I have to look back through the thread and see what some of my goals for myself are. I have to pull together tax papers, get the monitor replaced, take a cat to the vet, and I have a lot of projects around the house that I could do at any given time if I had all of the set-up in place. Like finish some tiles, or paint the hall. Finish clearing out shelves in my office. Some of this I mentioned, some of it I've grumbled to myself about.

ONT ANOTHER TOPIC COMPLETELY: I may start a separate thread on this, but I thought I'd give a heads up here. Circuit City is going to liquidate and hopefully actually offer some good prices, but anything you buy there can't be covered by store warranty, just the manufacturer warranty, and getting that taken care of might be tough. Last spring I purchased a used slide scanner on eBay and decided it might be prudent to buy a warranty to go with it. A company called Square Trade offers warranties. Of course you purchase it, it is like the extended warranty the store offers. I don't purchase those often in stores, but I bought this one after the scanner because I know that they aren't being made any more and I wouldn't be able to get it replaced if it failed.

It did fail, and I had a year with the Square Trade folks to file the claim. (I think you might have to wait a couple of months after first buying it, but I'm not sure). Anyway, I contacted them, they let me go ahead and send it to Sony, the company that Minolta contracted with to do repairs (Minolta no longer builds or supports these things). Square Trade would cover the repair up to the purchase price. Sony couldn't repair it, sent me a letter, so I sent that on (scanned and emailed) to the Square Trade folks, who put the money in my PayPal account. It was orderly, and easy, and if I had the money to purchase an out and out luxury like a flat panel HD television, or a new stove or something like that, I would probably buy the Square Trade warranty to back it up since Circuit City won't be there.

So there is my testimonial. I don't publish those often, but this worked out very well. I still don't have another slide scanner--I was buying a used item of the top of the line in slide scanners, but they've gotten way too pricey, so I'm going to do some comparison and see what else is out there that I can make do with.

SRS