Thank you on Memorial Day for those who gave all ...

then and the vets who have passed since. Their willingness to lay it on the line allows us to enjoy our lives generally as we see fit, or as the Declaration of Independence states, "...pursuit of happiness".

And in that pursuit, I did a couple of electronic scrap missions this morning and after a while I'll do some more garden work.

I picked up a Sony LCD Projection TV (KDF-500E3000), along with its remote and a spare lamp for free. There's something wrong with it and they wanted it gone after trying to fix it themselves. Not overly heavy but just bulky, was fun getting it in the back seat of my Regal. I looked things up on ebay and remotes for this series of Sony tvs go for $10-20 and people sell a good number of the lamps for $20-30+ range. Potentially, I have 4 lamps that work (counting the one in the box he tried fixing the problem with). Probably worth my 25 mile around trip into town (and I found the tomatoes the wifey wanted) just getting this piece.

But my trip wasn't done. I had been talking to a guy who wanted to get rid of some computer parts (both of these deals came from craiglist "free" stuff ads). This guy ends up living 3 houses from where I grew up so I got to see the old neighborhood again, how's its changed for probably the good and the bad--my old man, who was blind, would probably have gotten a kick to see how big his 2 pin oaks (a rare street tree for Sioux Falls, SD) had grown in the 50+ years he planted them.

Anyway, the guy said he'd take $10 for the whole lot, so I took everything he had but my eyes really lite up (and was happy to give him a Hamilton) when I saw his box of gold memory. Everything in front of the tv in the pixs is from him. I weighed the gold memory on my mail scale and it was 2 1/4 pounds. I think I did pretty decent on my $10 investment as well as seeing the old place again. Everything else after the memory is just gravy!!

Well, off to the garden now...









P.S. My mom and dad would have been married 65 years today. Thanks for being there folks for as long as you were...