Escape from Aurora

We are at the brand new Wal-Mart in Longmont, Colorado (map).

We are glad to have finally escaped Aurora, even if we have no DirecTV receivers to show for our extra time there. The post office has, apparently, lost them. We finally extracted a promise that, if they turn up, they will be forwarded to us wherever we happen to be.

So we now have the original eBay seller on alert to look for the package, since it may have been "returned to sender," and we have the post office going back through scanner records to see if they can figure out exactly who scanned it as "delivered," which might reveal exactly where this alleged delivery may have occurred.

In the meantime, we're out $24 and we still have no working TV service. Neither of which disturbs me as much as the prospect of starting all over from scratch: finding a pair of receivers identical to our own for, say, $20, from a seller who will ship to an unconfirmed address, then nailing down a post office where we can be certain to pick them up. It's possible that these stars won't align again until we're in Gillette a full month from now. That's another month I'll have to persuade DirecTV to knock off our bill, since we're not actually getting any service.

No matter -- life goes on. Today we will visit our friends Beth and Flash in Fort Collins, just about an hour north of here. I expect by tomorrow night we'll be in Wyoming.