Wot I dun this weekend

• Got tired of the old DVD player skipping, so I picked up a new one with more features than I can shake a stick at (and surprisingly affordable, too). I still have my Dolby 6-channel goodness, plus the ability to play VCDs, MP3 CDs, DVD(+|-)Rs, and DivX ;-) on CD. Added bonus: it's got such a low profile that both it and the receiver I've had for a year now fit perfectly into the bottom shelf of the steel rolling cabinet that I found in a hallway with "Free to a good home" on it lo these many years ago. (This had been a longtime annoyance, since I'd gone to the trouble of borrowing a hole saw from ti94's dad and drilling a 3" hole in the back of the cabinet, only to discover that the old DVD player and the receiver were too tall to fit.) Thus, I was able to get rid of the cardboard box in the living room that the AV components had been sitting on, and the living room as a whole looks much, much nicer.
• Laundry. All of it. Well, except for the clothes I was wearing yesterday, and two loads aren't folded, but I feel virtuous anyway.
• Took possession of kehkhmet's Vespa, which she couldn't take to England with her. OMG, this thing is fun. Okay, so it can't keep up with the Head Minion's Gold Wing, but it's just fine for riding around town, especially since most of the roads around here are 25mph anyway. So far I've driven it around the block a few times and to Radio Shack and back. On Monday I'll actually get plates for it. And, hey, now I can get my amateur callsign as a license plate without having to give up my existing geeky license plate number!
• Picked up plywood and 2x4s for substructure for the DDR hard pads that the Head Minion wants to build. In doing so, we discovered that:
  • A sheet of plywood does not fit in a Saturn
  • Lowe's has free twine if you need to tie plywood to the roof of your car
  • 2x4s fit in a Saturn, but you need someone in the passenger seat to hold them away from the gearshift
  • The trunk lock assembly chooses exceptionally inopportune times (e.g., when the car is full of 2x4s which can only be removed via the trunk) to stop working. Fortunately, the bottom latch is held on to the body by a mere two bolts, which were only hand-tight, so getting into the trunk to get it open wasn't that hard, but replacing it will be ... interesting.
• Finished my oscillator. Well, mostly. It isn't in an enclosure, and I don't like the key I have for it (it's a miniature lever switch), but it oscillates very nicely. (Yes, I am dead chuffed over something that beeps when I press a switch, because the audio element is a speaker, not a buzzer, which means that the beeping comes from the circuitry I put together and not something a buzzer-manufacturer put together. Okay, so I'm easily amused.) I'll sort out the enclosure thing when I know how I'm going to integrate the oscillator into the CW rig that's the next project, and I'll figure out something for a key once I know what I'm going to do about the enclosure. Funny how that works.

This must be what people who have weekends feel like!