘professional’:

So yes, Wii remotes can become projectiles if handled improperly. Although, through these and countless other examples on YouTube, the remotes are primarily launched into TVs, since that is what you are looking at when you are playing Wii.

The Scene of the Crime:

As you can see, the hole in the wall is nowhere near the Wii and television.

Above, you will see the approximate proximity of the Wii balance board to the television.

An approximate triangulation of the relative position of the board and the hole in the wall.

The teenager (name withheld until guilt is proven) claims that she ‘slipped’ and the remote fell out of her hand. The accused also claims to have been leading with her left foot, or in skater terms, she was ‘goofy’. This state of ‘goofy’ was relayed to me when I played the same game. Apparently, it is cause for ridicule, so would she really be goofy as she claims? Furthermore, she claims that the remote was in her left hand, the hand closest to the TV.

The accused, though calming down as she gets older, has been known to occasionally throw things when frustrated.

Well? What’ll it be, Gumshoes? Where does the fault lie? Was this, as the accused has claimed, an ‘accident’? Or was it intentional?

You decide!

image from squidoo.com

OK, so maybe this post is a little late. As you continue to read, you’ll understand why…

Happy 2010!!! You geeks out there that read this blog know that this is ‘The Year We Make Contact‘!!! Start striking your timpani drums now! So, my first resolution this year is to make friends with some Russians and go to Jupiter to look for monoliths…

All geeking out aside, I have been taking a lot of time to reflect on where I am as a husband, father, employee, and of course, Daddy Blogger. Since you are reading my blog, I am going to focus first on what I will be doing here going forward in this brand-spanking new year, and why you should keep reading!

Howefitz Blog New Year Resolutions and Hopes For The Future

• Deliver more quality content, maybe less quantity
  • Last year, I set a goal of blogging every other day. I failed. Of course, the reason for that is that I have a real full time job and a family. Some days sleep seems appropriate, and then it’s time to work or take care of the family. So I’m going easy on myself this year:
  • Generally, it seems I get about an hour in the morning to blog. This has resulted in a few rushed, phoned-in entries. So going forward, I am going to try to seek out better information, and really think through what I’m writing. I know a lot of my regular readers have become like friends, and for that I am eternally grateful. But I would still like to see this base grow, and to do that I need to take the time to research and do my best to provide quality content. Therefore, I may not blog but once, maybe twice, a week. Of course, these will still include funny anecdotes from my wife and children, but there will also be genuinely helpful (I hope) articles that others can find interesting beyond my friends and family.
• What About ‘Kids Play On The Net’?
  • My ‘weekly’ column, ‘Kids Play On The Net‘ over at Dad-Blogs will continue, probably in the same sporadic rhythm as last year, but you have my solemn oath that when I post there, it will continue to be about websites and online resources that I genuinely use on a regular basis and I hope you will find them helpful as well.

Beyond my hopes for creating a more resourceful, thoughtful, useful blog, I have personal goals as well:

• The Ever Popular ‘I’m Going to Lose Weight’
  • Our big family gift for Christmas this year was a Wii, with a Wii Fit. The first body test I took with it called me obese. A little voice said (Out loud!) ‘That’s obese!’ And my Mii character looked down at it’s ballooning form as if I had cursed it to a life of unhealthy plumpness. So, I will definitely start really watching what I eat. I considered going back to Tim Ferriss‘s ‘Slow Carb Diet‘, but I’m easily bored, so I will settle for avoiding ‘white foods’ and extra snacks. But the one day of eating anything I want? I could still get behind that!
  • And of course, I’ll be exercising with my Nintendo. (Welcome to the future. Oh the times, they are a-changin’!)
• Heaven Help Me, I Will Get Promoted
  • This past year I did a lot of complaining here, at work, and at home, about my job. The past several years I’ve felt like I’ve slipped and lost hold of something that I used to be very good at. I’ve heard a lot of complaining from others as well, and my response is always the same: ‘I hear a lot of problems, but not too many solutions’. A quick glance in the mirror made me realize what a hypocrite I was being. Here I was complaining and not solving anything myself! So, in this bright new year, if I find myself wanting to complain, I’m going to redirect that energy into finding and implementing solutions. And then if someone happens to notice what an improved manager I’ve become and thinks I should be doing more…

• Be A Better Father
  • Living in the Rocky Mountains is tough in the winter time. I feel like my kids don’t get a lot of varied experience due to being inside all the time. However, I am making a vow to get out to more story times at the library, visit the children’s museum more, and, of course, teach them the proper way to have a snowball fight (if I can ever get the stuff up here to pack well enough…).
• Be A Better Husband
  • Having kids, it’s easy to neglect the marriage. Your spouse is relegated to an extra pair of arms and hands to get things done, and an extra set of eyes to watch the kids and make sure one isn’t beaming the other in the head with a Linky-Doo.
  • This year, I’m going to make sure I pay attention to adding more romance into my marriage. After all, that’s how this whole family business got started in the first place…

How about yourselves? Any plans for 2010? 2009 was a good year, 2010 will be great!!!