Last Friday night I ended up staying up almost all night with lots and lots of stomach pain. This led to a very exhausted and nauseous and headachy Saturday. At some point I had just two of the speckled minty m&ms I’d gotten, and was incredibly nauseous all over again. That’s when my husband reminded me that he’d had to stop getting m&ms at work occasionally because if he had them for a couple of days then skipped them, he’d get splitting headaches. I stopped with the m&ms, and felt better. I wonder if it’s all those colorings they put in them, because I couldn’t see anything else in there that I don’t have in other chocolates. But normally I don’t tend to get candy bar type of chocolates with lots of colorings and such in them.

In fact, oddly enough, in this case I bought them largely because they looked cool. I wanted to photograph them, because they had this funky shimmering speckled coating. At least they did, in fact, photograph well:

Luckily I felt better in time to go visit friends on Sunday, which was fun. I ended up trying out their Nintendo wii because they spoke so highly of it, even though I knew, KNEW that if I did, I’d be lost, and I really didn’t want to buy a console. Anyway, Cathy and I played bowling (way too much fun), and I had to try out billiards, fishing, and that weird game where you ride a cow and try to knock over scarecrows.

Here’s the great thing about the wii: it’s the console made for casual gamers. And as much as I love to game, when it comes to video games I consider myself a casual gamer. I have a husband. We have lots of great friends. We have hobbies that take up our time. I don’t have the time for hours and hours of gaming at a time most nights. I love the kind of silly, entertaining games that you can play for ten minutes at a time if you want, and companies have really stepped up to the plate in delivering unusual and original content for the wii.

So, yeah, I’m hooked. I really want one. But here’s the thing: it’s way past buzz-generating time, but it’s still freaking impossible to get one of the things. We tried every store in the area; no go. Not a one of them could predict when they might get them in. I finally found an online store that claimed to have one in stock (Toys ‘r us) only to have them yank it from my order because it wasn’t really in stock (of course they left all the accessories on order, so I canceled the rest of my order). The ones listed at Amazon are listed way above list price, and are being sold by merchants I’ve never heard of, so I don’t trust that they aren’t going to repackage a broken unit given the demand.

Eventually I did find a bundle at Walmart.com that was supposedly in stock; I’m still waiting to see if the order actually ships.

But seriously, there’s no logical sense to this. Why put up barriers to people’s ability to give you money? I understand that at first they do it to create buzz, even though I loathe that tactic, and frankly I try to avoid anything that’s being sold in that manner. Now, however, when the thing isn’t new, there just isn’t any point to it.

Of course, rumor has it that the lack of units is due to a production problem. I find myself very curious as to whether that’s the case.

So far this week we’ve posted two reviews, of Bertrice Small’s Dangerous Pleasures and Carole Hart’s Pleasure U. To be honest, I’m a little behind on my reviewing this week in large part because I’ve been playing around with photography and Photoshop a bit too much: