So, this weekend Tina and I were visiting some friends, when I related my pathetic (and failed) attempt to get my hands on an XBOX 360.

“Well, I had my hands on an XBOX 360,” my friend told me. This certainly piqued my curiousity, especially since I did not observe the mystical console sitting inside his entertainment center.

He went on to tell me about his extremely unique launch day experience. As a Sears employee, he was surprised to find about thirty young men lined up in front of their store on the morning of Tuesday, November 22. Apparently, this was because they were waiting for the store to open so they could each score an easy XBOX 360.

When the doors opened, they rushed the electronics department to find no 360’s to be had. Because, as my friend said it: “We’re Sears.”

Apparently, Sears is not exactly the top tier when it comes to gaming consoles.

However, this wasn’t totally the case. Later that day, my friend signed for a mysterious delivery from Microsoft — two XBOX 360 core systems. Unsure of what to do, he took the systems and stashed them in the warehouse, high up behind the television sets.

Later, two of his colleagues approached him. They’d heard a rumor that he signed for two XBOX 360’s. He couldn’t deny it, so he told them that he’d hidden the 360’s in the warehouse.

After a pause one of them nodded sagely. “Good work,” he said, “that was exactly the right thing to do.”

Not knowing how to distribute the two system to the throngs of people who desperately sought them, they now sit hidden in a Sears warehouse like the Lost of Ark of the Covenant, mystical radiation produced by their heavenly powers kill rats and driving Sears employees insane.

And so gentle reader, I leave you with the legend. Somewhere in the United States of America, two XBOX 360 core systems sit unpurchased in a Sears back room, stashed away from the hungry masses. But what city they reside in I refuse to say, except to tell you that there is no Sears within the limits of my own home city of Washington, D.C. And my friend flatly refused to sell one of them to me. But perhaps you could be luckier?

Good luck and godspeed.

I now know what it meant when they used to say “Silence is Golden” in reference to children. The silence that follows the heart rending experience of hearing one or both of your daugthers wail in agony for hours is perhaps the greatest thing I’ve ever known.

Something is amiss with our girls. Both of them. It started about two weeks ago, just after they began sleeping through the night. Anya, once a paragon of solid sleep, began getting up multiple times in the middle of the night and Rachel followed. The problem culminated on Thanksgiving, when Anya got a lowgrade fever and kept us awake for hours.

Anya’s crying is near constant, Rachel’s more sporadic, but they both cry more than usual. The chewed fingers and drool lead us to believe that they may be teething, but they’re only four months old — it seems so early. Yet all the usual online parenting sources say that teething starts between 4 - 8 months.

I’ve spent the past few days massaging gums, dousing the girls with Baby Oragel and drowning them in Baby Tylenol to help them sleep. There is nothing quite like the constant shriek of a child in pain — when it goes on for hours, you feel like your body has caught fire. As we pass Anya back and forth, we try to go about life as normal — reading, watching television, blogging, surfing the net. Yet, the soundtrack of misery makes everything seem to combust.

Your daughter is in agony, and there’s almost nothing you can do to help her.

Tommorow, we try the pediatrician. But, as always, there’s likely nothing they can do to help us. You have to ride these things out. I’m afraid this next phase may last a long, long time. Yet, as difficult as it is for us to deal with, I can only imagine the nightmare for the girls, as they suffer wordlessly with only a cry to communicate their discomfort. Imagine an adult living like that for months on end — congress would call an investigation. But for babies, we take it as the norm. And as comfortmable as we try to get them, it’s only temporary.

It’s an excellent thing I did not get my XBOX 360. I doubt I’d have a moment to play it.

In other unrelated news, today we came home from my mother’s to find that my mousetraps successfully snagged and killed the mouse that had been spreading his droppings all over the apartment, running from room to room and eating our food. The first time I saw him, I felt a shiver of genetic memory, a feeling of utter revulsion and disgust. But in the end, finding him nearly decapitated in the mousetrap, I felt sad for the little bastard. He was so small, and he desperately wanted to eat that peanut butter. He was clever enough to dig his way into an Old El Paso Taco Kit box, but he failed to anticipate that the peanut butter was the bait in an ancient contraption that is probably the most clever killing device ever invented by man.

I’m just glad that the girls weren’t old enough to plead the case for his survival. Bad enough, their mother could barely look at him.

Not to worry, though. There are other mice out there.