2001-07-07 - 12:55 a.m.

Pay Toll

As I told people at work today, on Thursday Julie and I experienced an American rite of passage: Our child wrecked the VCR.

Yes, Liralyn done it. She fed it a floppy disk. When Julie went to put a tape in, it jammed. Julie never suspected the presence of a foreign object (obviously she'd be a face if she were a wrestler) and tried to get the tape to feed properly. As a result, things went haywire.

When I arrived I whipped out my Leatherman and tried to play Daddy Fix-It, but to no avail. After no small amount of manual labor performed to get the loading cradle back into place, I fed it a tape and discovered that the solid-state controller was fried. None of the buttons worked. It had two modes: fast-forward scan, and eject.

We sort of need more functionality than that, so it was off to the store to buy a new one. Alas, the store didn't have any S-VHS VCRs in stock, and I refuse to pay $100 for a plain VHS machine when for a reasonable amount more we could get S-VHS. So instead I'm going to have to drive to my parents' house tomorrow, pick up their old VCR, and use it to tide us over until something better comes along.

The rest of the day went likewise. Liralyn simply *had* to break any rule she came across. Julie attributes it all to a natural impulse to test the local enforcement mechanisms. I never felt much of that impulse and just generally blame Julie for having loco genes. These are the days that domestic tranquility is not made of.

Today worked out well, though, since I got to hang with Julie, Dwinn, and Mer. _Kiss of the Dragon_ featured exactly the right sort of gratuitous violence to please me, and of course such pleasant company is not to be scorned.

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