This car has served our family well for many years. Respect!After dropping off my mom I headed over to the Hole-In-One for breakfast (see previous post) and had Eggs Benny again. (Win!!!!) Man...it was just as good as ever, even two days in a row. After breakfast I drove over to my Dad's house where it being still early, he was the only one awake. I told him that I had been thinking about getting them a computer while I was there and that I'd like his help to surprise the others. Surprised himself, he said that would be really great and that he wanted to help me find a good one. We talked for awhile before heading out to search for the best deal we could find for their new desktop PC.
They wanted a desktop this time around instead of a laptop because it would be near impossible for anyone to steal. Laptops are a quick snatch and grab, while unplugging and carrying a desktop computer out of someone's house is a much bigger feat. Besides...Jeff was going to want to play games eventually and most affordable laptops can't cut it in the gaming department. I knew any sales person they talked to wasn't going to know anything useful so I did my best to educate my Dad on what he really wanted to get.
Our first stop was Staples. They had package for a Dell and Monitor that was decent, but nothing that stopped me in my tracks. Just some middle of the road sort of stuff. We weren't looking for anything expensive or huge, but nothing hear was that great. Ultimately I knew we'd probably end up at Best Buy in Hyannis so we decided to cut to the chase and head up there. Hyannis is a thirty to sixty minute drive from Orleans in rain and traffic so going there is a decision not made lightly by the locals here. In fact most of them cringe at the thought of it. Thirty minutes later we arrived at the mall and the local Best Buy where we started checking out what they had.
After browsing for awhile and using my phone's barcode scanner to check out any better deals locally, I settled on an Acer mini-tower bundle and a 19" wide screen lcd monitor. This would serve them really well. Generally speaking, gaming is the most demanding thing a recreational computer will be doing at any time. If it can run games, it can do anything they'd need to use it for. It was a floor model (got it for a bit cheaper that way) so Best Buy told us it would take them a few hour to remove their proprietary software from it and give us a clean Vista installation. Shit. A few hours? What are we going to do in Hyannis for a few hours? Irene had called a few times wondering where the hell we were, not really having any idea. She assumed we were up to no good but we'd show her! Hah!
For the next few hours we walked around the mall, checked out some stores, and ate some good mexican food at a restaurant called Sam Diego's. It was really cool to spend some quality time with my Dad. Visiting once a year isn't enough, I'll have to work on this slight problem in the coming years. We also swung by The Boarding House, a local surf shop to look at some surfboard bags that I may need on my trip home. After the required time had past we headed back over to Best Buy to pick up our fresh new computer! The drive home took an hour or so in the traffic...not much fun, but I was really anxious to deliver the surprise so it was okay. When we got home we brought the stuff in and they were totally stoked! It was cool to see my brother so happy since he had been sick and practically on house arrest the whole time I was there. No 13 year old should have to grow up without the internet or a computer. It was important to me to get him back online, and back into learning the things that would undoubtedly play a large role in his future. We spent the next few hours setting everything up and removing all the bloatware from Best Buy before I handed the reigns over to my Dad and Jeff for them to get going. I even set up a gmail for my Dad, which he has actually been using quite a bit!
After a few hours playing around on the computer I packed my stuff and headed again to Mahoney's to meet up with Tim and whoever else might be coming that way. I talked to the bartender for awhile and found out he was a high school teacher who was starting a class about Video Game Development. I was floored! Seriously if they had that class when I was high school I would have taken it over and over and over again! We exchanged contact information and I look forward to hearing about how his class goes this Fall. I offered to help him out any way that I could so hopefully I'll hear more about this when school starts again in September. Tim got finished cooking and came out for a beer, and shortly after a few more friends from school arrived. Abel, Phil, Paul, and Genghis: four guys I grew up with. Genghis's family has always been really close to ours, our parents are all great friends, so it was cool to see him again. He is a like a brother to me. My East coast twin if you will. We had a couple of drinks and then they all wanted to go to Joe's Tavern down by Nauset Beach as that's where the fun was apparently. At Joe's I ended up seeing a dozen or so more people I went to school with and got to drink and have some more fun. A couple of hours later I found myself back at the Cadillac so I headed home to sleep once again.
Thanks for reading! This trip is going really well. I'll be writing a new blog entry each day until I come home next week.
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