So Saturday was my birthday. A while back my esteemed spouse began to fish for gift ideas, and I allowed as how, since she'd upgraded her ipod and left her old one to me, it might be cool to have a car stereo that'd interface to it.

Friday I was ordered to relinquish my car. I did not ask questions, but merely took my parking pass, against the not unlikely eventuality that the carpool would fail to provide me transportation.

Mid afternoon on Friday rolls around, and my office phone rings.

ana $ana?
toxicfur It's your wife.
ana Hi, what's up?
toxicfur Tell me you didn't leave a CD in your car stereo.
ana I didn't leave a CD in my car stereo. Took it out yesterday, in fact.
toxicfur Oh good. I'm holding the radio in my hand, and at this point it'd be a pain in the ass to power it up again to eject a disk.

Turns out the surgery took longer than she'd planned. When I got home, we rushed out (using her car; mine was still in the driveway, battery unhooked, dash disassembled) to get some butt connectors at Radio Shark and a mounting bracket from Beast Buy.

We returned, she managed to get connector A and its wire harness wired up to connector B and its wire harness. Knitting, I called it. She sniffed. Meanwhile, I was stir-frying whatever I could find in the fridge. Rather a lot of it, starting with an over sized chicken breast, frozen solid and so not amenable to being divided.

After dinner, toxicfur went back to the driveway. After a while I went out and offered her the little battery-operated LED light from my key ring, which came with a clip for attaching it to a baseball cap. And her baseball cap. This enabled her to put light wherever it was her head was pointed, and seemed much appreciated.

She accomplished the job, got the dash board put back together, apparently without breaking any of the silly little plastic connections that make up the modern automobile.

Saturday, more or less usual stuff except for sleeping in a bit longer. Usually on Saturdays, we drive her car around, since mine's in the (single-car) garage, and hers lives in the driveway. This weekend, though, we took mine, with iPod plugged securely into the new stereo. Managed to figure out how to set the clock, favorite radio station pre-sets, use the iPod with it, etc.

Took the dog to the Sheepfold, where dogs run around off-leash. He really likes this a lot. One of his friends, Crystal, a beagle-doberman mix, is all growed up now. We first met her last September, when she was perhaps 6 weeks old, and hiding in a hole because she was overwhelmed by all the bigger dogs. Now she's a big dog herself, and runs around wrestling with the other dogs, and planting wet kisses on their faces. There was also a herd of pugs with cow-bells on their collars, and an Aussie to herd them.

Home, nap, and oh look: if we go to the matinee, we can see Paprika and still have dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company at a reasonable hour. Venison and some kind of Hawaiian swordfish-like critter. Teh yum. I had a beer called YouEnjoyMyStout. Also teh yum. The venison's gaminess and the stout's stoutness were well matched, in my opinion.

The movie was wonderful. It's really Japanese animation at its finest. I can't praise this movie too highly: go see it if you can. There's a very cool trailer in various places on the intarwebs.

One further amusing incident: On the way to the movie, we stopped at the pet store to get cat and dog food. Came out, jumped in the car, turned the key, nothing. Turned the key again, still nothing. Quelling that queasy feeling in the tummy, I remarked "It's almost as if the battery was not hooked up." Out we jumped, opened the hood, gave the battery connection a twist, and voila. Minor side-effect of the surgery is that the battery cable wasn't torqued down quite enough to avoid shaking loose. Silly cable, that's attached by a bolt that goes into the battery itself.

Sunday, pretty much the usual stuff. Toxicfur got drafted to read a lesson from Second Samuel about David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Lots of good talk, and the (recently ex-) director of our choir got his kid baptized. His dad, who's a priest, presided. Very cool.

Home again, beans and rice with just the right amount of spice, write for an hour, trim grass, go to the grocery, and then toxicfur barbecued a chicken with a can of beer inside. Our heathen liquor store doesn't have PBR, so we had to settle for Bud. They don't have much beer in cans at all, actually. Nice and moist it was, and seasoned just right.

Life is good. And I'm looking forward to my 54th year of it. I'm extremely lucky to have a partner like toxicfur.