The Weekend: Saturday

On Saturday morning I was up at the crack of dawn to get free trees with Brandon. Yup free trees. You see, GRU, our local utilities supplier gives away free trees every year and I went along to help Brandon with his tree count. It was very funny to see how serious this was for some people. We got there at 6:45 am, and people had been lining up since 6. We waited around for about 45 minutes until finally they opened up the gates and in we filed. First we got our GRU bills stamped, then we got the checked with highlighter (like at airport security) which made me laugh. Then we went to the tree master who we told which two trees we would like, and then we were given receipts for these trees which we could then go and get. They even stamped our hands so that we couldn’t comeback with a different GRU bill and get more trees. LOL.

Waiting for our trees with 500 other people.

Well after that early morning adventure, I returned home to a cooked breakfast by my darling wife (Cocoa Pops / Crispies) and we called my parents. I had a good long chat to both my parents and it was wonderful to hear that Australia is finally getting some rain for the first time in a long time. Hopefully that will start to alleviate some of the drought. Praise the Lord.

After chatting to the folks, we got ready, I went to work to tend to some consultancy work, and Jenee went to the beautician (not that she needs too) and then picked me up where we headed to Ocala to pay a visit to Hobby Lobby (aka Holly Hobby to those in the know). Jenee was in paradise, so much so that when we walked in the door she got so excited that she had to make her first stop the bathroom.

We walked around for an hour, and bought some picture frames. One of these days, we will actually print out some of the pictures I have taken and put them on the wall. We also found a really nice kitchen shelf that we would like to get to put kitchen stuff on. A quick stop at Starbucks and we were back in the car, heading back home for the most exciting part of the weekend for me.

What was so exciting? Well I got to finally buy a DVD player and A/V receiver! I had debated long and hard about how much to spend, what brands to buy etc, but I finally settled on good ol’ Marantz, like I had before. I am very happy with it. The best part is, the DVD player can do the following: play DVD’s from all regions, inc Australian Region 4 DVD’s, automatically convert PAL to NTSC color codes and upscale DVD’s to high definition signals. Yay x 10! At first, I couldn’t get everything to work together, but then I realized that I had to connect the AV receiver to the TV. Duh.

The new reviever and DVD, under the TV, and my Krix Speakers!

Needless to say, I am very giddy and Jenee humored me by watching some or my favorite movie, The Fifth Element, to celebrate the new toys!