shopping shopping can be one of my least favorite activities. i really hate shopping just for the sheer joy of shopping. i need to have a goal. i need to make progress on the goal. fortunately, the beautiful and talented alisa is of like mind. gawd i love that woman. anywho, last month we were shopping for a tv stand. we bought a new tv a year ago. and it needed something nicer to sit on than a crate alisa made when she was in collidj. we found something nice and on sale in palo alto. so we bought it. along with a really nice matching buffet thing to go with it. they arrived this week. i spent last night moving the tv accessory and gaming stack from the floor and the crate to the new stand. the stack is actually pretty small as tv stacks go: replay tv, nintendo 64, dvd player, av switch, and of course the onlive microconsole - sorry tv adapter. which has got to be the stupidest name in all of creation. ever. for some reason, adapter makes my juvenile mind think of sex toys. anywho, there's a vcr too. but it isn't actually connected to anything else. which is exactly how it was in the crate. apparently we don't use it any more. anywho, everything worked right the first time. much to the shock and pleasure of the observers. i had budgeted extra time to make things actually work after being hooked up. so i spent this temporal windfall making things pretty. i zip tied many of the cables together and out of sight. most of the stack is plugged into a hard power switch that's discreetly accessible between the stand and the fireplace. cause yeah, we really are that anal about conserving electricity. sorry - we really do consider the leakage current of all of our electrical devices.  ¶ 8:00 AM