The rain spat feverishly from the cool night sky.

Around 7:30pm PST Thursday April 13 my wife wanted to do some grocery shopping and we piled into the car and headed to the local Fred Meyer. Upon entering I sauntered over to the electronics section with our oldest son fully expecting to see the same empty space on the shelf.

And was wrong.

There sat one lonely Xbox 360 green core system. I urged my son, “Quick, go get your mother.” This was a historic event in our dozens of local retail store trips, maybe 100+ (didn’t keep count) since November when the Xbox 360 had been released.

No more among the unsold.

We promptly threw down the $299 + tax knowing full well that the core system was a lousy deal compared to the premium bundle, but since this was the first and only Xbox 360 we had ever seen available for sale in a local store, there was no hesitation. Fred Meyer didn’t have the hard drives so our search was now on. Best Buy was next, but they were out of stock. We were much more confident about finding a hard drive somewhere. The third stop was Toys R’ Us.

Not only did Toys R Us have hard drives but they had a good half dozen core and premium Xbox 360 systems. Oh yeah. The smarter buy was the premium bundle so we threw down for that along with the collector’s edition of Oblivion. Total price after tax: $515 USD and change. Now we had two Xbox 360 systems in the car.

Now here is where you might expect me to say we held the core system for resale on eBay or something like that, but that just didn’t seem right. There are too many in our area among the unsold, the right thing was to take it back.

So back to Fred Meyer’s we went and returned the system, unopened. For about an hour or so we can say we owned two of them.

Got home and took a bunch of pictures and recorded various notes of the unpacking and installation which will be coming over the weekend and beyond. In the last 12 hours or so I’ve only squeezed in a few minutes of gameplay, the kids have been eating up the glory of full on 1080i resolution.

For those hoping and praying I’d shut the hell up about not being able to buy an Xbox 360 anywhere locally yet, rejoice, that great safari has ended.

And now the fun begins …

Did this post make you go hmm?

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