... Long live the toob!

I spent a tiny bit of time yesterday researching 21st century televisions. Since I wasn't shopping for a living-room-wall-sized tv, just a "little" 27-32 incher, that basically meant I'd be going with LCD. And since I didn't want to spend too long shopping or researching, it had to be one that Costco carries (since if I don't like it, I can just return it and try another).

After work I rushed to the store and looked around. They had lots of humongous tvs, several 32 inchers and nothing smaller. Ok then, that tells me what size I'm getting! Then I had to decide between the half dozen that they had. The price range was many hundreds of dollars. I wanted to go with a name brand I'd actually heard of, but those were at the top of the price range. The prettiest one also had a built-in dvd player so I eliminated that; one more thing to break down. I had a kid helping me and he kept saying that these sets were on all the time and the picture was still good. Hey, waitaminute! Are these going to burn up after 2 years?? At these prices?? I decided to just ignore that part of his patter.

I ended up with the cheapest one they had, a Vizio. Nope, I'd never heard of them. But, in the store at least, the picture was the best no matter where I stood, it looked good, and the kid said his cousin had one that he used for tv, movies, games, computer stuff, etc. and loved it. Plus, it fit in my car and I could lift the box, pretty important if I didn't want to have to take a sales person home with me.

Got it home, got it out of the box, read the instructions, pulled out the box from my dvd/vcr to look at those instructions, got confused and realized it was time to go run.

We now interrupt this exciting story for a run report. I wondered if anyone would show up at the TnT buddy run. Mentor Marcie, her new fiancee and 2 others were there. My running companion of a couple weeks ago was there so I didn't feel I could just fly out and back on my own. The air was nowhere near as nice as the night before so I was kinda glad that those 2.7 miles took us forever to do. He's decided that 100 paces running and 50 paces walking were the best for him. Since he was obviously counting I didn't talk, he didn't talk, I just followed along at his pace. Yaaaawn. Sorry, but it was pretty boring. We finally finished, stretched, and everyone left. I'm hoping more people start showing up, but I doubt that'll happen.

Fresh eyes helped me when I got home. Even though the set-up didn't make too much sense, I decided to just plug things in and hope for the best. Worst comes to worst I could unplug and start all over again! But it worked! Yay me! Because I've got a splitter on my cable (which is analog because I'm not in love with the whole Comcastic thing) I have it hooked to both the dvd/vcr and to the tv. I hooked the audio output directly from the tv to my ancient stereo. So for the first time I only need to turn on the television and the stereo (before I needed the vcr on for the sound to run through it); I can tape something and watch another; the picture is fabulous, the sound is great; I have a bunch of channels I didn't have before (mostly audio); and I have a couple of high def channels. Gotta love this whole technology thing! I'm almost happy my old toob bit the dust!

And just in time for a wonderful episode of Veronica Mars. You've GOTTA start watching this program!