Wiiii

I was planning to be at the farm by now, but I'm still in Baghdad. And Nahida tells me she spoke to my dad and delayed my trip a few more days. My dad's been speaking to me a lot recently, lecturing me about the farm and telling me what I must do.

So far I've got two objectives, the first is to start transferring ownership of my dad's plots of lands to me. I didn't think that was a big deal until I had a look at the maps and my dad explained to me that he has an inheritance share in so and so sectors and each sector is split up into many smaller plots and each of these plots has an individual title deed whose ownership is shared among the inheritors of my grandfather. It looks like there's over a hundred of these little plots. It's starting to look like quite a big project on its own.

The second objective is to start taking over the farm accounts from the manager and to run some sort of petty cash account for him. What's surprising about this is that my dad's finally going to trust me with vast amounts of money. Today I opened bank accounts in Baghdad and when I go to the farm I'll have to open a couple of accounts there too. And then I'm supposed to take account of the manager's expenses and feed his petty cash fund at the end of every month. I wonder if this really means that Nahida and her husband would no longer be in charge of handing me my pocket money.

Whilst I was there I asked how does a bank make a profit. The bank manager explained to me that because of the security situation the bank does not rely on loans to make generate revenue but instead makes deposits at the central bank which gives the bank a higher rate of interest than the bank gives out to its customers with deposit accounts.

Well summer's started, and I have begun to spend money a bit more freely. I got myself a Japanese modded Wii a couple of days ago for 390 bucks from the only shop that sells them. Nintendo is not popular in Iraq, the reason according to the guy at the shop was that there never are any great football titles on Nintendo systems.

The Wii's great fun, the games work fine and are in English. But since the thing is Japanese the Wii menus are in Japanese and there's no choice to switch the menu language to English and it seems I won't be able to make any use of any of the online functionality. And after I slapped in a game the console performed an update, and I'm no longer able to access the settings menu.

It takes the piss that the manuals are in Japanese too. I'm wondering how in the world am I going to get some Wii and DS interoperability going on, or if that's even possible. I've even the read that that Wii points, the credit system to make online purchases, are region specific. I'm thinking that I might some day sell this one and then buy a legal Wii.

So far I've got 5 games: Wii Play, NFS Carbon, Mario Strikers Charged Football, Super Paper Mario, and Zelda. The games are a dollar and a half each. There is a bright side to having a modded Wii. The one game I'm looking forward to now is Mario Party 8, but I've yet to get more Wiimotes. The shop owner was only willing to sell me one but for nearly 50 bucks. Maybe I could get my dad to send some to me from Lebanon.

In the mean time I should start trying to figure out how to get in touch with my feelings. Maybe, I should try to get down and start meditating. Shut up the chattering monkey in my head.