Wii Fit

Mom ordered a wii fit and I broke it open on Sunday. It is pretty hilarious. First thing it does is weigh you (to one tenth of a pound), take your BMI (to two decimal places), and measures your balance. Your little mii person gets fatter depending on your BMI. Every time – so it starts skinny and then after it measures your BMI, your mii plumps up. Amazingly I have a good BMI, though my mii still looks chubby. Most of the time the Body Mass Index tells me that I am overweight or obese. My balance is pretty good which is also surprising. Then it tells you your wii fit age. I am 38. Then later after doing some of the exercises and playing some of the games – I tried it again on the sae night and it told me I was 48. Ha. Mom’s wii fit age is much closer to her real age than mine.

The wii fit does make you exercise though it doesn’t really feel like it. You can feel the effects after a while. I like the yoga exercises, probably because I like yoga. The strength training I haven’t done much, but that’s mostly because when I am on the wii, I don’t particularly feel like doing much exercise, sweating, or working that hard. That’s why I stayed away from the aerobic exercises. One evening I tried them and was surprised to find the hula hoop. Hula hooping is AWESOME. It is hilarious watching the little miis hula hooping and then you realize how hilarious you must look gyrating around on a wiiboard in the middle of the living room. While hula hooping, you have to stop and lean to catch more hoops. The more hoops you have, the more trips the hoops make around your nonexistent mii hips and the higher your score is. After two times hula hooping, I unlocked advanced hula hooping. I am that awesome.

The best part of the wii fit is the balance games. Want to feel like a club-footed oaf? Try the delicate touch and nuances of a wii balance game. For these activities, you move the mii around different sports or obstacles with subtle movements of the toes, balls, and heels of your feet. There is slalom skiing, ski jumping, soccer heading, a balance board and tight rope walking. We suck at soccer where you head soccer balls by leaning from side to side and dodging soccer cleats and panda bear heads. I rock at tightrope walking – funny, because I would really really suck at that in real life – especially because you have to jump over the chomping metal teeth monsters. I have played enough games to unlock a fun penguin game where your mii is dressed in a penguin costume and you rock back and forth to rock an iceberg to slide around to eat lots of fish. If you time it right, you can jump on the edge of the iceberg and switch directions to save time and not fall in the water.

Anyway. The wii fit is really funny. Mom and Michelle are not as enchanted with the wii as me. Michelle claims that she just likes to watch me.

Who’s Michelle? Michelle is a mining engineer student at Virginia Tech and she is working and interning at Virginia Vermiculite this summer. Because housing sucks, Mom offered that she could live and pay rent here. Mom was out of town when Michelle arrived so it fell to me to make her feel at home. I vacuumed all the spiders out of the basement, cleaned out some junk, changed the sheets, and gave everything a quick cleaning. She came with her family to help her move in. The next day I drove her to Va Verm so she would know where she worked, showed where internet would be available and gave her a quick narrative of Louisa and country life.

So far, so good. She seems really fun and smiles a lot. She seems to like working at the mine and doesn’t mind living with me and mom and our quirky habits. But it is only week one. We shall see how it goes, but for now it’s nice to have someone else at home to talk to.