Is it Christmas yet?

Zach's birthday is in November and this year we decided to spring for a big gift, one to cover Christmas as well. An mp3 player. He chose a Zen 30GB player from Creative. Only trouble was, they were out of stock everywhere.

January 3 I got email from Creative announcing they were back in stock. I ordered one.
January 6 It was shipped.
January 8 It arrived. It didn't work. It was a brick.
January 9 I emailed back and forth with customer service to convince them it was bricked.
January 10 Creative issued an RMA.
January 11 I sent the unit to OK for service or replacement. We paid shipping.
January 28 The replacement was shipped
February 1 It arrived. It was the wrong player. A smaller, cheaper player. It did, however, work.
February 2 I emailed customer support.
February 4 Creative issued the super-duper Advanced RMA --- will ship new unit and a prepaid shipping label to return the wrong one.
February 6 I got email notification that the RMA has been shipped. UPS tracking system doesn't have it yet.

Then there was the December 21 xkcd.com T-shirt order. Zach needs new shirts, he loves xkcd and the mp3 player was not coming yet. Something to open on Christmas? January 16 I got a weaselly apology from Paypal and a more straightforward one from xkcd. It was Paypal's fault but they erred in not contacting us sooner. T shirts arrived January 23rd. (A big hit, too.)

Then we realized Zach's ski pants from last year were a no show. He must have outgrown them so we would have passed them along. SierraTradingPost has quality merchandise at good prices. When I ordered the pants, the website said that a Medium was size 28-30. Sounded like they ran pretty small, but I've always had good shopping experience with SierraTradingPost. They arrived. They are huge. I contacted the friendly customer service. She said "Well, I am looking at the on-line catalog right now and the Mediums are 30-32." Was I going nuts? I got her to check and she called back to say that the catalog folks had "recently updated the sizing." Sigh. The new pants have left the warehouse and UPS expects delivery Friday February 8.

Other news: I've been either too busy or too sick or too boring to blog. Busy includes the bookstore, paperwork for the Board From Hell (yes, I am still in it. According to Mayor Greg's memo, I do my noble-citizen-duty until October 2009) and other things as well, including planning a two week trip to Japan for April. Franz has done a lot of the work, but it still has taken both of us many hours of internet sleuthing to line up accommodations and travel details. I have not knit much, the VLT shawl still needs a few more border repeats and one more corner turned. My last day at the bookstore is next week (yay!) Week after that is mid-winter break and we are going to Utah to ski (double yay!)

Odds and ends: I get so many hits on my blog from folks looking for the Triangle Shawl calculations, that if you Google "trapezoid formula" my blog post shows up on the first page of results.

I'm good at voting but have never attended a caucus. (Recall, I grew up in the last bastion of Taxation without Representation, otherwise known as Our Nation's Capital.) This year I got talked into volunteering to chair our precinct's caucus. It ought to be a zoo. Wish me luck.