So a friend of a friend here in town (who happens to own the ice cream place on the central plaza, and is from Kansas) got a new computer, and was getting rid of her old components. I snagged a nice monitor for my son's laptop (necessary because the screen seems to have been sat on in the suitcase on the way down here, which sucked, but not too much because that screen was on its last legs anyway; that laptop got me through some good years, but I still never had a laptop I liked until I bought the machine I'm typing this on) AND (remember that main sentence?) a set of speakers which are huuuuuuge but really good, for the Linux machine. With a subwoofer the size of ... a breadbox, I guess. I just compiled mpg123, a command-line MP3 player, to test it on some MP3s I happen to have lying around, and it sounds great!

So that's cool.

Today during my daughter's fencing lesson we walked around the downtown. There was YAPP (yet another political parade), but you can't have too much of those anyway, because down here they play really good music, give you free flags to wave, and shoot off a cannon. It's fun for the whole family. And we got a whole bunch of T-shirts for $3 apiece -- Christmas coming up! And KB Toys had a big sale, so we got four kites and a bunch of other stuff.

Then we came home and there was a big birthday party at the pool (with Christmas music for some reason) and so we had cake.

Life is good here.