Sunday, July 09, 2006

Kaput

This morning, our TV died, just as my friend N and her two-year-old daughter, visiting from the Small State to our south, were watching the Big Red Obsession. No warning, no fuzzing or blurring or other signs of age. One minute a big red dog, the next absolutely frickin' nothing. Luckily, R took it in stride. (Or so I heard. I was still in bed when this occurred, grabbing another hour of sleep while Ess snoozed on top of me.)

Even more luckily, we have another, significantly newer, TV in our bedroom (before you tsk, let me say that it was intentionally not hooked up to cable, so we only used it occasionally for movies). It's going pretty much unused these days, since we put Ess to bed in the co-sleeper at eight or so, then leave the room dark and quiet until we come to bed a few hours later. So the new TV is now in the living room. Being of recent vintage, it is much smaller and sleeker than our 15-year-old behemoth. Combined with the recent removal of the coffeetable so we'd have some more room to play with Ess on the floor, the living room looks gigantic.

The only drawback? We can't figure out how to make the DVD player and the TV talk to each other. (We have a complicated surround sound-system that is also a few years old... enough so the DVD player has outputs for which the TV does not have inputs.) Luckily, this will not interfere with my daily TLC time. But it does put a halt to our viewing of the current season of the Sopranos, on somewhat illicit DVDs, and to D's movie-watching. I suspect the problem is solveable by someone with a bit more savoir faire when it comes to electronics... but at the moment I can't work up the energy to call my dad or my brother-in-law and describe the problem. The energy to complain about it, though? That I have.