I love getting packages in the mail. It’s like a miniature Christmas on a random day. Yesterday I got a CD from BMG and my resurrected motherboard. The CD, unfortunately, was somewhat disappointing. It’s I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings by Radiohead. I love the version of “Like Spinning Plates,” and “True Love Waits” is of course a wonderful song, but the rest . . . well, I already have them on other albums, and they don’t actually sound better live, so what’s the point? And then it strikes me, Oh, yeah, I remember that I don’t really like live albums. Silly me. Oh well. At least it was free (and by “free,” of course, I mean that it cost me $2.79).

The motherboard was a more exciting package. I’ve been having problems with this thing for months, and their tech support is notoriously slow. They don’t have an 800 number, and I don’t particularly feel like waiting on hold for half an hour at five cents a minute, so that leaves tech support via email, and it takes them about a half a week to respond to anything. But finally they gave me authorization to send it in for warranty service, and I finally got it back after a nearly two-week absence (though I suppose that’s actually decently fast when it comes to warranty service). It came with a note explaining that they’d replaced some parts, and it seems to be running fine, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

And of course, all the other packages we’ve gotten recently have been actual Christmas gifts. I’m still waiting on a big one—fully half of Ruth’s gifts—that left New Jersey eleven days ago and just left Denver yesterday. Boy, they really cut it close, don’t they?

And now, I really should get around to wrapping the rest of it all.