The banks make it way too easy for me to spend money I don't have. Last week Discover phoned and nearly begged me to use my card more often. They offered me bonus rewards and special rates, and I think they also said they had a secret plan to end the war (although I might have heard that one somewhere else).

It's no great imposition on me to spend money. I love to do it, whether I have any or not. Most of the time I can keep myself under control. I've made bargains with myself over this challenge. I've even made new year's resolutions, and kept them. Seriously, it takes more than incentive-based marketing to make me spend money when I don't have it. (Which is most of the time lately.)

However, sometimes there's just no way out. I can live with a refrigerator that's too small. I know, because I've done it for years. I can't take a stereo system that fails to bring in da noise, though. For three whole days, my right side speakers have been silent. I checked various connections between the TV, DVR, VCR and DVD, and it turned out that my receiver was the culprit. My A/V receiver, that is.

Thus, I needed a new receiver. Some things become necessities by filling needs you wouldn't have if those things didn't exist. A functioning sound system sustains me in a way that even a larger (and better stocked) refrigerator could never do.

It's amazing that I waited three days to sneak off to the Big Electronics Store, but I wanted to do some research first. I found the best receiver I couldn't afford, then downgraded a notch to one that would do the job. Today I went and bought it, without having to deal with a salesperson at all.

This thing has so many features, so many inputs and outputs and settings, that it will be months before I learn to use them all. To be honest, that's part of the charm. That helps me get my money's worth.

I can't give you the recipe, because I made it up as I went along. Some kind of chicken (with pimientos, garlic, onions and golden raisins) on a bed of buttery saffron rice. It's a variation on Rachael's Chicken for Almodovar.

I'm satisfied I made the right choice for the simple reason that it works! I've been through so many heartaches with defective equipment lately that I would have settled for "it works" and left it at that. But it works better than the old one did, even when it was new. The sound of tonight's Giants-Dodgers game was bright and lively. Not quite like being there, but in this case I wouldn't have wanted to be there anyway.

The commercials were still too loud, though.