Minor mundane expenses

Tired. Worn out. Demoralized.

That’s the state of my exis­tence lately.  I’m under quite a bit of stress related to my efforts to revive my online children’s cloth­ing busi­ness.  I’m sleep­ing very poorly, due, I assume, to the stress.

My expenses this week, with the excep­tion of the new car, have been sparse and mundane.

I put gas in the new car for the first time today at Safe­way — $10.05.  I pumped 6.405 gal­lons @ $1.569 per gal­lon.  My odome­ter already reads 168.

I’ve made a few quick gro­cery runs but not big gro­cery shop­ping.  Whole Foods — $24.57 on 01/15/09; Kroger — $9.23 on 01/15/09; and, again, Whole Foods — $22.36 on 01/17/09.

On the 15th I bought The Son a Cinnabon cin­na­mon roll ($3.80) as a treat after our early morn­ing One-to-One les­son at the Apple store.  And at the Apple Store I spent ~$25.00 on a com­plete iKlean kit for clean­ing the screens and bod­ies of my 24″ iMac and my refur­bished Mac Book Pro laptop.

There were also two new-car-related pur­chases.  At the Sub­aru deal­er­ship I spent $48.47 on a set of 4 deep-groved rub­ber floor mats (a must in this weather).  I got a 10% dis­count off the mats because I bought them at the same time as pur­chas­ing my new car.  I knew that this set was about $10.00 more than I’d pay at Tar­get but I also new that the deal­er­ship mats were specif­i­cally designed to fit the Sub­aru and would not need to be cut or trimmed to fit perfectly.

The Daugh­ter, freak­ing out and jump­ing up and down at hav­ing arrived home from a bas­ket­ball game to find a brand new Sub­aru parked in her spot in the garage (we hadn’t told her that we might end up buy­ing a car that day so it was a total sur­prise), jumped at the chance to take it for a spin.  I grabbed my purse and we headed to the clos­est Best Buy were I spent $11.83 on a 3′ aux­il­lary cable to con­nect our iPods to the stereo in the new car.

Tonight we enjoyed a fam­ily din­ner of meat­loaf, mashed pota­toes, and broc­coli.  Tomor­row, bright and early, The Son and I head into the city to par­tic­i­pate in a MLK “marade” (march/parade) that is expected to be big­ger than ever.  The Daugh­ter, feel­ing like she’s com­ing down with a cold and hav­ing a game to play tomor­row night, will most likely not join us.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

Oh, and before I sign off and head to bed, one last poten­tially finan­cial bit of news.  I fear that our TV is about to die.

It’s a rather large (24″ ?) Zenith CRT TV that we inher­ited in ’95 when my father-in-law passed away.  It was in his Florida condo.  One year we took our old smaller TV down to Florida with us and brought the newer, big­ger one home.

Thir­teen years is an awfully short life span for a TV, isn’t it?

The TV is hooked up via a coax­ial cable to our cable ser­vice as has a VCR and a DVD player hooked up to it.  We keep it on a lit­tle wheeled wooden cart in the cor­ner of the liv­ing room and it can eas­ily be moved and repo­si­tioned for view­ing from the kitchen, the couch, or the din­ner table (we don’t do a lot of eat­ing with the TV on but it does hap­pen on occasion).

We do have a spare — a lit­tle 13″ unit with a built-in VHS deck that’s been in stor­age in the base­ment for a cou­ple of years.  The thought of try­ing to watch the news on that lit­tle TV from the kitchen while I’m cook­ing makes me very depressed.

The prob­lem started today.  Last night the TV worked just fine.  This evening I turned it on and got just snow.  After surf­ing a bit I real­ized that I wasn’t receiv­ing any cable chan­nels.  At first I thought the cable was out but both kids were surf­ing so I knew the Inter­net was up.  So I checked the TV down­stairs.  It worked just fine.  So I fid­dled with the cables and played with the but­tons — all to no avail.  I went into trou­bleshoot­ing mode and dug the lit­tle TV out of stor­age and hooked it up.  It worked just fine.  That meant it wasn’t the cable.  But why would I get some sta­tions just fine but all the higher “cable” chan­nels be noth­ing but snow?

After The Hus­band got home we took another look at it together.  I finally fig­ured out that some­how the set­tings had been changed and it was set to “broad­cast” pro­gram­ming.  I switched it back to “cable” and sud­denly I was get­ting our reg­u­lar basic cable chan­nels again.  At first we wrote it off to a “butt button-pushing” acci­dent assum­ing that some­one had sat on or oth­er­wise pushed but­tons that should not have oth­er­wise been pushed.  That didn’t really make sense though — that remote has been sat on, played with, chewed on, dropped, and oth­er­wise abused for 13 years and it has never repro­grammed itself like that.

Then we real­ized that every time we changed the chan­nel the sig­nal would go wonky three times send­ing out three annoy­ing bursts of sta­tic before set­tling down and show­ing the pro­gram.  Each time you change the chan­nel — three burst of sta­tic and snow.  This is not good.  It does not bode well for the health and life-expectancy of our TV.

I cer­tainly wouldn’t mind hav­ing a flat-panel TV.  I cer­tainly wouldn’t mind hav­ing a TV on which the reds don’t bleed into every­thing else.  I cer­tainly wouldn’t mind hav­ing a TV with a semi-clear pic­ture — clear enough to read the sub­ti­tles that The Hus­band and I both depend on when watch­ing movies these days.  But a new TV is not in the plan.  A new TV isn’t even close to being on The Husband’s pri­or­ity list.

TV, please don’t fail me now.

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