Update: This week, CC is charging $499 for the Onkyo home theater system I wanted … A full $100 less than Saturday, when I told them I would buy it from them if they dropped the price about a hundred bucks. They wouldn’t budge. And then Sunday, it was on sale. Damn sales people, playing with me.

CC also had a deal where if you ordered through their website these last 3 days, they would send you a 10% gift card… dropping the price of the receiver to $450. Not really wanting to order online — I wanted to wrap it all up in the same sales ticket, I went in to CC over lunch, told the sales people I was going to buy it online unless they could match it, and they did. One receiver, $449, no gift cards to hassle with.

So now all I need to do is go to Best Buy and pickup some non-Monster cables, and wired the system up. Woot.

Is it Thursday yet?

I’ve managed to spend almost three thousand dollars today. Wow. I even ended the night by making a last minute run to Pages for All Ages and getting $50 worth of books and CDs. (Damn you Harry Potter!)

On Thursday, my Hitachi 57″ F500 rear projection wide screen HDTV will arrive. This is a newer model to Nate’s already excellent TV, which looks awsome, so I can’t wait. Yeah, I finally bought it — after only going over the details to my friends over and over and over. I got a good deal, and 18 months no interest financing. Woot!

Of course, toys like that aren’t good on their own. Since I don’t have HD cable (yet, that’ll be another plan entry,) I need something to push the envelop of home entertainment. While the component video expansion to the XBox will serve nicely, I was thinking something more…. progressive. So I bought a 5-disc progressive scan Panasonic (without the CROMA bug) DVD player too. If the CC sales drone typed in the stuff right, I’ll get that at 18 months no interest.

What I didn’t get today, but really wanted (and still want,) was the accompanying home theater in a box kit. I really like the Onkyo HTS760, but CC wanted $599 and I wasn’t ready to pay that. (Especially when it was only like $450 last month, and I can still find it places online for like $470.) I tried to haggle with the sales kid, but they wouldn’t budge. Buy a few grand worth of home electronics from them, and you can’t talk them out of the third.

The rest of my purchases today were not as fun …. The Maxima got its 15k checkup to the tune of almost three hundred dollars. Damn expensive oil change and tire rotate/balance, if you ask me. But they also flushed the fuel injectors and did a bunch of tune up work there, and that jacked the price up. They also replaced free-of-charge the wind deflector for my sunroof … it had cracked in a few places, and apparently Nissan had acknowledged a bad batch of them and were replacing them. Kinda like a recall, I guess, but I never was proactively told about it. (Scenes from Fight Club rush into my head.)

The last part that brought me up to $3k was my $200 replacement drivers side mirror. Grrrrr…. All I need now is a nut-driver to make sure the thing is really truly secured, and I’ll call that a done deal (well, and a bit more waxing and maybe touch up painting.) Grrrr.. That’s the money I didn’t want to spend.

In other news, Bravo has syndicated The West Wing from NBC, and will start showing it tomorrow! They’re doing a 6 hour marathon starting at 10am. Then, on Monday, they’ll start showing the pilot episode, and go through them in order. It airs three times a day – 6pm, 10pm, and like 11 the next morning. Set your TiVos…. Do not miss this show. I really like the TWW; it’s probably the best thing on TV right now. It’s smart, witty, funny, fast acting. It’s really well written and really well performed and I’m stoked I get to watch it daily for the next few months (and they’ll mostly be new episodes to me.) When NBC finally releases them on DVD, you know I’ll be there. I just want to make sure none of you miss this.

Golfing tomorrow, and maybe going up in Marc’s plane… I’m looking forward to that. That, and then going into work later and gutting the backups server, and hoping everything comes back alright. (Mirroring good, fail SCSI controllers bad.)

And I think that’s it. I’m going to start the next Harry Potter book now. G’night!