Yesterday started out great but long about 4:00p turned into the $2 sucky-sucky.

I’ve been getting up early lately since Jenn’s gone back to school to become a pharmacy technician and her classes start early. That’s not too bad, since getting up 15 minutes earlier means I’m on the road 15 minutes earlier, which, therefore, also means that I beat the bad traffic I normally hit when I leave at my normal time.

Around noon I took off to go to the local Game Crazy to sell back a couple of PS2 controllers. There wasn’t anything functionally wrong with them, but the pad that sat on top of the left analog stick wasn’t glued down anymore and would spin around while you moved the stick. I can’t handle that. It doesn’t bug Jenn, but my thumb just seems to slip off if that’s the case. So I traded in the two controllers for a total of $18 of store credit. That’s a good portion of the cost of a used game, so I started looking at those. I narrowed the decision down to Dynasty Warriors 3 or Virtua Fighter 4. I’m still sort of torn, but I’m thinking I’ll go with DW3. I already have Dead or Alive 2 for a fighting game, and while I wouldn’t mind picking up VF4, I think I should get something Jenn and I can play cooperatively so there’s less of a competition going on. Besides, my dad loves the DW thing, so he’ll come over and play.

Then around 4:00p, I decided to try to do some work on an upcoming project - you know, to maybe get a head start. So I opened up Office XP Developer and… it wouldn’t open my project file. I know it was a valid project, because I created the framework for it, then closed it. Done. But now it gives this “Store Type Not Valid” message which means pretty much jack squat as far as I’m concerned.

I figured it was maybe a problem with the Office XP Developer program, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. No go. So I uninstalled and reinstalled again. Still no go. Noticed that there were some patches available for it, so I patched it. Uh uh. Tried to uninstall again, but this time it wouldn’t uninstall. Tried to do the “reinstall/repair” thing, that didn’t work either. Decided maybe I could just delete the thing manually then run the repair, so I deleted the files and registry keys for it and ran the repair utility… and it failed.

Something was definitely hosed on my laptop, so now I’m in the process of totally reinstalling Windows and all my apps. Crap.

I did, however, get my records from GEMM, and I’m stoked. I’ve been listening to PWEI remixes all morning long (on my good computer). Yay, me.

Today is Fred Meyer employee double-discount day. That means Fred Meyer employees (my mom) and their families (me) get 20% off everything in the store but food. I’m going to pick up some attachments for my Dremel tool and a new DVD player since ours is, I believe, heading out the door. (The sound on it is sort of dicey anymore; the center channel fades in and out.)

I still haven’t heard from Magnolia Hi-Fi on the television I am planning on purchasing, but hopefully I will soon. I may give them a call today and see if it’s in and they just forgot to call me.

Went to my parents’ house to watch Survivor last night, and let me say I was a little less than impressed. Maybe the show isn’t living up to the hype, or maybe I’m just burned out on it. Either way, I guess I expected a little something more but I didn’t quite get it. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping for, but whatever it was, it wasn’t there. Hopefully it’ll get better.