(or "Football Game? What Football Game?")

James tramped sleepily off to work on Saturday and I commenced the hunt for the wild laptop. I stopped at Sam's Club, but they had nothing interesting. However, I did get milk, Skinny Pop, Chex Mix, onions and sugarless gum. Stuffing the milk in the insulated bags, I took our dry cleaning by the cleaner finally, having discovered that we hadn't done any dry cleaning since Leigh and Robbie got married. (Yes, that was last March.) Chatted to the elderly lady who runs the place. She broke her leg last May and was in a cast for the first eight weeks of summer. Bleah.

From the cleaner I went to MicroCenter. Why do they have 15.6 inch laptops for $300 and all the smaller ones are "gaming computers" that are $1,500? Gah. I did see a Dell two-way that looked interesting. The thing I liked best, however, in the entire store was a mechanical keyboard. Computer keyboards just don't give you that visceral feedback that typewriter keyboards used to. They had some keys sticking out of the box so you could try them out, and it was dreamy. But it was on sale for $129!

Since we had gone to Office Max last night and not seen anything promising on the laptop front (more huge cheap ones and expensive small ones, except for one that was a maybe), there was no use in stopping at Office Depot since they're now the same store. So I bit the bullet and went to Best Buy. I hate Best Buy half from a bill altercation I had with them years ago and half because their fluorescent lights make me lightheaded. Looked at a Lenovo 2-in-1 that would have been promising had it not had a lousy monitor; it looked like someone turned down the contrast button on the screen (but there is no contrast button on a computer, so I couldn't figure that one out). I was kinda taken by the 11.6 inch Yoga, which was small, but the keyboard just fit my fingers, but when I test typed on it, I understood the lengthy complaints on Amazon reviews: they have made the right shift key so small (the same size as a letter key) and then stuck it there next to the page up key so that when you touch type anything that needs a capital letter at the left side of the keyboard instead of a capital the cursor leaps one line up and you get a lowercase letter instead. Evidently the engineers do not touch type.

I should have stopped at HHGregg, but I was getting tired and hungry since it was nearly two o'clock. I did try to get into Costco, but the whole place was in a furor of pre-goodie buying for the Stupid Bowl and I couldn't find a parking place even at hiking distance. So I went to Barnes & Noble to get myself something to read (the collection of Valdemar short stories, and also picked up the formerly expensive making-of-Back to the Future book for 75 percent off) and then did a survey and had lunch cheap from Tin Drum, and finally went home to wait for James to get back from work so we could go to dinner (Hibachi Grill).

I have spoilt myself looking at that silly Surface Pro 4, but I can't help it. It has a dream processor and the screen is gorgeous. Looking at laptops after that is like driving a dump truck after testing out a Maserati. But I need to find a peppy dump truck and get on with it.  So we went back to MicroCenter to look at the Dell that was so promising, but it was now sold out. However, on the next table full of laptops was an Acer with the same specs (8GB RAM and a 256SSD) and not a bad picture. Guess what, they were out of that, too, but the Gwinnett store had three left. So we made arrangements to pick it up today. Just came home because James was tired and watched some Rosemary & Thyme and got off to bed.

So after this morning's breakfast and dog walking and tiresome going to the grocery store (where I got cut in line at the deli just for taking a minute to talk to James by some woman stocking up on a ginormous store of cold cuts for "the big game"), we headed out to Gwinnett County. Hadn't been to the MicroCenter here since they were near the Aviarium. The new store is as untidy as the old one, but larger and filled with all sorts of little gadgets and gizmos. Need to come back before Christmas to buy for geekish friends. All we did was pick up the laptop and come home because James wasn't feeling well. Spent the afternoon watching the Puppy Bowl and setting it up. (Also stumbled upon National Geographic Wild's Fish Bowl which was a series of terrible puns before settling on the National Dog Challenge.) We had a late lunch of chicken and wild rice soup from Publix and then just noshed for supper.

So I've caught up on Victoria, have WordPerfect and my HTML editor and Paint Shop Pro 5 loaded on the laptop, and after all the sturm und drang the Falcons lost to the Patriots, so there is no joy in Mudville Atlanta. At least there won't be a victory parade holding up traffic tomorrow.

Labels: books, electronics, errands, food, shopping, sports, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:05:00 PM

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