Back to the kitchen

Today is R's birthday, a fact he tries to ignore, forbidding any parties or celebration, on pain of pouting. I usually ignore this dictum because it seems to me so silly. Though I have not in fact thrown a party for him in some time (I remember one time I surprised him with a beach party, lugging numerous chairs and food to the beach without a car, somehow), but I do usually get him some kind of gift. Today I got him one of those old-fashioned looking multi-media music centers because he likes to transfer his old LPs to tape, and now needs to transfer them to CD. Although the computer has a CD writer, he doesn't have a turntable. This machine I bought him has a turntable, CD writer and player, tape player, AM FM radio and port for an MP3 player. It was not cheap, but I had a coupon that yielded quite a good discount--maybe 30%--off the $200. price, a price that was much lower than that for comparable machines I had seen elsewhere. So he reluctantly said he liked it and thought it was a thoughtful gift, though he made me promise not to buy him anymore gifts for a whole year.