Smile

As you can see we got quite a surprise when we opened up our new vacuum cleaner yesterday. Just kidding, of course, this is Evalyn playing with the box, which she claimed as her own.

Our old vacuum blew up on Saturday. Well, it popped and smoked a bit. Now the motor only seems to run on super puree speed. It was an old vacuum. I went to Wally World to get a new one.

After hours (or what seemed like hours) of comparative shopping on the cell phone with Lisa, who was feeding me information from the Internet while I looked over the different available models and brands, we picked out our optimal vacuum, only to find out... they didn't have one in stock!

Not wishing to return home empty-handed, I spent another hour looking at home theater systems. That wasn't really a whim. We've been thinking about one for a long time. The stereo system in our living room was the same one I had in high school, five thousand years ago. The selector knob was worn out and for the past two or three years we've had to spend several minutes jiggling it at the start of every DVD or CD in order to get a clean signal coming out of both speakers (this last sentence is certified exaggeration free). Lately we've been unable to get that to work at all. So...

I spent another hour looking at home theater systems, and I picked out the optimal surround sound set-up only to find out... they didn't have one in stock!

So I bought some yogurt and went home feeling mighty defeated. But yesterday I tried again, this time at the new Wally World out west of town. Yes! Both items were in and I brought them both home. It's good to have a variety of department stores in your community; competition breeds excellence.

Anyhow, we set up the surround sound with speakers balanced on the arms of the sofa and wires going all over the place. We put in a DVD of Brian Wilson's live performance of Smile (there can be no better way to inaugurate a new set of speakers), went to the set-up menu and selected 5.1 surround sound. We were blown away!!! I sat there immersed in this fantastic music, with my arm around Lisa, watching Evalyn dance and thinking "this is the life"! Now all we need for Christmas is a nice big high definition flat screen TV!

So today we decided to figure out what to do about the speakers and the wires. We will need to completely rearrange the front room. We went back to Wally World and purchased four CD/DVD shelves, one each to put the front left/right and back left/right speakers on. We've just spent most of the evening putting those together. Here I am posing with them. Yee haw!

Needless to say, the studio is still a pit, but I did get some actual work done today - mostly figuring out finances. We're in pretty good shape coming off of my most successful summer in years. This will help me make some decisions about which new projects to start on. More about that soon.

In case you're wondering how the domain name thing went... MontyHarper.com has finally been safely transfered to my current ISP. I had to pay about as much for that as the cost of the home theater system, and the old ISP still has control over KidsMusicPlanet.com. It's a long story. But in a couple of months hopefully I'll be able to transfer that one too and the whole ordeal will be over.