Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Going Hi-Def, Slowly

There was a note from Ashley taped to the television when we got home from Santa Barbara saying that the television hates her. She said that since Sunday she could only get sound, but no picture.

We have a confusing television set-up which drive ME to tears sometimes, and I've been working with it for several years. I just figured that she had pushed the wrong button, though I didn't remember encountering that particular problem before.

But I did what I always do when the TV starts acting weird, I sat down in a chair with 3 remotes in my hand and scientifically began to push buttons at random, with no idea what I was doing.

I also unplugged the TV and the cable box, 'cause that's what they tell you to do. I don't know why, but I always do what they tell me to do. (I assume that is the television version of rebooting, or kicking it or something)

Anyway, with a lot of button pushing, I was finally able to recreate Ashley's problem--sound and no picture. That was the best I was able to get it.

Now, this isn't anything Ashley did, I don't believe. We have been getting a lot of "halos" on the screen for over a year and I have just assumed it was a sign that the thing was on the way out.

"We could find someplace to take it to be fixed," Walt said, kind of half-heartedly. I told him I didn't know if people even fixed televisions any more (especially ones that will require a cable box after February 19, 2009). We finally decided to go TV-shopping at the newly opened Costco.

When you enter Costco you are greeted with a veritable WALL of television sets.

TV sets are like olives. Have you ever seen a can of "small" olives? of course not. The smallest olive you can buy is "large" and they go on up through gigantic or something like that. So the "small" TV in the wall of sets we were looking at was 5" larger than the "huge" TV set sitting without picture in our family room. And of course the price was comparable. I don't remember how much we paid for our 32" set, but I suspect that we were looking to at least double that cost, no matter what we bought. Then, of course, there were the sets on which you could probably show a first run movie in a theatre and have nobody complain about it being too small. For those you had to take out a mortgage on your house, or sell your first born son.

Fortunately, we have no place big enough to put a set that big--and we kinda like our first born son.

Walt suggested we go to Wal Mart to compare prices. I wasn't too keen on going to Wal Mart, just on general principles, but I did agree to at least look. We found one we kind of liked there, but Walt had forgotten to measure exactly how much space we had, so we drove back home, measured the space, drove back to Costco and the one we had chosen at Wal Mart was gone. They had only had one Vizio TV and in the hour since we left, they had sold it. (They aren't going to carry it any more.) But they did offer to sell us the floor model and we went with that.

The last time we bought a TV at Costco, it was so heavy we could barely lift it, it was such a tight squeeze to get it in the car that we had to uncrate it in the parking lot and I remember riding home with my knees practically in my stomach because we had to move my seat up so far (and I have knees that don't want to bend--even that long ago).

This time Walt picked the TV up by himself and we put it in the trunk of the car. Yes, there have been big changes in the past 10 years or so!

I had a meeting to go to and was already late, so he dropped me off at the meeting and came home to read the instructions. (He couldn't actually put the TV in until I came home because it would take two of us to lift the old one off of the shelf where it is.)

When I got home, my first way to be "helpful" was to put a new lightbulb in a lamp which had a burned out bulb. We were switching from regular light bulbs to those weird eco-friendly fluorescent bulbs. But the lamp was in an odd position and in trying to twist the bulb around so it would go into the socket, I dropped it. It broke. Walt shouted "DON'T TOUCH IT!" He said that the mercury was poisonous (I remembered as a kid playing with mercury whenever we had a thermometer that broke).

I decided that the best help I could be would be to get out of the way where I couldn't break anything else. An hour later Walt, with face mask and rubber gloves, was still cleaning up the floor before he could even think about setting up the new TV.

By the time it was all cleaned up, it was after 9 p.m. I asked if he'd rather have dinner first, and he said that yes, he'd rather have dinner...then admitted that he wasn't going to be able to get the TV put up tonight.

So, as the evening ends, we are still TV-less (or, rather, Walt is watching on the upstairs TV and I'm watching on the little set in my office) and we are hoping that in the morning he can finally get the new TV set up before I go off to a writing group gathering.

(All this to watch Boston Legal and Monk reruns!)

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