Well, I made (for me) a big purchase this afternoon.

I had got one of those 10% coupons from Target (if you spend $1000 - I guess that's it - on their visa card over a matter of however long - you get one. And - just so you know - I pay the bill off in full every month. Yes, I know that store credit cards have insane interest rates. But it doesn't matter if you can pay it off each month).

I had thought of just letting it lapse - it was good until early in November but I couldn't particularly think of anything I needed.

And then I remembered that I had put aside money a while back for a dvd player. I had originally planned on going to Best Buy for it, but why not Target? I had never bought one, mainly because I was kind of paralyzed by the different options and also by the question of whether it would work with my 10-year-old tv.

So I decided today to give it a try, assuming that if the jacks were very different, I could get some kind of adaptor cable.

But the nice guy in the electronics department asked me: does the back of your tv have a yellow jack and a white jack? I said yeah (having had looked at my tv). Okay then, he said, this will work fine with it. (And he was right - I got it hooked up and working, no trouble).

So I went down there and picked one out. It's sort of a midrange model - it's a Phillips and it claims to play a "variety" of disc formats. It was cheaper than I had budgeted for (even more so with the 10% off) so I bought a couple of dvds to go with it. (I already had Chicken Run and the Wallace and Grommit movie - both gifts from my brother who had forgot I didn't already own a dvd player. I could have watched them on my computer, but that's not as comfortable).

I did wind up buying Groundhog Day - which is one of my favorite movies ever - it was on sale, marked down to $7 (as cheap as a movie ticket!). And - and this was a big purchase for me and I spent a long time debating it but finally bought it - the first season of My Name is Earl. (It was about $32 with the discount). I figured: I hadn't seen all the episodes yet (my life frequently takes me away from home on Thursday nights and I never felt like bothering to tape it). And even the ones I had, they were funny enough and good enough to want to see again. And it's a good thing to have - to be able to pop in an episode when I come home dead-beat from the day and just need to laugh for 20 minutes or so.

(And there's a very odd pleasure for me in watching it with the French subtitles turned on. Probably because of my high school training, I think of French as a very sophisticated, erudite, and literary language. And to see Crab Man's words translated as "Voila la bouffe" ["Here's the food" - bouffe is kind of rude French for food, it's more like our "grub"] is kind of odd and funny. And I can review my French!)

And at any rate: good insurance against the nights when I just want to zone out with something visual but there's nothing good on tv.

And I also suspect (though I haven't had reason to check before this) that my University library probably has dvds of things like Shakespeare plays and maybe even opera that you can check out and watch. And maybe cool dvds showing places like the Galapagos islands that my fear and loathing of travel and discomfort will never let me physically go to.

I don't plan to join Netflix just yet; my life - my evenings - are unpredictable enough that I don't think the $10 monthly deal or whatever it is would pay off - I might have months when I could get a total of two discs watched - but I do have a rental place just 3 blocks from me and literally on my way home from work.

And I can get yoga dvds, and maybe some instructional dvds (I want to learn conversational Spanish one of these days), and all that.

And this will make it easy for family members at a loss of what to get me for my birthday or Christmas; I can compile a list of the movies I'd like to have copies of and give it to them.

I will admit I thought, briefly, of getting a Sirius receiver instead - it would have been more for the whole deal (I would have needed speakers too) than for the dvd player and dvds. And I also thought briefly of being the Little Pig and getting both. But I didn't, partly because I figured the thought of spending that much money at once on something "frivolous" would make me come out in hives. But also because I can get the receiver later on sometime. But mainly because I don't want to dilute the pleasure by having too many new toys to play with at once - if that makes sense - I'd like to save the happiness of getting satellite radio for a time when the happiness of FINALLY having invested in a dvd player has worn off somewhat.