Um… hi. What started with taking Dinah into the shop to have her “lol red snow” display looked at turned into mother suddenly being stricken by “new machine fever” and next thing I know, we’re hopping freeways to get to Fry’s in Industry.
Yes, she has two machines, one of which she hardly touches because it is not within immediate earshot of puppies. Yes, she COULD just move that less-used machine over into the den, so she can bum around on the internets near said puppies. But… nope, she wanted a new one, with a quad-core processor (AMD thankfully, because I hate installing Intel, their CPU fans irritate the crap out of me) and a Blu-Ray burner. (Never mind that blank media for that is still expensive as hell right now. MUST HAVE ANYWAY.)
All new parts, and pretty powerful ones too, so this was not going to be a cheap machine… but mother’d just gotten her TSP payout from the Post Office and gosh darnit, she was gonna splurge on parts even if the world ended tomorrow. Yay. No, seriously, she was all “This is probably the last machine I’ll ever own, so I want a really good one!” like she’s gonna die in a month or something. Oi… I TOTALLY reserve the right to laugh at mother if she comes to me in, what, 4 years and tells me she wants to rebuild one of her other machines with the latest and greatest. Ya rly.
Also WTF mother why did you have to pick the $400 blu-Ray drive when you could have gotten an equivalent drive for $250? (One of them is LG, the other is Sony. Guess which one is the Sony drive. >_>) I know there is brand loyalty, but geeze…
Oh, the best part is when we hit the checkout. Apparently, mother forgot that her debit card has a spending cap of $1000, even if used as a credit card emulator. To save her the embarassment of having to put back half the parts so we can come back tomorrow for the rest I ended up eating half of the total cost (I probably shouldn’t have, she really needs to stop jumping on shinies without THINKING, but at this point I was really tired and just wanted this done, not to mention she immediately put back that $1000 and as soon as the transfer console resets I’ll get the $800 I’m owed for 4 months worth of back-contributions for pet insurance). If this were an episode of Countdown this would instantly get mother tapped for WORST PERSON IN THE WOOOOOORLD.
*ahem*
So, um… now I am home, and as soon as mother finishes feeding Evil Stepfather and the Pups of the Apocalypse and clears a spot, I’ll be assembling this monster. I’ll post specs if anyone cares, but it’s basically the same mobo as Synergy 2 with Blastoise’s video card (and, you know, a Blu-Ray drive).
Sometimes I wonder if my mother is, you know, the puppies-and-PCs version of the octuplets’ mother. As in, replace compulsion to have more babies with compulsion to buy more puppies/build new machines for the sake of doing those things. Hm…