I had a good plan. No, seriously. I really did have a good plan. The 42 inch TV currently in the living room was going to the basement “media room”. This new venue should be more conducive to reducing glare and cutting my cooling bill this summer. Hiding in the basement when it’s a gagillion degrees in July and August just seems to make more sense than running the 18,000 BTU window unit flat out for weeks on end. Moving the TV was easy enough and I had a small TV packed away that would be more than sufficient for background noise when I happened to be in the kitchen or fiddling around upstairs. What I didn’t account for was that nice little TV having only a single set of old school standard component cable connections, so I can plug in the cable box or the DVD player, but not both at the same time. And forget plugging in anything fancy like Apple TV or XBox. Apparently, this TV has been in storage for a while. I didn’t even know they made flat panels without HDMI ports.

This leaves me in a bit of a dilema. I can leave things as they are, with the TV in the basement and nothing in the upstairs living room. I can plug in the baby TV in the living room and try using it as what’s basically a radio with moving pictures. Or I can bight the bullet and head over to Delaware this afternoon and try finding a new TV that doesn’t send me screaming to the poor house.

The part of me that loves shiny new toys really wants to put the 42 inch TV back in the living room and bring home a 50 inch screen for the basement. The part of me that just finished paying the bill for moving here really, really wants to avoid doing that. The compromise might have to be finding a no-frills (read: cheap) 32 inch model for the living room and letting things in the basement be for the time being. It can’t hurt to stop in at Best Buy and have a look, right? I mean, since I have to go to Petsmart and pick up dog food anyway, it only makes sense to look around a bit.