After having been sick for the past 10 days I am finally back into fighting shape. Now, don’t laught – I had the shingles. Not a very pleasant experience I might add… it’s itchy, scratchy. hurty, yucky. So to celebrate my return to the land of uninfected we decided to run a few errands this weekend which had been put on hold.
First stop was to the computer store as the Mrs is keeping her computer busy digitizing our DVD collection on our home server. Ever since we did the gueshouse build out last year we have a 36″ flat screen tv standing around which has been turned on exactly twice. First it was standing in the guest house where it was just simply too big and since a few months it has found a new home in our bed room and hasn’t even been hooked up. Now with the baby’s arrival just around the corner and nearly all of our movies conveniently accessible on the home network a new computer was needed for the bedroom to pass those sleepless nights.
There is a store in a town near our farm which builds custom computers at VERY reasonable prices. They where offering a PC for 299 Euros which was more than powerful enough for the purpose of watching our movies on the LCD TV. While chatting with the clerk he ran through the components with me he remarked on pretty much all of them that they sucked….power supply, too weak… only a DVD reader not a burner…. case too ugly…. processor too slow. And miraculously as he mentioned all of them he would follow it with “yeah, gonna upgrade that for you to xyz”. By the time he was done the computer massively nicer for the same price. He also didn’t feel like putting it together since it was Saturday and if I wanted to do it myself he would give me an additional discount and throw in a motherboard upgrade – SCORE. The putting together went flawlessly- software installation a different story. And that’s how I ended up with the most powerful computer in the house,for 269 Euros, once I finally figure out why Windows XP won’t install right that is.
Next followed the shopping trip from hell – IKEA. IKEA and I have a love hat relationship. I love their stuff, and hate the people shopping there. The IKEA Zombies – you know you have seen them shuffle through the store high frm the smell of swedish furniture and acres of impulse shopping. We where organized though and on a mission – only 30 minutes later it looked like a costco-sized family pack of pink marshmellows had exploded in our shopping cart. Texas grandma had remarked on the noteable absense of pink in the nursery and let me tell you, it has been remedied. Pink bubble bed sheets, pink fairytale bed sheets, a pink rug and you know what -it is all the most adorable stuff I have ever seen in my life. Pictures are coming, I promise. Handling the Mrs. in IKEA not so pretty – pregnancy hormones can be quite scarry. Fathers to be, be advised that having some bail money on you while baby shopping at IKEA – it will come in handy when the cops haul away your very pregnant wife on charges of assault. Things didn’t go quite that far on our excursion -but there where times when she scared me.
Which brings me to the last shopping extravaganza of the weekend. The Mrs has been wanting a Digital SLR for some time now. She takes amazing pictures with our cheapo digita camera we bought for a vacation a few years ago and loves to take pictures for her blog. Personally I would love to post pictures more often but first I need to get Photoshop on my laptop – I am a bit of a freak like that. Anyways, I had been playing with the idea of getting her one as a combined Christmas and baby gift but we ultimately decided to hold off for a while longer. However, after our IKEA expedition a flyer awaited us in our mailbox with an offer too good to resist on a CANON EOS 1000D from a store from which I still had a 83Euro gift certificate from. I had tried to find something at that store twice before to redeem the certificate and never found anything. Together with the certificate the camera came in at nearly half the price I had originally budgeted – SCORE 2…a good weekend for bargains. So, to take advantage of the bulging baby belly as a picture prop the Mrs. got the camera as a late birthday/early christmas gift.
So now the camera’s battery is charging and I fear the Mrs. will have the baby prematurely from excitement to give it a try.
