Perfect For Little Errands

Max and I hadn't been doing a lot of traveling together. Part of the reason was the last few weeks of tax season. Part of it was a piece of shit battery. Part of it was the new battery wasn't properly charged like they told me it was. But Saturday came, the weather was stupendous, magnificent and any other adjective you can think of to describe it. And I had some errands to run.

We are making some changes to our home entertainment and technology setup. First is that we shitcanned the local cable TV provider. Just didn't think the value was there anymore. Second, we are getting a wireless home Internet connection from the phone company.

I know it may seem strange, but we have never had a high speed Internet connection at home. We have a digital TV antenna in our attic, so we can get HD television over the air for free. We are all about "stuff" for free. We thought that home Internet vs cable TV was a good trade off.

We needed a wi fi Internet adaptor for a Blu Ray player, an HDMI switch and a few other electronic goodies. Also we needed to hook up our attic television antenna to another television. That will entail some cutting and splicing of coax cable and I needed some tools and fittings and doo-dads for that. And if you're like me, then you're a little bit unsure of exactly what you need.

First stop, Home Depot. Found most of what I needed for cutting and splicing coax cable. It's not exactly splicing because you end up just cutting it and affixing an end that can be screwed onto your TV or some other connector. There's a particular type of trimmer that works pretty slick. There's also a crimping device that was a little harder to figure out, but with a little trial and error we figured out how it worked.

Next stop was Radio Shack. The hope was to find inexpensive wi fi adaptors. I knew I was in trouble when the store person gave me one of those deer in a headlight looks. I knew that I needed a couple of questions answered so I didn't stick around.

Next stop was Best Buy. Here I knew that what I was looking for would be well overpriced. You can get some good deals on equipment here, but they kick your ass on the accessories and cables. But I did talk to a dude that answered a couple of my questions. Amazing to me though was that they didn't have any adaptors in stock.

Last stop, Target. This trip was a gamble, because I was not real confident that they would have what I was looking for, but I seemed to remember seeing what I wanted at a Target store before a year or so ago. And luck would have it, they had both items at about half the Best Buy price.

Now by this time I had numerous small items I had purchased and Max continues to amaze me because I was able to get all the items into either the top case of the seat storage area. Didn't even need the "man bag hook"!

The only bad thing about the trip was the usual Saturday traffic, a real pain. But the weather couldn't be beat. Max is running like a champ.

It turns out I forgot to get one small HDMI cable.

Oh well, another excuse to run an errand on Max.