what the....?

an odd thing happened today.

it seems i've won something.

when i wandered home after babysitting last night, SO rolled over long enough to tell me there'd been a love note from fed ex on our door when he'd arrived home from work.

we never have anything delivered by fed ex.

however, since SO's birthday is rapidly approaching, we figured it must've been an early birthday present of some sort.

it was decided that i'd retrieve the package after the birthday party i was heading off to after work. after all, i could just toss it into the car on my way home.

or so i thought.

when i wandered into the leasing office and told the employee that i had been sent to retrieve the package, we looked through all the small packages in the closet. nothing.

so, then we looked at the medium sized boxes...and then i noticed this large white box in the lobby.

yep- you guessed it. my name was on the address label.

i checked the return address. funny, i hadn't ordered anything extra from avon. there must've been some sort of mistake.

since there was no way this big ol' box was going to fit into my little zx2 (as if i was actually going to be able to drag it to my car anyway), i drove back to the apartment in search of SO and his larger vehicle. while he was waking up from his slumber, i grabbed a roll of tape, figuring that there was no point in hauling the box home if its contents were unwanted.....and i could simply tape it back together and leave a note for ups to return the whole happy heap to avon.

i'm still considering it.

i have only won something once before. when i was much younger, i drew a poster promoting the "new" apple IIgs. (i think those were the right letters. at any rate, the machine's obsolete now.) in return for my entry, apple sent me a poster of the computer's keyboard. (i won fifth place, though i preferred the prize for sixth- a hat or t shirt or whatever sort of apparel it was seemed far more useful.)

anyway, since i had no real use for the poster (we were raised on ibms), i donated it to the computer lab at my elementary school.

well, once again it seems i've won something i have no real use for.

i'm still not quite sure how i managed to do it, but i won a tv.

to be a little more specific, i now have a rather large box in my living room. inside that box is another box. inside that box is a 20" sylvania "pure flat screen" color tv/dvd player.

i neither need nor want it.

i hate to sound ungrateful, but i have no use for it. we have two tvs only one of which is even hooked up....and that one gets very little use, because i'm never home to watch it, and when SO is home, he's generally either asleep or in front of the computer.

furthermore, getting rid of one of our tvs in favor of this new one would not exactly be an upgrade.

so, the question has become, "what am i going to do with this thing?"

my first thought was to donate it to the hurricane katrina refugees that are being housed in our complex, but i'm sure tvs have already been provided to them.

my second thought was to hold some sort of raffle and use the tv to drum up a little more avon business.

i am still trying to figure out what to do. in the meantime, i have another horizontal surface in the living room on which to pile my worldly possessions.

right in front of one of the tvs we hardly ever use.