Happy Halloween!

Yaarrrrrr I be a pirate!

Its ALIVE!

Anna and I decided it was probably a good idea to bring in our old '96 Ford Taurus to the shop to get it fixed. It was Anna's car when she was still in high school, and I use it to drive to work and back since its barely a 2 mile drive. It hasn't been running very well for many months now: jerky acceleration, hard shifting, backfiring sometimes.

Turns out it just needed new spark plugs, wires, a tuneup. I had the oil changed while I was at it. It was still kind of expensive but much cheaper than having to buy a replacement car. It drives wonderfully now, the best I ever remember it running. Kudos to the guys at Car-X here in Mankato. I really don't know if they are expensive compared to other places in town, but they have always done quality work for us.

How important is a witty title? Very.

The weekend came and went rather quickly. Granted, I work on the weekend so those days are nothing special to me. I did manage to finally get a haircut on Saturday after work. For a couple days after I get it cut, my head kind of looks blocky until the haircut blends in a bit.

We're preparing for the cold season here at the Meyer house, pulling up the tomato plants, raking leaves constantly. We washed all our winter blankets so we can snuggle up with fresh blankets now.

Anna and I finally had dinner at the Hunan Garden restaurant in North Mankato. Good Asian food there, but the place itself was pretty ghetto. You could tell they are trying to get by as cheaply as possible in there. All the plates and silverware were plastic disposable and very cheap low quality at that along with the smallest cheapest napkins I'd ever seen. The decor was half-assed at best, but there is something kind of fun about eating at a trashy joint. The portions were gigantic, even I wouldn't finish my meal and took half of it home.

We were going to just have it delivered but they only accept cash for delivery payments. Who keeps cash around nowadays? We sure don't, so we told them we would just eat in. We could have picked it up and brought it home to eat, but were already driving there, we may as well eat there and see how it is.

Anna said it would be fun for her to pick up some food for dinner on her way home from work, since it is kind of on the way home for her. She has about 3 different routes she can take, and that is one of them. So we may do the Chinese food takeout thing from time to time.

A disappointment

As I previously blogged, I received my Star Wars video game, which I proceeded to play all the way through to completion in just 3 sittings in 2 days. While it was a very fun game, I'm rather disappointed at how short of a game it was. At least I didn't pay the normal $60 that they sell for. I'm a member of Gamefly.com, which is an online video game rental service. I get to have 2 games out at a time for as long as I want. When I mail one back, they send me the next one in my queue, all for a low monthly fee. Very similar to how Netflix does movies.

I figure I have saved hundreds if not thousands of dollars by renting games via Gamefly versus flat out buying them for $60 a pop. And I'm all about getting a deal and saving money on things.

ahhh the weekend

And today marks the start of my weekend, since I have Thursdays and Fridays off from work. I should be stocked up and ready to go: I stopped a the store and picked up some beer and a bottle of bourbon. I should also be getting a new video game in the mail tomorrow: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Should be a good weekend.

Out with the old...

I finally made it up to JC Penny to spend my birthday gift certificate. I have this special gift to know when they have a killer sale, and this time was no different. I picked up some long-needed new jeans and some shirts. I also replaced my wallet. I've had the same wallet for probably close to 17 years. It was beat to hell and falling apart. Anna helped me pick out a very stylish new one and it it is about half the thickness of the old one. Its going to take some getting used to the new one as I'd gotten to used to the last one. I knew exactly where everything was in it, not that there was ever actually money in it.

In other news, I've been very busy at work, full days and tough appointments. Some of the appointments felt like I was just banging my head on the desk for several hours trying to get the computer fixed, but thats the way it goes somedays.

An update

I believe I am over my caffeine addiction now. I'm not suffering from headaches and as far as I know, the grumpiness associated with caffeine withdrawal is gone. The nice thing about not having coffee in the morning is not having to go pee 4 times before noon now.

In other news, I have a very busy day at work this saturday. I just plotted out my course and I will be driving over 250 miles to get to my 3 appointments. Half of my work day will just be spent in the car, which isn't all that bad since I'm getting paid while I drive and the VW Beetle is a comfortable car to drive. I know I'll be exhausted by the time I get home, which I'm guessing if I start my day at 7:45am I should get home around 7pm at the latest.

I've also learned that my cable company will be adding the Food Network to their list of High Definition channels. This is going to look fantastic on our new 50" plasma HDTV.

Oh, I didn't blog about the new TV did I? Here's the story on that! My laptop had to go in for servicing several times and under the Best Buy service plan policy if it requires a 4th repair, they will replace it. They added a new option where if you can't find an acceptable model for replacement or if you didn't want the same type of product that you could just get store credit. I really didn't use my laptop all that much, most of the time it just sat there being unused so I opted to get store credit.

The laptop I bought was fairly high end at the time so it was rather expensive. With the store credit, I was able to get a 50" Panasonic plasma TV literally at no cost, pretty much just sales tax. It happened that my laptop was worth what a huge TV now sells for. We got rid of our older TV and entertainment center and it is now a very nice smaller TV stand with the big TV on top. It actually gave us more room in the living room and the TV looks amazing. Anna and I are both very happy with it.