Today was a quite expensive day.

I woke up at 9 when the doorbell rang. It was the mailman. Delivering a Star Trek Voyager box set that I had accidentally ordered from Amazon while I was sleepwalking. Yup. These things happen when you get a credit card.

And a little later on my dad and I went and bought me a new TV. My old TV has been acting up. Every day when I turn it on I get sound but no picture. And then I have to turn it on and off for a while before I get a picture. And also it was making a strange sort of almost hissing sound in the back. It seemed to me that it was not in good shape. I wonder if it’s because I have had the computer hooked up to it the last few months? That has meant that it has been turned on pretty much all day, every day. Maybe that was more than it could handle. Anyway, getting a new one would be cheaper than trying to get it repaired and I wanted to be proactive so I didn’t one day suddenly find myself without a TV. Can you imagine the horror?

So I picked one out in a catalogue and then we went to Føtex and picked it up. In the shopping center around the corner. We put it in a shopping kart and dragged it to my place. Good thing it wasn’t snowing or raining.

It’s a very nice TV. I have upgraded from a 26″ screen to a 32″ one. I had originally decided to go for a 40″ one but thankfully changed my mind. Even the 32 inches is a bit much. I don’t need anything bigger, especially since I have to sit fairly close to it. So going bigger would just make it harder to watch.

There are some minor problems with it. The remote is not very good. And the audio cable I was using to get sound from the computer doesn’t work. So I’ve been on amazon and ordered a universal remote and a cable that should work. Handy that amazon thing yes it is.

One very nice surprise with the new TV is that I can now take all the HD channels that my cable company are offering. My old TV couldn’t take them. And I didn’t have a digital receiver box. But there’s a digital receiver built into the TV. So now I suddenly have access to a handful new channels. Not that HD means that much when you can barely see. It would have to be VERY high definition for me to see any better…. but hey, it’s nice when you’re paying for something that you can now actually get it. They moved BBC Prime and World off the analogue signal so I lost them when they started going digital. Nice to have them back.

Oh and I can listen to radio on the TV. That’s really clever. I don’t know why they haven’t done that before. In my selection of TV channels I can now see all the radio channels I have access to. There’s no picture of course, just the audio. But that’s handy. I like that. Now I can tune in and hear if there’s anything good on the radio without actually having to go and turn on the radio. If this TV could make me a ham sandwich and get my slippers then I wouldn’t need anything else ever again.

Christmas came early this year.

Not much going on these days. Nothing worth discussing in public anyway. The weather is cold. The goats are good. I’m doing exercises on the bike and for the back. Prodding along. Installed Skyrim on my new computer and it runs beautifully on the Ultra setting. Unfortunately I can’t see it well enough to actually play it. Had a little walk around in the snow. It makes me a little sad because it looks like the perfect game for me and I really wish I could play it. But those days are behind me. And there’s no point in getting myself upset over that. Things could be worse. The fact that I can’t play modern computer games is something I can live with. Many people have to deal with much worse. It’s no good to remind myself of what I have lost. No reason to look back.

Look at goats instead. Here’s a little Bob video: youtube.com/watch?v=W1qy4A7pk9o. Transcendental goat meditation.