The Red Returns, just in time, after Christmas...

We bought a new flat screen TV back in July, right before the Olympics. It took us a month to figure out which one to buy, then we had to find a cabinet, sell our current setup on Craig's List, order the HD from the cable company, and then finally hook the whole new thing up.

How can it be that complicated?

After we took back the combo DVD / VCR player because even the cable guy could not get it to work, we bought and hooked up a DVD player. The TV had a beautiful picture - gorgeous really, but then that's the point of a huge, HD TV. The Olympics were lovely to watch, as has been football season and all our reality TV shows. I sort of like seeing all the wrinkles, etc. those newscasters have.

But soon as we'd pop in a DVD nothing had red. Everyone looked pretty jaundiced actually, in a mustardy yellow sort of way. We got used to it. Only once in awhile I'd notice the yellow-green tint to everything, and it would remind me of when we brought Dan home from the hospital and daily we'd set him in front of the window, where he'd stare out, getting pinker all the time.

That wouldn't work for the TV. When we watched 'Elf' on Christmas Eve, it was a bit distracting, trying to mentally convert all that yellow to red, and really watching a Christmas movie without any red is just 'a little bit strange' as my grandson Caiden would say. He'd be right. The icing on the cake was that I'd bought Don the entire set of DVD's for 'Planet Earth' and we decided you just can't watch them with all the red missing. I'd put $100 of my allowance money in DH's stocking so he could buy a new DVD player, because we figured it had to be that.

As a last ditch effort, we asked our son-in-law's brother, who is young enough to be more techy than us, and he suggested we switch two cables. We did that and everyone had a speech impediment, so we switched them back, but it did get us thinking it had to be the setup, not the TV or DVD player. There were only three more cables left, the 'red/blue/green' and they only had one way to go. Good grief! We unplugged them, plugged them back in and still nobody had that nice pink tone to their skin. So I just casually mentioned to DH that possibly the cables we'd paid a good penny for when we bought the TV might, just might, have a short, and didn't he still have our old cables from the surround sound system in his shop?

Five minutes later, voila! Red, Red, Red!!! And yes, we might just be popping Elf in one more time before we start on checking out our planet in all it's glory.

And the $100 - back in my piggy bank - nice!