It was a typical November day: damp, chilly, and drizzly/rainy.

In a place that needs rain so much, this means it was an absolutely beautiful day. How I think about two years ago, when it rained nearly every day during the summer, so much that the back yard smelled like primordial swamp!

I find that, although I am taking a bit longer to get warmer, I am sleeping quite comfortably under the new quilt. So we had a nice eight-hours sleep before doing a few chores and then heading out to Fry's. James is looking for an AC power cord for the Magellan so he can program some addresses in.

We used the gadget to get out to Fry's in Alpharetta. Predictably, it does not have our address in its database yet (several of the online maps do not), so we used the address of the house on the corner. It was interesting to see how it routed us. For instance, we would not ordinarily use one road if it was a Saturday; too much traffic. However, the back way it used to take us to the route we usually use was quite expedient.

We had the Sirius Pops channel on during the drive; they are playing classical-oriented Christmas music as well as traditional carols. It occurred to me that there was nothing I enjoyed more than driving out on a nice chilly day with my favorite guy and Christmas music playing on the radio. Went through the sale papers from the paper as we drove.

Fry's was nice and warm and chummy after the chilly drive, and more people than we've ever seen there (the store at Gwinnett Mall is always more crowded). We had lunch in the cafe—nice hot potato soup in a bread bowl for me!—and had a fruitless search for an AC adapter. They had one only for a Garmin. On the other hand, they had the Rocky and Bullwinkle second and third season sets for only $15 each.

We came home virtually through the same route, although James had substituted "fastest route" for "no highways" on the GPS unit and we completely befuddled it by turning "off course" because we wanted to stop at MicroCenter. For the first five turns it had to replot a course to the original direction, until it plotted an alternate course instead. It's kinda nifty: tells you about two miles, and then one mile, then a half a mile, before a turn, and chimes when you get to the turn. The display is 3D while the closeup during the turn only in two dimensions.

We struck out at MicroCenter, too; they told us to go to Radio Shack, which had been my first idea. :-) (Like I was going to turn down an opportunity to go to Fry's! It's like a candy store for adults.) Cumberland Mall was slightly off our course, too, but the GPS gallantly replotted (complaining several times, "As soon as possible, please make a legal U turn!") until it could tell us how to get home from the "hidden parking deck," our favorite place to park. (I have seen Cumberland Mall at Christmas with people parking "in the galleries," as I call the outer lots, and you can drive right in this level of the parking deck and at the most find it half full. Today there were six cars there while people circled the mall looking for close parking spaces outside.)

Radio Shack did have what we wanted, a wall plug called an "iGo." It is variable amperage/wattage, depending on what your unit needs, with interchangeable tips so that it fits the gadget you are charging. It has tips/plugs for cell phones, PDAs, iPods, etc. (You can also get a kit with a car charger and a trio unit of car charger, AC plug, and USB charger.) So tonight James has plotted several scenarios out, including his route to work, to his mother's, and right now up to Unicoi.

We had homemade turkey soup with rice for supper, thick with turkey meat, and the rest of Lin Butler's pumpkin pie for dessert, and watched March of the Penguins for the first time. Very lovely and lyrical, and of course the baby penguins are too cute for words. Amazing how they survive the brutal cold!

Labels: electronics, food, movies, music, shopping, travel, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:07:00 PM

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