Gigantic Television
2002-11-19 � 8:49 a.m.

I would like to claim major excitement over the last few days, but I can't. I am chronically boring.

I went yesterday with my mother to a series of auctions. U-haul owns a bunch of long-term storage unit farms all over the metro area, and every once in awhile they auction off the contents of unpaid-for units.

It's weird. You walk in this big clump around the grounds, get to a unit that's for sale, they raise up the door and you can peer inside, but you can't go in or touch anything. Then they auction it. It's like a big guessing game.

It was interesting, but not all that exciting. The best parts of the process would be digging through other people's stuff I think. Everyone except my mother and I knew each other -- they all do this all the time, and several of them travel around and buy up this crap from all over and make a living out of selling the valuables and ditching the rest.

We didn't buy any units. One of them went for $1450.00! It might even have that much stuff in it. Maybe.

After that, we went and I helped my mother shop for a Christmas gift for my father. She wanted to get him a television. I had no idea what she had in mind, but I took her to the shop I think is the best and watched in both incredulity and delight as she dropped TWO THOUSAND FUCKING DOLLARS on a fifty-inch Hitachi high definition 16:9 widescreen television.

She is usually very frugal, but she justifies the expenditure with the fact that the company that she was Human Resources Director for (and recently left after seventeen years) is getting sued and she has to go and be deposed and become a witness, etc., and they're paying her fifty dollars an hour for her trouble. Unexpected windfall, sort of.

Wow. It's a nice television. They don't get all that much nicer, in fact. But you do know what this means, don't you?

Yes. It means that on Christmas day, Yours Truly will be crawling around behind the new television and the rack of stereo equipment cabling everything together.

I'm actually kind of looking forward to it.

In other news (and yes, I am a geek and a gamer, so no surprises here), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a kick in the pants, and appeals to me on a bunch of different levels, primarily in the music department. Rockstar Games must have spent a goddamn fortune in licensing fees, because this soundtrack is unmatched. I cannot tell you how cool it is to roll up on some dude, jack his car, and as you drive away, the radio is playing "Owner of a Lonely Heart" or "Billie Jean" or any other of probably fifty well-known and cool songs from the 80's (Vice City is set duirng the 80's), all organized into different, appropriate stations on the dial. That's just cool.

Sony is releasing the soundtrack soon -- I'll probably buy it.

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: The Halo Benders, Will Work for Food
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "Desperate me, desperate me -- you and me..."

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