Like my new car stereo? I paid FIFTY CENTS for this thing. I tried to talk the lady at the yard sale down to 25 cents but she wouldn’t budge. So far it works perfectly even though it’s missing the knobs. The best part is that it’s got a CD line-in jack in the back which I connected to a 1/8″ headphone jack. Now I can plug my Ipod directly into it instead of messing with the FM transmitter option. That’s my Ipod Nano sitting on the shelf underneath.

I think my car is about 100 times less likely to be broken into now. In fact, would-be car thieves will probably laugh at my early 90’s era stereo in my 2000 Ford Focus. I had to clean about 15 years worth of dust off of the front of this thing. I’m not sure if the cassette player works but I guess that doesn’t matter since I don’t own any cassettes.

I also found a really cheap bike at another yard sale which is in really great shape. Looks brand new, really. It even has completely aired up tires. Now I just have to keep it locked up so kcochran doesn’t steal it again.

I spent my morning hitting every yardsale in Albany, determined to find a car stereo. GPS rules for yardsales. Especially when they’re out in the boonies. So it’s been a fairly productive weekend so far.

The window for my car was FINALLY put in today. It was supposed to be done on Monday but it didn’t arrive. Same thing on Tuesday. Wednesday it was finally there so I sat in the waiting room for an hour before the guy discovered that the wrong window came in. Argh! Today it’s done, though. And it was fairly cheap so I can’t complain too much. It was just a pain in the ass trying to make left turns with the passenger window all saran wrapped.

I think I found a good stereo to put in the dash today. It’s a factory stereo from a 1999 Ford Explorer and it seems to fit in the dash okay. It was only $7.00 at Goodwill. Problem is that nobody sells the wire connectors I need to wire it into my dash. Couldn’t find anything on Google or Ebay. Maybe I could try a junkyard. I’m determined to have a crappy and/or factory stereo from now on so there won’t be as much of a reason to bash in my car window. Wish I could just drive to Illinois and get my original factory stereo out of storage.

Today I noticed a big red scratch on the back side of my car. The kind of scratch you get when a driver scrapes against your car because they don’t know how to pull out of a parking space. And I really don’t care but ARGH! Cars are just more trouble than they’re worth.

I lost 5 pounds this month on the Get Off Your Fat Lazy Ass Diet. I bought a scale about a month ago and noticed that I’m just a few marks below Big Fasto – about 40 pounds overweight. So I’m tracking daily calories and I’m jogging and/or walking about an hour a night. I couldn’t run more than a block at first. Now I can do 5 or 6 easily.

And I’ve never paid attention to calories before. I signed up for a website that tracks them all for you, along with tracking exercise and water consumption. I never realized how many calories soda had in it. I’m down to about a Pepsi a week instead of my usual 1 Pepsi a day. I’m trying to completely quit Pepsi but every once in awhile I feel like I’ll die if I don’t get a Pepsi. I’m drinking no less than 60 ounces of water per day. Apparently water is good for you. The way they talk about it, I can’t believe I’m not dead yet. I rarely ever drank water.

Tonight was open house at the kids school. It was boring and pointless. I registered for college a week or so ago. Had orientation on Monday and went and bought my books today. I’m taking just English 3 days a week and class starts this Monday. I’m hoping to move up to 2 classes a week next semester. I’ve been putting off this college thing for the past 15 years or so.

Oh, and Jammie and I broke up.

My precious $150 Kenwood car stereo is GONE! This has to be indirectly related to the crackheads next door. This isn’t a bad neighborhood, aside from them. They have weirdos coming over all the time, parking right next to me in the driveway. One of them probably looked in and mistook my stereo as being expensive.

My new stereo is going to be the factory model that came with the car. I’ll just beam my Ipod to the radio. I found one on Ebay for $20 but I was quickly outbid on it. I’m surprised there’s not more of them on Ebay. Anyone know of a local place where I can pick up a factory stereo? Maybe the dealership has them cheap. Or junkyards. I wouldn’t think a pawn shop would bother keeping many of those but maybe.

They also took my cool 3,000,000 candlepower spotlight from the trunk. Not that I used it a lot but it was a cool thing to have. And they made off with about 20 CDs. As in, 20 CDRs. Haha, bet they were annoyed with only getting lousy CDRs. They also took most of my change with amounted to a couple bucks. They left a few quarters in there and one on the floor. The change holder was filled with glass from the shattered window so I like to think that the guy bloodied up his fingers a little, trying to scoop all of the change out.

What they DIDN’T take was my Microsoft GPS receiver which was laying on the floor. And 2 power inverters from the trunk. And some miscellaneous cables from the floor which powered things like my Pocket PC. Those would have sucked to replace.

I need to move. Which sucks because I really like my apartment and it’s location. But the crackheads next door have lived there for 6 – 7 years and I doubt they’ll be leaving soon.

Today I hacked my first soda machines! Emily and I tried to do one at the laundry mat over the weekend but it wouldn’t work. Today we were walking along the street and spotted a couple soda machines inside some office building. So we went inside and managed to get into the menus on both of them. We didn’t know what half the stuff meant since I hadn’t completely read through the instructions the other day, but it was fun.

Stopped by Pizza King, hoping to win a Crash Bandicoot plush thing that was in the claw machine over the weekend, but it was gone. I spent $2 on the claw and won nothing. And I did so good over the weekend, winning 2 things, each on the first tries. Stopped for ice cream, went by the park, then home to watch some Dead Like Me season 2.

On the way to the park yesterday, the kids and I notice water running alongside the curb and into a drain. Quite a bit of it too. Figured it was just somebody watering their lawn too much or washing their car or whatever. A couple hours later, on the way back home, we notice it’s still pouring in there pretty strongly. Looking up the street, it appears to be coming from nowhere. So we walk up the block to investigate.

Apparently an underground pipe burst and the water was seeping through tiny cracks all over a large part of the street. You couldn’t actually see the water coming out, but it was. Walking across the wet spot on the road was like walking on thin ice. The road visibly cracked more as I went across and made neat crunching noises. You could see the water coming out of all the cracks on the parts that you stepped on. Luckily it didn’t all collapse and kill us.

This morning we were walking in that area again and decided to see if it had been fixed yet. It hadn’t. Some old lady and her cat was sitting by her back door so I went over to talk to her while the kids continued to watch water leak from the street. Eventually the kids came over too. The old lady seemed extremely happy that anyone bothered to come over and say hello to her. I think I made her week. She thanked us for coming by and said to stop by again.

Today we did laundry. And I made my best batch of waffles ever. Yesterday we ate at Pizza King while listening to bad karaoke. We walked there and back which was about 20 minutes each way. At lunch we had BTH and we walked through a giant antiques market thing they had going on in the streets. I think other stuff happened this weekend but I can’t remember any of it. I bought a TV this evening. $119 for 23″ is just too good to pass up. So far I’ve used it to listen to about 2 hours of podcasts. Money well spent.

Was standing in line at BTH today. Suddenly someone is holding my hand. I look down and it’s a 5-year-old girl. Right behind me is her dad, kind of laughing. I poke her in the shoulder and say, “Hey, uh, you got the wrong dad.” See looks up at me and looks pretty terrified. She runs over to her dad and hides herself as me and the other dad laugh. Scaring little kids is fun!

Brad Carter: i downloaded the entire george harrison discography last night. and it’s 99.9% completed. and the ONE track that isn’t complete is from the one album that i really wanted.
Brad Carter: dammit
Brad Carter: 1.27 gigs of george harrison and it’s gotta be the song i want that’s not completed
Spessa: Which song?
Brad Carter: fish on the sand. from his Cloud 9 album
Brad Carter: not the best song on the album, but still…
Brad Carter: i viewed all the peers sharing it with me and they’re all 99.9% complete. so it’s unlikely it will complete
Spessa: I liked that when i was in 7thgrade
Spessa: I listened to it on my walkman at the dentist
Brad Carter: yeah i loved that album. i asked for it for my birthday but i couldn’t wait for it so i shoplifted it.
Brad Carter: then i had 2 copies
Spessa: Hah!
Spessa: This is payback
Brad Carter: hehe. must be
Brad Carter: stupid God
Brad Carter: or maybe george harrison’s ghost fucking with me
Spessa: George is waggling his finger from the grave
Brad Carter: what a jerk