New TV

I just needed a place to park this picture for a second:

The starburst effect is from the flash.

It was my intention just to park the picture for a bit to get an address to use to post it on a message board, but I never got around to taking it down from here.

This is our new 55" Smart TV. It is sitting on a new TV console, since our old TV armoire, purchased in 1999, was too narrow to hold more than a 37" screen. I am amazed that I was finally able to convince my husband to buy a larger TV, which means needing to let go of the old armoire. At the moment, the old armoire is sitting in a corner of the room, waiting for my husband to ask around at work to see if anyone needs it. It's in excellent shape and could probably be converted to other kinds of storage if someone had the interest, but we have two other armoires and a chifforobe scattered around the house already, and it needs to go.

The old TV, really only three years old, is now in our bedroom, and the old picture tube TV that had belonged to my late MIL has gone to a better place (Goodwill). We used to call it the haunted TV because every 24 hours it would click on for about two minutes, and then click off again. It would have cost a couple of hundred dollars to get it fixed, so we just lived with it as was. That TV sat on top of a small but very sturdy solid wood TV stand that had also belonged to MIL, and which is now a perfect stand for the newer style TV's.

The new one is perfect for watching the NCAA playoffs. I had really hoped to get a new one in time for the Superbowl or maybe the winter Olympics, but John is not the sort to make hasty decisions about big purchases. He carefully researched televisions with Consumer Reports and then we went to view them at several locations before making a choice. We also went shopping for consoles.

And that is when my very deliberate, thoughtful, careful husband shocked me. He saw the console pictured above, fell in love with it, and wanted to buy it the same day. Not since he proposed to me eight weeks after our first date has he done anything that hasty. I had my reservations about how well the console was going to fit with our motley collection of living room furniture, but I kept them to myself. He liked it. I don't have any real objections to it. We bought it.

As it turns out, the new console has fixed another problem that has vexed me for years. We have an old encyclopedia set that is outdated and that takes up some 4 or 5 feet of bookshelf space. John refuses to get rid of them because sometimes (once a year or so) he wants to look up some information that hasn't gone out of date and he prefers a real book to an online version. The encyclopedia has been living in the room that I use as my office while other books I wanted to put on that space sat in a box on the floor or stacked on the top of the shelf.

We have a built-in bookshelf in the living room, but it, too, is filled with books. It has some storage space behind doors at the bottom that was filled with boxes and albums of pictures (the ones I vowed to go through once I retired).

There was just enough space in that console to stash the albums and boxes from that area, meaning that the encyclopedia could be moved to the doored shelf instead. Now all my books are on the bookshelf, I have clear floor space, and I even have room on my bookshelf for storing printer paper and DVD's for my computer. Oh joy, oh bliss, oh happy day.

Now if someone will just take the old TV armoire off my hands, life will be perfect.

Old TV armoire, with a picture tube TV that we replaced three years ago. That's Truffle watching the 2010 Winter Olympics. When TV's were square, you could fit a 42" screen (measured on the diagonal) in that armoire. Now that they are rectangular, you can't. Oh, and that fake plant to the left? It was there to block the view of a tangle of wires. The tangle is now out of sight behind the console and the plant has been eaten by the trash truck.