I got home yesterday and talked to the BMW body shop. The BMW is finally done but they don’t have the invoice ready for us yet so it is going to be another day before we can pick up the car. 🙁 Dominica and I made plans to get it tomorrow. It is no simple task to pick up a car from a shop that is only open during the working day and is located in the middle of nowhere. I have to leave work early and drive all the way out there and Dominica has to take a long lunch and drive down to meet me at the airport so that we can drop off the rental car then drive to the shop and have me drive home from there. It is a lot of effort.
I took a short nap just before Oreo and Dominica got home. Then we spent the evening watching Angel. We are almost to the end of the fourth season. I think that there are only two more episodes left.
It is another early morning for me. Up at twenty after five and off to the office. The weather has improved and the rain has stopped. People were all predicting snow for last night but that never came. Everything is fine this morning.
I checked with Amazon and our new Marantz receiver is in Elizabeth so there is some chance that we will have it today. Which would be great except that we have no cables at all for it so all we can do is put it into the cabinet and look at it until we get some cables.
I left work and drove out to Newark airport and turned in the Pontiac G6 rental that I have now had for nine days. That wasn’t cheap. At least my new insurance definitely covers this type of thing so the cost of renting should be a lot lower in the future. Dominica got to National Car Rental at the Newark Airport just minutes behind me and then we drove down to Iselin and picked up the BMW from Garden State Auto Body on the Lincoln Highway. The work looks great and the car is as good as new. Luckily it was just a plastic piece that had to be replaced so there was no real impact to the car.
Dominica had to return to the office as she is the only person who covers there late in the day. I drove back to Newark in the underpowered Mazda PR5 (mostly because it is getting old) and signed back on to work from home which I did until almost six.
I took a walk over to Radio Shack on Military Park before they closed and grabbed some cheap speaker cable, an optical audio cable (Toslink) and another HDMI cable to hook up to the new Marantz. I started getting the receiver ready before Dominica and Oreo got home. There is just enough space in our “entertainment” cabinet to fit the Marantz. That is going to be a problem. It is a 7x80watt receiver so that is a lot of power to cram into a very small space. We only use two channels out of all of that so we don’t drive it nearly as hard as we might but it still needs air and there is no circulation at all where it is. We might not be able to keep it there. But the apartment is cold compared to most places where a receiver would be used so it might not get warm at all.
I hooked up the Samsung DVD player through the Marantz’s HDMI switcher and hooked the PlayStation 2’s optical audio connection to the receiver as well. I don’t have enough cables at the house to have the receiver do the switching for the component video from the PS2 but it doesn’t matter as the television would have to switch between HDMI and component inputs anyway and since we only have two things to hook to the receiver it is all the same. We are using the Totem DreamCatchers in the little apartment. They work perfectly there. They don’t shake anything but it is easier to hear dialogue.
Dominica went over to Food for Life and got take away for dinner. We ate and watched the last three episodes of the fourth season of Angel. We weren’t tired so then we watched a little from the middle of the first season of Full House. For people who have cable it may seem strange that we bought Full House on DVD but since I have never really had cable I have never seen the show in reruns except when I am in a hotel somewhere and that is pretty rare and I have never seen some of the later seasons. It was a decent show but was ruined by being played in reruns so often.
There are holiday pictures of Oreo and his gang posted at Doggie Paradise now. I copied the two of our boy for our Flickr feed.