I’ve long been a fan of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of EA Sports games. This year I bought the PSP and Wii versions. The PSP version is great because it soaks up a lot of time on long flights. The Wii version unfortunately is not so great. The stroke mechanism is clumsy at best and it lacks many of features found on the more polished PSP and PS2 versions.

In my value-influenced opinion, Rolling Meadows is the benchmark for great Ann Arbor area golf. It is a sprawling beautiful course about 10-15 minutes from North Campus. It’s moderately difficult because of its length but the fairways are generously wide and they grounds are fairly well kept. Congestion is hit or miss here because they run a lot of tournaments.

I finally managed to buy a Nintendo Wii a week or 2 ago. It’s pretty cool.

The real story is the indirect Wii-related injuries. Being a particularly crappy day last Saturday I spent the morning and the better part of the afternoon playing some of the games — mostly boxing. I particularly like the heavy bag training mini-game. It’s the test where you punch different size heavy bags to make them explode; I got a gold metal on that one. That morning I also got to Pro level in boxing. Sadly, it took a long time because my reflexes are slow, especially for a 27 year old man in the prime of his life.

Anyway the next morning after my shamelessly long Wii session I went to Costco. While picking up a carton of orange juice (the Tropicana premium 4-pack) I pulled a muscle at my right shoulder blade and came up totally lame. The pain was pretty significant and I would have to say it is directly related to the amount of Wii I played the day before without stretching.

Monday at work I was messed up pretty bad because the pain was getting worse. To treat it I bought a large Bed Buddy heat pad ($24 at Walgreens) and found a bag of ice. The method is to alternate hot and cold at regular intervals: roughly 10-15 minutes. The next day, Tuesday, I was in decent enough shape to play some light real-world tennis (not Wii tennis). By Friday I expect to be back at 100%.

Probably the worst part of the story is I didn’t create a manly cover story to make me sound less pathetic. When a female co-worker asked me “What did you do to your shoulder” I told her I was playing too much video games. Hellz yeah.