Retail Therapy

Considering that I *HAD* to replace my "Thomas-Attacked" camera... a Circuit City credit card was added to the "Bills That Give Me Migraines" collection.

And while I was browsing... how could I let that poor little new camera come home without a few new best friends?!?  LMAO

The ordering was done online (with free shipping, and no interest or payments for 3 months - SCORE!), but a number if items were available for pickup at our nearest CC location.

Which meant new toys SOONER.  Yippee!!

After a dinner visit with MetalliDad in the hospital, Grey & I headed out to Gurnee Mills to nab the few things that I could start entertaining myself with immediately.  Of course, the ONE thing that spurned this shopping spree to begin with, my camera, was a delivery-only purchase because of it's brand-spanking new availability.  However, I think I can occupy my time with what I *was* able to pick up tonight:

~ A shiny sapphire blue Acer Aspire One laptop... which weighs less than 3 pounds!  I'm sure that most of you, if not all, have seen the MacBook commercials for their laptop that fits oh-so-simpy into a manilla envelope?  Yep.  That's about the size of mine - just maybe SLIGHTLY thicker... but actually only about the size of one of those black & white composition notebooks.  I think I'm already in love.  It's even got a 5-in-1 card reader so I can pop memory cards from my camera in there for uber-quick uploads of recent photos.

~ An Epson Ultra-High Def R280 Photo Printer... which winds up being FREE as soon as I send in the rebate form.  How cool is THAT?!?  It's also got the neat feature of having separate ink cartridges for each color, so you don't have to toss out an-otherwise-full ink cartridge that is only running low on one color.  Sweeeeeet.

~ 2 SanDisk 2GB USB flashdrives... pretty much for transferring photos, music, etc. quickly and painlessly between the systems in the house.  These will especially come in handy for pulling all the photos on our computer so they don't get lost, because we have a new system coming in the next few weeks.

~ Last but not least, I got a digital photo frame for my mom, so she can watch random pictures of Greyson perform a nifty little slideshow on her desk at work.  Hopefully, being able to see him all day will make it a bit more bearable to deal with the hellions she has enrolled in her classroom this year.

LOTS of fun stuff, hey?  But that's not all... remember the rest is being shipped...

~ A Kodak EasyShare M1063 High-Definition 10.3 Megapixel digital camera, with 3x optical zoom, and 5x digital zoom.  It has 20 different scene modes, as well as a NIFTY as hell panoramic stitch mode to combine up to 3 photos into one wide-ass photo.  It also has video w/ sound capability, along with the option of labeling with text or speech your photos to make it easy to find a grouped category, instead of having to scroll through photo after photo to find the exact one you are looking for.  It actually had even MORE features, but these by FAR, were the absolute selling points.

~ An eMachines T3656 Desktop computer.  YESSS, I *did* buy two computers in one day.  However, the one that I had built back before MetalliDad & I were even engaged has been acting like someone poured a bottle of molasses into it, needed a memory upgrade, a processor (and probably a motherboard upgrade, as well)... and those repairs would have cost only about $75 less than an entire new system.  So, HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY to the MAN.

~ I also treated myself to Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.  I used the dang 30-day free trial literally almost DAILY... so when I found the option to buy it, of course, I JUMPED at the offer.  I've used it for photo-editing, graphics design, web layouts, band photography and effects...  the $100 price tag was just plain WORTH IT.

Now, of course, we will have months and months of dreaded Circuit City bills flooding our mailbox... but you know what?  Right now, I'm not the least bit concerned about that.  In the midst of being shat upon day after day after day... I decided we neededa few things around here that will just plain make us happy - AND help us accomplish many things that we have not been able to in the past.

It's not like I used a charge card to buy that much chocolate!!

Mmmmm... chocolate... hehehe

I think I am now going to try setting up my laptop and make sure that the demolished camera I currently have in my possesion managed to at least protect the memory card from being turned to mush.

Hope you all had a great day... and an even better tomorrow!  Please keep MetalliDad in your thoughts (and me, too, while I continue on my quest for not one, not two, but *6* different specialists for myself and the 2 men in my life!).

Thanks everyone (especially if you made it reading this far...!!).