Naughty Girl

As you may have already surmised, last night was a very late one for us. As in, we didn’t eat dinner until after 10 PM. After my two appointments, we spent over an hour pacing the floor in Best Buy, looking at flat panel TVs. This idea started a couple of days ago when we realized that the TV in our bedroom is really fuzzy. I never noticed it until I hooked up the new PS2 to it and saw how much ambient noise was on the screen. Not cool.

We briefly discussed looking at replacements for the TV, which devolved evolved into a discussion about replacing our TV downstairs. Because of the dimensions of our family room and where the furniture is placed, we are only about 10 feet or so from the TV. This limited our choices when we last bought a new TV for the room about 4 years ago. I’ve been thinking for a while that the only way to go bigger is to get a flat screen TV (LCD or plasma) and mount it on the wall.

So, we stopped at Best Buy on the way home last night to take a look at the demo TVs. We spent an hour staring from one TV to another, trying to discern small (and not so small) differences. The most informative occurrence was when the rain storm started to degrade the store’s satellite signal, so the picture was breaking up. With the signal dropping off and coming back in, some TVs were faster than others at catching up when they received bits of signal. Some were slower. And some TVs, much to our dismay, blacked out completely. They just couldn’t handle it. I’m talking high end TVs that cost a few thousand dollars here. VERY good information to know and not something that you would necessarily figure out until you had it home. Since we have satellite TV, this is actually a key finding.

I finally convinced Terry that I don’t want to spend half of our tax refund (which hasn’t arrived yet, since we just filed the other day) on a TV that we don’t really need because our existing set in the family room still functions quite well. However, I did have a real itch to replace the TV in our bedroom and we had been there so long that Terry said he felt obligated to actually buy something. So, we bought a 32″ LCD that was on sale at the time. The picture is nice and crisp (Terry, of course, had to put the stand together and install it in our armoire before we even ate dinner) and all is well. The money will come out of the tax refund when it arrives. I am so terrible sometimes with wanting instant gratification!

I really have no excuses left to not play DDR on the new PS2 and dance my way back into shape…