Baby Got Back

My lovely wife returned home to me on Thursday afternoon, after having spent three months away on medical rotations in Clarksburg. That's the longest we've been apart since our wedding day, though in truth the longest time we ever went without seeing one another during that three month stretch was for 3 weeks back in August.

She popped into the "liberry" on her way back in Thursday afternoon to surprise me and laugh at my hair, or the lack thereof. It was great to see her. It felt strange, though, because she smelled different to me than I'm used to. Not bad at all, but definitely something different. I thought maybe it was residual 60's Smell from having lived in that Brady Bunch house for that long. Turns out, though, it was because she'd switched to Gain laundry detergent and my nose is used to Surf.

As an added bonus to my Thursday, my copy of the Firefly DVD box set FINALLY came in, so we spent our weekend watching episodes of that show, among other activities.

It's been an ordeal getting that DVD set. I originally ordered it back on September 8, from Amazon's Marketplace. The seller, (Media For Less out of Gulf Shores, AL), described the set as brand new and unopened and the price was right so I ordered it and expected it would be in my hands within a few days. A few days turned into two weeks with still no Firefly. I finally went back to Amazon and looked at the seller's feedback rating, which I should have done in the first place. There were lots of complaints against them. Of course, there was also lots of high praise for them, so they seemed to be an intermittently bad seller at worst.

My theory on this was that Media For Less was the on-line outlet for a retail store. If their stock sold in their store, they might not remember to remove it from its Amazon listing and would subsequently ignore any inquiries about those items from the people who ordered them. Pretty crappy business ethic, but again it was only a theory based on the kind of negative feedback they were getting. Most of it spoke of receiving no merchandise and either no replies from the seller or rude replies from the seller. I figured I was going to have to file a grievance. Even so, I wanted to go ahead and try to contact them just so I'd have a paper trail. I sent them an e-mail asking the status of my order.

For a week I heard nothing from them, which made me just as mad as you'd expect. I wanted to just go ahead and order the set again, figuring there was no way Media For Less would actually send it. Then again, as soon as I ordered it from someone else, I knew what would magically appear in my mailbox. So I stewed for a week, irritated that according to Amazon I had to wait until October 3 before I could even file a claim. Then, on Sept 23, Media For Less wrote me back.

They wrote:

"we are closing this business . we are located in gulf shores alabama, and just took a direct hit from hurricane ivan , we are just now able to answer any emails, besides extensive damage we were without power until today and all our product has been lost - if you have not made an a-z claim at amazon on this yet go ahead and do that , we will be refunding all lost merchandise due to the hurricane from the a-z claim."

I was sorry to hear they'd lost their business, but was actually rather happy that they weren't sending the order cause now I could order it again. I checked all the Marketplace listings for the Firefly set, but most of the least expensive ones were located in Florida. Not willing to take another gamble on Ma' Nature, I just ordered it from Amazon directly.

The wife and I have only watched six of the 14 episodes so far, but I'm even more in love with this series than I was upon first seeing it at Dragon Con. The wife likes it a lot too. Unfortunately, we won't get to watch any more of it until she comes home again. See, even though she just spent three months away from home, she also scheduled a near month-long rotation in Princeton, WV, starting today, so she had to leave again. (That's okay, though, cause after she gets back she'll have at least 6 months of rotations here at home and has several weeks of vacation time scheduled in Nov, Dec and Jan.) She made me promise I wouldn't watch anymore episodes without her.

I did promise that.

I did not, however, promise not to watch the commentaries.