Who needs television?

A few weeks ago we thought our television was dead for sure.

I had asked Aedyn to help me clean the screen earlier in the day with a rag and some Windex and a few hours later he decided to do a little cleaning on his own. This resulted in the top coming off the Windex bottle and the contents being poured on the television.

I had never poured Windex into a television before, but I figured it was not a good thing.

I turned out to be right.

It seems that the glass cleaner had soaked the circuit board for all the control buttons (Channel, Volume, Power, Video, etc.) and when we would turn on the television it acted like the Volume Up button was being pressed repeatedly as the volume would climb until it maxed out, then the tv would shut itself off.

I have to admit that though this was a bit of a bummer (it always sucks when something breaks) the loss of the television really was not going to change our lives all that much.

The television is not really a big deal in our house. We don't even have a new television (we are still rocking a 26" CRT that was given to us for free a few years ago).

You down with CRT? Yeah, you know me!

Ever since we got married, Heather and I felt it was not necessary to have cable television in our home.

When we were in St. Louis we were able to get several channels on regular old broadcast and we have a decent DVD collection. Add this to our discovery of Redbox and streaming shows online and we were set.

Even after moving to Melbourne where broadcast reception was poor, we still didn't miss not having cable... much.

We have a few shows that we like to watch, but since I work nights it always ends up working better for us to curl up in front of the laptop to watch Bones or House once I get home from work via Fox.com.

I will admit that whenever we stay in a hotel the television gets a good workout, but when I am at home I don't really even think about it all that much.

In the end, the circuit board dried out and the television stared working again. I guess this is good because Aedyn sure would have missed his Toy Story and Star Wars without a television. However, I was kind of looking forward to having a home without a tv for a while.