$pending Money...

Well, I finally got my car's battery recharged. Bob looked at the alternator belt, and the belt is completely chewed up. So because the belt has no gripping power, it's not spinning the alternator, and therefore not recharging the battery.

I'm hoping that all I need to do is replace the belt. But I'm planning on setting aside the money to replace the alternator.

Books, Cars, and Day Break

Well... There's a bit that happened this week.

First, I won't be able to go to the BAT this year. My car started to overheat on Monday, so I ended up going over to Triangle Auto, to get it repaired. That was fixed on Tuesday. But then, this morning, my car wouldn't start - I think it's my alternator belt - I'm PRAYING that my car will start tomorrow, and I hope that they can fix it cheap.

I did happen to manage to get up to Barnes & Noble before my car died. Managed to pick up 4 books, along with the Complete Wordbook, by Mike Baron - One of the best book on Scrabble to date.

AND - ABC has finally aired the rest of "Day Break" on line - so I'm glad to be able to finally watch the rest of the series.

Something new, Something used...

Thanks to my greatest bestest friend in the world, I have a 5.1 surround sound setup now. And I'll never go back to listening to a movie on a TV. Ever. It's only a 720 watt system, but that's PLENTY of power for my small apartment. It's a great system, and the movies sound incredible. As do TV shows as well.

And thanks to my landlord, I now have a second monitor hooked up to my system again. It's another 16 inch monitor, and it looks fantastic. It's nice having my Matrix setup going again.

A very late post....

Due to the fact that for the last 6 days, I've had the absolute WORST case of diarrhea I've ever had in my life. After last Saturday's Scrabble tournament (4W-3L... but more on that in a bit), I came home, and was feeling fine, but Sunday night - well... let's just say my ass exploded. Multiple times. And it did that for 5 DAYS! I'm on antibiotics now to help cure what ever is in my system, and yesterday I had my first NORMAL looking poo in a week. At least I'm getting better.

Onto the tournament!

I went in seeded 14th out of 20 and finished in 9th place. I'm rated at a 692, with 4 wins and 3 losses. I Bingoed in 5 out of 6 games and had my best game ever with a score of 448 points.

Here's a list of my bingos:

Game 1 - played PLANETS for 91 points on a TWS.
Game 2 - Two bingos! NAILERS for 66 and vAINEST for 77
Game 3 - Three bingos! (you see a pattern?) Phonied a bingo PELTIN(G)S for 69, FOCUsED for 83, and then I had my best play of the game - I bingoed out with ENSNAR(L)S on a TWS for77 points.
Game 4 - INcITI(N)G for 66
Game 5 - D(E)FICITs for 61
Game 7 - HuNTERS for 74

All in all an excellent tournament. The next one is on June 9th, and I'm planning on attending that one as well.

In other news, I finally - after years of waiting - bought a real MP3 player. It's a Creative Labs Zen Vision:M 30 GB mp3 player. But it also playes Movies, Music and photos as well. This little piece of equipment has a TON of features.

It has a built in radio, microphone to do dictation with, it can import contact info from Outlook, you can use your own images as wallpaper. It plays Movies (Divx, Xvid, MPG and AVI - and if the format isn't compatible, it'll convert it so it is), music (which I already have a bunch on there), and photo slide shows. 250 bucks at Walmart, and it's quite the little package. My only concern is that the touch pad you use to navigate with is very sensitive - make for selecting what you want to do a bit frustrating at times. But other than that - a great mp3 player.