Ok, what a looongg afternoon!

I went to Wally World, they were sold out of most models. Nobody knew anything.

Best Buy was right next door. There were swarms of little techy salespeople. A little gal helped me. Basically, I told her what I wanted and confirmed tht my camcorder would work with Vista, etc... She tried to talk me into some of the others but I told her about the disadvantages of each for my situation.

They had two display models of the one I wanted. One of them was up high, not plugged in, and on close inspection, there were no fingerprints on the touchscreen. I bought that one with an additional 10% discount.

The girl had to round up all the accessories while I played Mahjong on a souped up laptop.

I got the Sony DCR-HC52 for $210.00, that's $40 less than any of the online prices I saw advertised. It's the mini-DV format.

I had to buy the tapes and the firewire cable as well. This has 40x optical zoom, night mode, etc... I was out the door for under $300.

We went to our son's bands performance tonight, and I recorded it all. Right now it's transferring to the computer. I need to work with it tomorrow and see how to format it for emailing out, etc...

So...... SUCCESS!!! DS was thrilled that we were able to be there and that Mom had a nice little camcorder to record them! They had a pretty big crowd watching and got some good applause as well! I was as proud as could be!