Remember all that blizzard news you read about Colorado on Sunday? Yeah, well, it melted already. You won't see that on Fox. Oh, the bigger drifts are still around, and the big piles the neighborhood kid made shoveling our driveway are still big piles – but they're all smaller. Most every place with actual weather likes to joke, "Don't like it, then wait a minute." But around here, it's the real deal. If I'd have had worn a heavier shirt, I would have taken the top down today, too.

Still, Melissa took a snow day. When she got up at Oh Dark Thirty, there was an unmelted, unshoveled two-foot drift in front of the garage door. She could either call in to work – where hardly anyone else was going to show up – or wake my nightowl self up and ask me to shovel.

No surprise which option she chose. I'm grumpy in the morning – and that's at eight AM. At six, fuggidabouddit.

She got stuff done around the house she's been meaning to do, but didn't want to waste a weekend day doing. I didn't get much done at all, because I'm not used to having another human body here during working hours.

Yes, I know fatherhood will change all that. But while I'm cutting myself some slack, you should, too. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Spent my time doing piddly things, like getting all my Internet shortcuts re-arranged. When the link list in any given subfolder is longer than your screen, it's time to get organized. What did I discover? That for the first time maybe ever, the majority of my links directly involve spending money.

There's a "Shopping" folder, with links to Amazon and such. But there's also a Food folder, to places like Dean & Delucca, a store where I can find stuff I can't find here in town. There's a folder for Cars, one labeled Software, and another dedicated to online camera shopping. Oh, and Music and Clothes, too. And one for Household Items.

I have links to Consumer Reports, Epinions, Ken Rockwell's photo reviews, and… you get the point. When I'm not spending my time (and time is money) blogging on the web, then I'm spending my money there more directly.

What the hell happened?

The Internet used to be the place I went to read about the things I'd already bought, to find reinforcement for my buying decision. (And if that's not a metaphor for blogging, then I'm not wearing pajamas. OK, I'm not actually wearing PJs, but a joke's a joke. Anyway.) Sometime around 1999, I set up an Amazon account. Used it for books (sometimes), music (rarely), and all my DVDs. Now I'm buying camera lenses there which cost more than I used to make all summer. And I'm doing it sight unseen.

There's a level of trust on the anonymous Internet you usually only find with certain family members and very dear friends. How'd that happen?

I have an idea how it happened, but I can tell you for sure how it started.

One of the first things I bought on Amazon was a CD box set as a Chanukah gift for my Grandfather Green. It was a hard-to-find item, one I'd been trying to get for a couple years already. Two minutes on Amazon beat two years of hitting every record store on the Front Range. Proud, I told Granpa what I'd done. The conversation that followed, I think, sums up how trust developed on the Internet.

Granpa: You gave your credit card number to a machine?

Me: Yeah.

Granpa: How could you do that?

Me: You order things on the phone, right?

Granpa: Right.

Me: You're giving your number to some minimum wage employee with access to Neiman's entire stock. I gave mine, scrambled, to a computer without an axe to grind. You tell me which is safer.

Granpa laughed, and that was that.

Meanwhile, the trust grew. It's easy to buy a book or a CD/DVD online – you know what you're getting. But now I -- me, a very tactile shopper -- am buying clothes online. Stuff I used to have to touch, now I just click and get. I trust my e-merchants so much, that I'm sure they won't sell me crap. And if they do, I trust them well enough to take it back – without too many questions, either.

Want to know a secret? Couple years ago, I got Melissa a Pocket PC for Christmas. Getting it set up for her, I dropped it on the hardwood floor, and killed the thing. This was on Christmas. I'd bought it two months earlier. And yet Amazon took it back and replaced it without even charging me for shipping – all in violation of their 30-day return policy.

Try doing that at Dillard's, where the sales clerk looks at you funny, and double-checks and triple-scans that stupid yellow barcode sticker, just to make sure you're not some petty criminal.

What it comes down to is, Amazon trusts me. Dillard's doesn't. And though I'd really like to touch those new pants before I buy them, most often now I buy them online. Sight unseen, touch unfelt.

They trust me. Therefore, I trust them.

The shortcuts don't lie.