Isabel got a call from her part-time employer. His two daughters are taking him to Mexico near the end of February, so it looks like Isabel's going to babysit his job for him.
He also invited us to come on over and pick through all the effluvia of his suburban life because he's going to move to a smaller house. So we went over around 2 and we spent about half an hour visiting and looking through his stuff. We came away with a comfortable-sized frying pan, a set of four blue plates, a cookie sheet that fits in our elfin stove, and one of those chopper things that has four blades connected to a shaft on a spring and you put vegetables inside the jar and go fapfapfapfapfap and it's all chopped. No more garlic sticky hands for me! No more onion-sprayed eyes! Whooptie!!
So then Isabel asked if I wanted to go rent us up some video games because it was Saturday and all. She wanted to go to this specific Blockbuster, and I said I knew how to get there from Bill's house without making two legs of a triangle.
So we got lost.
We ended up out by the CompUSA on the west end of K-town. They'd paid some poor fellow to stand out on the street corner with a giant GOING OUT OF BUSINESS EVERYTHING 30 TO 50% OFF BUY BUY BUY. So Isabel recalled that Linda had wanted to buy a new Macintosh because her old one was going the way of all flesh and the iMac Daria gave her wasn't on speaking terms with keyboards. She called Linda and told her about CompUSA's sale. This store is the only one for miles around, so Linda asked us (or we offered, I can't recall) to stop in and price some Macs.
So we did.
I had been hopeful that I could find a nicely-priced graphics card because my eMachines on which I am typing this rightthisverymoment just has an integrated card on the motherboard. It runs programs just fine but whines about it an awful lot. So while Isabel was trying to find the last three Macs they had in the store, I went to find graphics cards. They had three left, two for $60 and one for $fuckload before the 30% off. So I grabbed one and tried to find a guy in a red shirt to ask if it would talk to Vista (gone are my days of impulse purchasing! Ooh, that's pretty...!) This worked out well because Isabel had found the last three iBooks in the store and needed someone to unbolt the one labeled LAST ONE that she and Linda had conferred on.
So I walk past the giant big-screen teevees showing the Transformers movie from last summer (poor Sam Witwicki. You thought you were in another teen movie, get the car, get the girl, you know the drill, and now your Camaro's following you and that cop car is chasing you and you're in Christine instead of She's All That, you poor sod) and waited in line for one of the two red-shirted customer service guys to notice me. So then he had to go find the right kind of screwdriver to unbolt it, and then the box to stuff it all in. I managed to ask him about the video card and he said I don't know man if it doesn't say Vista on it then it probably doesn't work which wasn't a lot of help. So I went back to see if there was anything else. I really didn't want to pay $fuckload, even $fuckload 30% off, so I reluctantly put it back and decided to go do research using the Series of Tubes (R).
So I found Isabel waiting for the guy to box up the Mac and watching the Transformers movie, which was in the middle of a bit of 'splode as the Army plot thread moved forward (and people thought it bashed the army. The black soldier lives through the whole movie!!!) and showed off all of the air power that $200 billion a year buys us. Just about the end of that scene, the guy comes out and hands us the boxed-up laptop and we check out.
So. Finally. We drive back into Oak Ridge and deliver Linda her new laptop. I thought it came with an iPod, but it was just a remote control (they apparently expect you to watch this computer from your couch if you're doing a slide show or playing a DVD). After I figured out how the battery goes in (Linda: Does it go in this way first? Isabel: No, it goes in the other way. Linda: But that end won't stay down. Me: ::reaches out and pushes that end down, sticks a thumbnail in the little slot beside the battery port, and turns, just on a whim. Click!::) we booted up the laptop and started to explore it. Safari? Check! DVD player? Check! Word processor? Well, there's TypePad... So Isabel started to worry that she'd gotten a defective one and by the time everybody started to snap at each other it was obvious that we all needed to go home (or, well, we did, Linda was already home) and get supper.
So after supper Linda called us up and said that she didn't think Apple shipped AppleWorks with their computers anymore and she'd have to buy it separate and she might decide to get Office 2008 instead (what, does she have a thing about pain?). So Isabel felt better about getting the cheaper laptop.
And this all kind of drove every thought of this blog out of my mind. So, here's your cat pic:
Spook wants to go out. She wants to go out so badly that we're going to have to sand and varnish the doorframe when we move out because she's endangering our security deposit. We gave her a cat tree, dammit! So anyway, to stop her clawing at the door we usually give in and let her out onto the porch. Within 5 minutes in this kind of weather she wants back in, and she's taken to doing a Garfield imitation on the screen door. It never occurs to her to ask. We might not hear her, anyway. So we get up for the second time in five minutes to let her in, at which point she threatens to call the SPCA if we throw her out in that freezing forty-degree weather one more time.
Then she checks her food bowl. If it's not full of succulent, yummy gooshy food she wants back out. I think she believes it's a food-bowl reset button.
No comments:
Post a Comment