Since getting the Wii, I've been spending a lot of fun time in the Virtual Console, downloading and playing old favorites like Zelda, Super Mario Brothers (the original!) and Tecmo Bowl (ahh, the memories.) Last week, Iexpressed excitement over the recent release of Super Mario World, but at the time Catherine's reaction was negative. I discovered last night that my wife, when she said, "I never want to see Super Mario World on our TV, EVER," was not expressing distaste for classic gaming. Rather, like a samurai who has no taste for needless violence after a lifetime of war, she was simply explaining that she wanted no more koopa blood on her hands.

Because holy crap, once I convinced her to play it was obvious she had been down this road a few times before. I didn't even know there was a purple Yoshi, but she had him flying around and spitting fireballs at bosses while I was still trying to get back into the swing of jumping on turtles. "Oh," she said while I scrambled past a few hammer brothers. "No, you want to double back and fly up until you find the vine. There's a secret there." My wife is a Super Mario World shark. It's awesome.

Once, she dodged a roomful of ghosts and flew up into the sky to steal a secret key from a vengeful God, a sort of 16-bit Prometheus. "I think I must have been home sick from school a lot the year this came out," she said obliquely. I think I saw Lakitu weep.

This weekend has been a good one. I slacked -- which by my standards means debugging Drupal theme code and setting up a new site. The excitement from Friday's post about the Movable Type compatability theme for Drupal caught me off guard, and it's cool to see the reaction. (My first digg. Wheee!) I've ironed out some kinks in the 1.0 release, and it deals better with multicolumn scenerios. It also supports a neat MT-like 'Powered by Drupal' sidebar element. Normally I'd ditch that, but it became apparent that the lack of the 'moduled-powered' div was actually messing up a number of MT styles, so I slipped it back in.

I've set up Gutenberg as a demo site for a number of the cool styles that are out there. It's nothing special, just some demo content, but it's a nice example of how a simple Drupal site, with a couple of modules (Views for archives and Custom Pagers for the archive navigation headers) can take a huge bag full of 'stock' MT styles and look right spiffy. I've started emailing back and forth with Byrne Reese, one of the brains behind the excellent Style Contest web site that generated so many top-notch designs. He's hard at work planning improvement to the standard that could make it more platform agnostic and more flexible. It's exciting stuff -- folks who want to build a really customized system will always end up writing a theme from scratch (or creating their own templates, in Movable Type land), but these kinds of skinning systems are the bomb for blog sites that have similar content footprints.

In other news, it looks like Nintendo unplugged a drain somewhere: after months of hunting in vain for a second remote for the beloved Wii, I walked into target tonight and found kajoodles of them. There were even a couple racks of Classic controllers and Nunchuck remotes thrown in for good measure. Wow. I snagged a wiimote/nunchuck combo, so now Catherine and I can play two-person Elebits and indulge in matrimonial WiiBoxing whenever we want to. Let the good times roll!

Despite my promises to blog more regularly, the trip to Providence for the Lullabot Workshops knocked me off my rhythm. They were great fun, though, and it was a real pleasure to work on distilling Drupal's ins and outs for an audience of curious web developers. I got a chance to meet the rest of the 'Bots, including Angie and Ted and Nate and Liza and Robert and Jeff and Matt (in no particular order). Angie and I confirmed that we're the Doublemint Twins of the Drupal world, sufficiently geeky to pass up free drinks in favor of hacking on core.

There were other thrills, too -- one of the guys who wrote the web design classic Creating Killer Web Sites was there attending the workshop. I went a little fanboy, admitting that it had been my personal HTML bible in the heady days of the mid-90s, when spacer GIFs were cutting edge and tables were advanced page layout tools.

Getting home was really, really nice. I forget sometimes how much time Catherine and I spend hanging out together, and I missed her a lot. Abby, too, was missed though it was nice not having to sticky-brush myself free of fur every twenty minutes or so.

In other news, I obtained (wait for it, this one's worth it) A Nintendo Wii. Against all odds, a GameStop about 5 miles from home had a few in stock and I was there at the right time. Finding a second remote for it is proving to be even more difficult, but Catherine and I are quite enjoying the Tennis and Baseball and classic Zelda (on the virtual console). Nintendo knows how these things are done, friends. I popped in an SD card and realized that it had a pile of old honeymoon photos. How? The Wii popped up a nice slideshow with friendly background music and spiffy transition effects. Not only that, it displays my blog site perfectly. Hooray, Wii Internet Browser!