Well, as I expected, there WAS a casualty of our vacation... the horrible smell from the refrigerator last night was, in fact, because the motor died while we were gone and the contents of the freezer, including about a ton of ice and two tons of frozen beef, had thawed and leaked into the fridge compartment. So we got to spend a large portion of the afternoon throwing away most of its contents and sponging the meat juice out with a rag and bucket. Fortunately, the only fridge at Best Buy with a decent-sized compartment, adjustable shelves that don't take up most of the space, and no water dispenser in the door was also the cheapest. Who would have thought it? I set up a delivery appointment for Saturday, which will hopefully be in the morning, because we've got a U-verse installation in the afternoon, and while I don't expect that the install will require any space in the kitchen, or that the fridge delivery will leave the entrance hall/kitchen area, but if the U-verse guy needs to get in and out, it'll be through the space where fridges are moving. Awkward. However, it gives me a bit more excuse to stay home tomorrow - I still have stuff to put away from the trip, checks to mail, purchases to record in my spreadsheet, and now, a delivery to arrange. They're supposed to call sometime tomorrow. On the plus side, this makes cleaning out the fridge for Curt's imminent departure slightly less of a chore, and we were going to throw away most of that food, if not all of it, anyway. And now I'll have a shiny new fridge to have to take care of, and if we can manage a quick speed-clean mid-delivery, less stinky crap behind it.

Since we needed to get to Best Buy for the fridge anyway, and Saturday was going to be pretty full, we hit Borders as well for the usual weekend anime and manga shopping. The end result: the second half of School Rumble season 2, Tsubasa DVD 10, and How I Met Your Mother season 1, price-matched to Target's $15 cost. Manga-wise, I picked up Skip Beat 16, Saiyuki Reload 9, Kujibiki Unbalance 2 (surprisingly, that's all there is, but then, the anime was short), Strawberry 100% 7, High School Debut 7, Elemental Gelade 10, Castle of Dreams, and due to the buy 1, get 1 half off sale, Hitohira 1. Castle of Dreams is a particularly interesting one... it's a series of short stories by the author of Kare Kano. Those of us who didn't make the mistake of watching the anime and failing to follow it up by reading the manga got to see the actual content of the school play in book 9, "Steel Snow". The anime gave it a lot of buildup and never actually delivered, but the story in the manga was surprisingly deep, especially considering that it was a story within a story. Even THAT had plenty of layers, as it managed to capture aspects of all of the story threads in the main story and speak to each of the main characters in a way that expanded on both the characters and the situations. Heck, watching Arima's reaction to the play was almost as much a part of the experience as the play itself! And that's just half of one of the 21 books in the complete series. Masami Tsuda's story was amazing on so many levels, and I hope Gainax are ashamed of themselves for screwing it up so badly (and aside from the ending and the unforgiveable number of recap episodes, it really wasn't a BAD series... it just never got to the good stuff and didn't even TRY to have an ending). Castle of Dreams is a collection of short stories by her. How can you pass that up? Despite having a manga queue so tall that even with another day off, I STILL don't imagine I'm going to get to my FIVE manga magazines any time soon, I've got to have that. I'll read it eventually. Honest.

Then I bought the Commander Keen collection from Steam. I saved a whopping fifty cents. It's a lot harder than I remember, probably because my memory sucks. I forgot about one of my favorite secrets until Curt reminded me about it. This is why I need to get back to beating Prince of Persia, which Yahtzee has finally reviewed, and once again, he's spot on. I neglected to buy a decent UMD carrying case or a very strong deodorizing agent while I was out, but depending on when the call comes tomorrow, I should be able to get those on my own. It's going to be a work day, even if I'm not going to work.