If Christmas is code for everything breaking, then yes

it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

First up, I bought the Dark Knight Rises two-disc DVD and watched the movie again, put the special features disk into the DVD player, and forgot about it for a week. When I got the inclination to watch them, the player couldn't read the disk. The computer did, so that ruled out a bad disk. The player refused to play any DVDs. Time for a new player.

My parents gave me money for Christmas and early to boot, and blu-ray players were on sale at Best Buy. Upgrade time instead of spending the money on a bill like I've been doing for how many years in a row? But first I had to go sink another $220 into the car on top of the over $300 I put into it at the first of the month for new tires. Bought the player, decided against buying any blu-ray movies since the inner accountant was still pitching a fit about the money spent on the car. (Yes, we did the math before leaving home but that didn't change the reaction.) I also bought the upgrade to BookCAT so I could finish the update to my book inventory and a video game for the rest of my Christmas.

Sunday became laundry day by default since I spent so long in town on Saturday. Started the load, worked on editing, turned CNN on for the Conn. shooting coverage, and it was about an hour before I went to swap the load. Mustard streaked into the house a little freaked out.

Now the washing machine has been on a slow death spiral for ages now. It leaks between loads if you leave the water on to it, so I developed the habit of always turning the water off. This time it decided to never move off of the fill-up-the-tub portion of the cycle, and half the yard was watered by the time I checked. Then I discovered it was watered with hot water because Uncle Scott changed the settings the last time he used it.

"Why do you get jealous every time I have to spend money on the frakkin' CAR!"

Side benefit to semi-rural living, nobody hears you when you yell at inanimate objects. I borrowed Mom's washer to finish, and sorta priced new washers. And by that, I went to one website and twitched so hard at the prices listed, I didn't look anywhere else.

I stayed up too late last night finishing the book list in BookCAT with CNN on. Luckily, my book diet meant that I didn't have that many to add in. Now I have to make corrections to the list from the last backup. Mostly authors' names and title goof-ups and a few duplicates.

Read Free!
The BookWorm