Out With The Old....In With The New

Well, here we are, half an hour or so into the new year with the holidays behind us and the new year ahead. Now that the festivities are behind us I can say that it wasn't too bad at all this time around. We had a nice time at the Green's on Christmas eve...lots of eats and some fairly painless socialization. Ri and Adam came over Christmas morning to open presents and hang out for a while and then me, Wanda and Chris headed up to the folks for Christmas dinner. We had a good meal and traded gifts and hung out there until about 5:00pm. Ri and Adam came up later after we'd been there for awhile and had some dinner too. they stayed for awhile after we left for home.

Wanda had to go to work the day after but I had Tuesday off so me and Chris decided to take a ride up to Whiskey Creek and make sure everything was still there and unmolested. We didn't stay long, just stood around a bit, took some pics, rode around the grounds for a half hour and then headed back for home.

I had a 3 day workweek, which went by fairly painlessly and then it was Friday evening. Wanda asked if I wanted my birthday present early which was a surprise because I hadn't really figured on getting anything, but she managed to come up with a really nice surprise. I unwrapped a small package to find an Apple Ipod, something I've wanted for the last year or so...an 80gig one too.....big enough to pretty much hold the entire record collection with room to spare for the future music purchases. So, since I unwrapped that I've spent quite a bit of time playing with it and building my music library. At this point I've got a about 36 hours worth of tunes on it. In other words.....I'm just getting started.

Saturday was my 54th birthday. Good lord....54? How does that happen? It was a pretty nice day too. I slept in until I felt like getting up and hung around the house until about 5pm. Then we headed for the mall area and hit Circuit City and Best Buy looking for a case for my new Ipod and a decent pair of headphones for it. Those ear buds that come with it suck. They sound terrible and I don't care for having things stuffed in my ears. While we were there we looked at computer towers too simply because mine system is almost 6 years old which in computer age makes it a dinosaur. After reading the Ipod manual it had become evident that I wasn't going to be able to use it much with my system simply because it was too old for the tricks it needed to perform so in a rash move, after an hour of comparision shopping I bought a new tower. Nothing fancy, a Compaq Presario SR2050NX . Just something basic and more up-to-date than I've been using since 2000. It should tide me over for a couple years at least. It's not like I'm playing high end online games anymore. I play with my websites, read Email and now I have the Ipod to occupy me on cold winter nights. This box should do just fine. Anyhow, after that deal was done (they had to prep it and I'd come back to pick it up Sunday afternoon) we headed over to Branns for birthday dinner. The 3 of us had a nice meal and I got sang too along with a piece of chocolate cake with a candle in it.

After dinner we headed over to the Cinema Carousel to catch a movie. Because of the time the choice for a flick ended up being "Dreamgirls" which wasn't bad even though it wouldn't have been my first choice, had we had more choices. By the time we got home from the movie it was almost midnight.

Today I picked up the new computer and spent the bulk of the day moving stuff from the old tower to my external drive so that I can reinstall it all in the new machine. It's gonna take several days to get things moved over and probably a week or more before I've got everything back up to where it was with the old box.

It's been a long day and an even longer year and I'm ready to call it a day now that it's officially 2007. Hopefully the new year will bring some good things and not too much in the way of bad but we shall have to wait and see how it goes. Rolling with the punches is what's prescribed no matter which way the road turns. Adios 2006, welcome 2007.

TC