I had a wonderful day off yesterday!

I met with my friend Dean for coffee, and we went to the mall so I could buy my "business casual" clothes for my new job. We also picked up his stretched canvas painting at a local frame shop.

Then I met with my friends Amy and Lisa for a late lunch, stopped by the scrapbook store to pick up my pictures (and a few new hot papers), and headed on over to pick up my husband from work.

We went to "the geek's mecca" - otherwise known as Fry's. I needed a new external hard drive, and he wanted to look at fax machines. So we braved the big store and found what we were looking for: a 300GB external hard drive from Seagate, a new cel phone, a couple of geeky computer books, and a memory card for my husband's PDA.

I've now got my new cel phone charged and ready to use Yahoo IM. So, while I was at the mall yesterday, I stopped by the T-Mobile store and asked how much it would cost to buy a new phone, without adding a year or two onto my current month to month contract. The salesperson pointed at the invoice price. I looked, and the very basic (no camera, no music player) cel phone I wanted was $179. No thanks. Fast forward to Fry's. Fry's is an authorized dealer of T-Mobile services (and Cingular and a couple of others). They have the EXACT same phone I wanted at the store, in a *prepaid to go* phone package. Price? $59.99. They verified that all I'd need to do is insert my existing SIM card (instead of the prepaid SIM card) in the slot, and I'd be good to go. So I got it - at a 1/3rd of the price the retail store wanted me to pay for the same package. Hmmmm.

Here's the book I picked up:

Photoshop CS2 Workflow