Well . . . let’s see . . . as you know, last Sunday was my birthday . . . June 6 . . . I can no longer use the classic “I’m not really over forty” response to people’s questions about my age as I am now officially forty-one. Grrr.

Now, what do you think a man would most like to do as he steps across that fateful threshold? No, not that, the other thing. That’s right. We went to see the new Harry Potter movie! My daughter has been clambering and excited to see it – she’s been feverishly trying to finish the third book in time but didn’t make it. Of course, Lorraine and I have wanted to see it anyway so we decided it would be okay as a family outing kind of deal for my birthday. Even though it didn’t have strippers, nudity, or any erotic subtexts, I enjoyed the film rather a lot. It’s very different in style and tone from the other films and really shows the franchise is growing up.

Next we went to Easy Mall under the Taipei Railroad Station in search of X-Box components. Yes, my “big” birthday present from my wife is a brand spanking new X-Box machine with three games (a driving game with wheel, a flying game that’s well on nigh wonderful, and the Harry Potter game . . . I’ll give you one guess who that one’s REALLY for and it ain’t me . . . but Kaye is loving it).

We looked all over the place for a Spiderman controller for the X-Box (we have three, an Incredible Hulk one for me and a green one which came with my “special edition” all green X-Box console, and another blue one). Since the neighbor kids come over often to play with Kaye we would like to have four controllers.

While this is Taiwan and modified chipset machines are common, we got an unmod machine. This means we get to pay full unpirated price for games (will have to be picky on what we get then) and eventually we can give online play a go.

We made a day of it . . . although we didn’t get the Spiderman controller, we had a rather nice time looking for it. I did pick up the DOA Volleyball game on sale. It has some T&A but the game play is incredibly simplistic. It’s a good game for the girls though as all of the characters are female – Kaye really does get annoyed that few games have choices to be “girls” in the gameplay. You would think game designers would catch on after awhile and have more choices.

While you can’t see it so clearly in this photo of Kaye and me with my birthday cake, the cake is a ram. Kaye picked it as it’s cute and I went along with it. There are much better photos in the birthday album. They are all straight out of the camera except for the shot of Lorraine and I. I edited that one to crop it in a bit as the original was a bit too wide.