Mmm.. gadgetry!

Thanks to the miracle of technology--email newsletters from CompUSA--I am now writing to you from the comforts of a 19-inch LCD (flat) monitor. Sale! Big sale! Today and tomorrow only! So we braved the crowds and drove to Lexington to buy.. well, we went to buy a 160-GB hard drive for $20, but they were (predictably) sold out. There were a few other things from the sale paper that we had talked about, and so.. we gave in and I got a new monitor. I've had the last one since.. well, before M moved here, and before I found out where to buy phone cards so I could call him, because mine went out and I had to buy a new one and I knew that he would be waiting on me online and I kept not showing up and I felt bad enough about it that I think I went up on campus to send him an email or something. And, we may also have bought a graphics card for what will be our media server but is now a computer we have no use for and therefore does nothing. (Four working computers and two people, that sounds like a useful ratio, right?) And perhaps one of those printer/scanner/copier things, because I have a really sucky old scanner ('98) and having two pieces of hardware is cluttering up my desk area. And then we might have stopped at WalMart on the way home and ended up buying a bunch of DVDs for $3.44. And.. we're going to get money back in rebates for the three things we bought at CompUSA, but.. we've sold two cars for less money than we spent today. Yikes.

Anyway, yesterday I had my dad get our Christmas tree out of their attic, and he put it in the car for me, along with three plastic tubs full of decorations, etc. He also put air in all of my tires and diagnosed our broken right blinker as needing a new bulb and did something with the oil, cause I have a very good daddy. (I say "something with the oil" not because I'm trying to be a girly girl who knows nothing about cars and oil--not that that's not true either--but I can't remember if he checked it and told me to tell M it needed oil, or if he said he put some oil in it, or what exactly he did.. I was a little distracted by the fact that it was freaking freezing outside at the time.) Anyway, the plan for this afternoon, and perhaps tomorrow as well, is to put the tree and related items up, work on our media server--because don't you think it would be really cool to watch perfectly legal (of course) movies and stuff on the television? And play music through the big-ass speakers? And to be the ones who talk about their media server?--and in general, fix our living room so that we want to spend more time in it. And I'm going to bake an apple pie. And then we're going to watch a movie. Or six.

Today, I am thankful for the smell of new hardware my whole little life.