1/4/08 The Mistress

There's a new family member in our house. One that Tony loves more than anyone else, including me, his mother, and Nikolai Khabibulin combined. I'll give you a hint: it's 42" across the diagonal, picks up HD, and is currently mounted to my living room wall. Oh yes, we are now the proud new owners of a flat screen TV, and Tony's little heart swells with adoration every time he looks at it. It all started innocently enough. We went to see Tony's family at Thanksgiving, and his Dad had remodeled the family room, complete with snazzy flat screen TV. And Tony longed for such a TV, all huge and...well, huge, but unless we came into an unexpected sum of money, it was not to be. And so we admired the monster TV, and then mentally filed that under the "Nice, but never happening" category. (At least I did). And life was good. Then lo and behold, we came into an unexpected sum of money! Tony got a really nice Christmas bonus. Nicer than he expected (although completely deserved if you consider all those Saturdays that he had to work), and The House of Quirk rejoiced, and then settled down to figure out how to spend it. Tony immediately wanted to buy a flat screen tv ("A big one!") but it wouldn't fit in the entertainment center that we have now, and we didn't have room in the living room to get another one (plus I was hoping that the tv thing was just a phase, and that he really wanted to invest that money in some respectable stocks and bonds). But a new TV was the only thing Tony talked about, and it was his Christmas bonus, so we agreed to invest half of it and buy a tv with some of the other half). I rearranged the furniture to make room on a blank wall, and we agreed that the tv would hang on the wall instead of taking up additional floor space with a new table. (I'm turning the space where the old tv went in my entertainment center into additional hidden pullout shelves for dvds. I'm in the process of designing and building it now, and it'll be pretty cool if I do say so myself.) Oh! and we got a new coffee table/ottoman to balance out the new furniture arrangement, which is nice. Very feng shui.

The tv in question is a 42" LCD TV, came from Best Buy, and is something called 1080i, which is supposed to be what all tv channels will be broadcasting to in about 5 years. (So we're all set for that and will never have to buy another tv ever again after this one). Best Buy wanted $600 for professional installation, but we're cheap independent, so we hung the TV ourselves, and I've gotta say that unless you're hanging your tv 150 feet in the air over a pool of mutant sharks, that is no $600 job. (Cough-ripoff!-cough). We had ours installed and working in about an hour. Tony has been staying up late to watch everything he can on this new, fabulous tv. I think he'd sleep down there with it if he could. This TV ranks up there with the purchase of Satellite on Tony's list of all-time best things that has ever happened to him. (I'm hoping that I'm somewhere on that list too, but I'm afraid to ask where). I have to admit that I was less than enthused about the tv at first, but it is pretty cool watching stuff up on the wall like that. And it is bigger. And brighter. And more beautiful.

Yes, that new TV is a seductive mistress.