The New TV

We bought a new TV this weekend, Mariah and I. We went out to Target intending to return some things, look at some others, and maybe look at the TVs. We've been talking about a new TV for a while--the one we had was bought at Sears in 1989 (maybe early 1990), and had decided to provide its own letterboxing for almost everything. Only the letterbox simply cut off the top of the picture. It was great for watching people hit ground balls, not so good for anything else. The debates were amusing--no one had a head. Sometimes the head appeared but the neck was somehow folded so the head just sat on top of the foreshortened body. You get the idea. It was unreliable. Frustratingly, it would sometimes work for hours in a row, then inexplicably shrink the picture just as you were getting used to the idea that it might work. That finally got old. Especially when Mariah just began borrowing my computer to watch DVDs.

We didn't get the TV at Target. They have lots of cheap TVs, any one of which would probably have been just fine, but they are huge. To get a TV with a 20+ inch screen anymore it seems you have to be willing to have something, oh, three or four feet deep. We have a small living room. We wanted something not so huge. We wanted the TV not to take over the living room, not to be the focal point. These big hulking things would have demanded attention, would have dominated the room.

So, in an irony that is lost on none of us, we ended up buying a far pricier flat-panel TV at Circuit City. Yes, we spent more than twice as much money on a TV than we needed to, because we don't want TV to be too important. Um, right. Anyway it's really cute and you can see the whole picture and it's not too obtrusive. And it's a good thing Mark and I are both working, so we can pay for things like this. It's also a good thing, I think, that he was busy on Saturday when Mariah and I went out--we made the decision all by ourselves, and though it took trips to four stores, we were still relatively efficient and decisive. That might not have been the case if we'd all gone together.

We still need a new refrigerator (this one is over ten years old, but we're not quite sure how much more...because we can't remember, not because we didn't buy it ourselves). And a new stove, probably--we've been in this house ten years now, and the stove was surely nowhere near new when we moved in. But the stove is the least of our worries--it's merely ugly, while the fridge is dripping inside and will probably not keep things cold much longer. Blecch.