Sunday, June 28, 2009

back to the garden

Friday was "new tv day". Mom's television died early last week and my best efforts to find the magic "screen" control were to no avail, so Friday was spent getting the new set. After a ridiculous amount of waiting around, we abandoned the local Wal-Mart (really the only option in Falmouth proper) for the Best Buy down in Hyannis, where I ended up getting a 42-inch Panasonic, based on two main criteria: it was a decent price for the feature set (1080p, 3 HDMI inputs, etc), and it fit in the car. (The price has gone up since we bought it! Weird.)

Friday evening, my brother set it up, and Saturday morning, we got the old behemoth into the car and took it down to what used to be the dump but is now called something like the Waste Management Facility. Even with a bigger screen, the living room seems bigger because the new tv is so much less massive. The picture is gorgeous, too.

The rest of Saturday was odd, the kids weren't in the mood to do anything, and we alternated clouds and sun all day. The temperature barely hit 70. By two o'clock I'd had it with the perpetual video games, and forced them all out to the beach. The two younger ones swam, DS1 could not have been less interested, and only went out because I made him. It pains me to see him turning into a disaffected teen already. At least the younger ones had fun.

Making castles with "silly sand"


Sunday morning I had fun photoshopping the new tv onto the fireplace. (I just used the old Paint application.) My father, God rest his soul, always said that someday he'd get a tv to hang on the fireplace, well before flat screens ever existed. My mother has always detested the idea, so this is the closest we'll ever come to liberating the living room from the encumbrances of the television stand:

Quick-and-Dirty Photoshop puts "Wheel of Fortune" on the TV, and the TV on the fireplace.


Sunday afternoon my sister and her younger grandson visited, and we went back to Spohr Gardens. It was a good day for the gardens, cool with occasional sun breaking through the clouds. The kids didn't mind too much being chased out of the house again:

And they're off!


Perhaps some day I will look back on these 60-degree days wistfully, as I melt in Arizona's 100-degree-plus weather. Today is not one of those days.

Inviting, isn't it?

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