The tracks go off in this direction

I know, I know it's been forever. Tripp has pretty much given up on even nagging me anymore which is kind of a sad commentary on my posting behavior in and of itself. Mostly it's been laziness, but I do have some excuses.

1. I've been sick. The snow - warmth -back to snow - back to warmth weather pattern finally did me in and gave me the cold from hell. Lame to complain about as the world watches the SARS epidemic unfold I know, but what can I say, I'm a whiner. After struggling through work while wacked out on cold medicine, I'm hardly in the mood to come home and spend more time in front of a computer screen.

2. I bought a new new TV. The Wiz (local electronics chain) is going out of business and I pounced on their clearance deal on the Sony KV36XBR800. I got 30% off the stand came free. Moving it in was a nightmare. If you're planning on buying 235 pound TV (no joke), I highly reccomend getting it delivered. I borrowed a van from a friend of my brothers to get it home and enlisted my brother to help me get it down to the basement. We had to take off the basement doors to make it fit, move three full bookshelves and a chair, but we managed to do it without doing serious damage to either the house or the TV. It took me another few days of tweaking the picture with the Sound and Vision Home Theater Setup Disc, regrogramming my remote control, checking the picture on my favorite DVDs (so fucking good - has to be seen to be believed*), and checking every channel before I remembered there's pretty much NOTHING GOOD ON TV.

3. Baseball is back. Ok there's one good thing on TV. Now if they'd only start winning. I went to my first game of the season last Sunday and have another game coming up on Easter. Jesse (friend from work) and I bought a ticket subscription that gets us to every Sunday home game (13 games total) so hopefully their play will pick up soon.

4. I'm trying to abstain from posting about war/politics. It's played out. I'm tired of thinking about it and I'm not really comfortable being the most conservative person in the room especially since I don't think of myself as conservative at all.

*I was expecting a good picture, but the quality has absolutely blown my highest expectations away. LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring looks better to me than it did when I saw it in the theaters. It just goes to show how badly most retailers adjust the pictures on their salesfloor. Give me a day to tweak the settings and I could triple their sales., in fact if the Wiz had done a better job maybe they wouldn't have gone under in the first place.