Had quite a good weekend. All in all good, mainly thanks to Ian, the ever pragmatic realist who kept me from overdramatizing the minor mishaps.

The plan was: fly to Austin Saturday to see the new baby and come back, Sunday mow the lawn and do dinner/movie with Jai and Drew.

Reality:

Hard drive craters on my PC late last week. I’d seen it coming. So, now I need to buy a hard drive and try to restore my documents, especially my writings! (I have a month or two old backup, yes, I need to do more frequent backups, no, I probably won’t start doing them). Weird brake light indicator while driving comes on on my car (check manual - just means your brakes could be failing and go out at any moment, take it in and get expensive repairs done!)

Saturday, flew down, visited with Ian’s family and saw the baby (a cute, leggy elfin little boy!!) Amy seemed tired (imagine that) but doing well. Coming back, I realize I’ve lost my cell phone. Crap! So, all I need to buy is a new hard drive, a new cell phone, and get a brake job done on my car. What, that can’t be more than $500, why am I complaining?

Sunday, raining, so the lawn goes another week without mowing. Sigh. I’m having fun by now! Ian, the sweetheart, helps me play it down.

We end up having fun going to the Sprint store and Best Buy. I have a fab new clamshell phone (I’d been wanting a new one anyways) from Samsung (the VGA 1000). After mail-in rebate, she’ll be only $100 including car charger. Ian has a spare hard drive in an old computer, so I’m going to format that and hope I can get XP installed somehow and restore my documents from the bad disk. The brake light ended up being low fluid, which Goodyear tops off for free, and did a free tire rotation (bought the tires there).

Finally, went to Bellini’s, a great Italian restaraunt down on Oak Lawn with Jai and Drew and watched the DVD of Saved (funny movie!! handles religious hypocrisy very well I think).

Deep breath. All is well. Oh, and we got a new DirecTV Tivo. I like their new approach. The boxes have always been cheap, it’s Tivo’s lifetime service fee of $300 that stops you cold. Well, now you just pay DirecTV $5/month extra for the recording service, and voila! we have a new 70 dual tuner Tivo in the living room!