So I started this HT journey after my SD TV died and it just occurred to me how many of my supposed quality-of-life-enhancing electronics are currently busted: of course the power amp which won't cooperate and shall remain nameless, the Garmin Nuvi GPS I purchased 3 months ago (FM transmitter went bad, at least I can ship this back at the same time as the amp above, that will be convenient), my Blackberry 8703e which has a diagonal crack extending across the LCD screen (from going through the airport security machine), and my 8 month old Dell XPS notebook which had massive file corruption and had to be reverted to factory state after spending 6 hours on the phone on Friday/Saturday with Microsoft and Dell trying to finally install SP1 (I know it wasn't broke, don't fix it, but I couldn't even play a DVD, it responded to the VISTA OS install disc with the prompt, "Would you like to format this blank disc?"), and in the process discovering that 1 of the 2 gb Crucial RAM sticks in the notebook was bad (I'm pretty sure from first install but who has time to test and fix these things?). If there's a unifying theme to all the meltdowns it may be the hazards inherent in mobility/shipping and handling, just the spiraling slave-to-the-machine phenomenon of modern life ("cyborg"), or at the most basic level just the series of accidents we call life.
So we went to my daughter's Western riding horse show yesterday, where she placed 5th and 6th in "Walk and Trot" (hey the horse was cranky and giving her a hard time, we were happy she placed) and made perhaps one of the most intelligent purchases I have made in a long time: we got ourselves a puppy. So far the care and feeding of the little guy have been infinitely more rewarding and joyous than the maintenance and repair of all these infernal machines.
