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Bit news last night! We got
a new TV.
It's an LG 43" flatscreen. I don't remember all the other specs, half of which had no meaning to me. I just know we got a great deal on it. Here, I'll paste in the caption I just wrote for the photo of it that I posted to Flickr (linked to above):
[O]ur 43" LG TV from Costco, which we got at a value of $329 but paid $180 (before tax) because it's discontinued and only the floor model was available.
In January 2022, Alexia gifted us
her 50-inch TV as a handmedown, and that lasted us about three years before, in March of this year, it suddenly turned off and would not turn off again. So, we reverted
back to the Samsung TV was had been using prior, for the three years between January 2019 and January 2022, also purchased as a floor model and the only thing left at the Puyallup Sears closing sale for only $50, largely because it had a little black hole in the screen—which, miraculously when we turned it back on this year, was gone! That lasted us again three
months—until, this time, the speakers completely blew out, and it could not be fixed and was intolerable.
For only a couple of days, therefore, we reverted back to
the first Samsung flatscreen we had, which actually lasted us 2010-2019. But, the sound on that was too tinny, and neither of the older Samsung TVs had enough inputs to use the sound bar that had also come with the TV we got from Alexia.
So! Off to Costco we went, to buy our first full-price
and brand-new TV in 15 years. Except! We got this floor model discount, so even this one wasn't full price either.
Back to my actual content for this blog post:
We went out with Shobhit thinking we might look at TVs at both Costco and Best Buy, an idea I wasn't thrilled by—I'd rather just go to Costco and buy one, but whatever. Shobhit likes to shop around. But, as I already indicated, we did just get one at Costco in the end anyway.
Costco has a ton of TVs, and they range quite dramatically in price. Some were in the thousands. Among those, the size was stupid-huge, something I saw no need to bring into our living room even if it were affordable.
I had measured the screen on the TV from Alexia the other day, and it was 50". I'd have loved to get another 50", but even before we knew we would get a discount on this new TV we ended up bringing home, we had narrowed down our choices between that, which was 43", and the 50" TV next to it, which cost $111 more. Was an extra 7" really worth that much? I decided it wasn't.
Mind you, I did just look online to find a calculator to figure this out: the difference in surface area square inches is 247. I suppose 247 square inchese sounds like a lot, but that's all of 27% of the surface square inches of a 50" TV. Was reducing the screen size by 27% worth saving $111? Absolutely yes, it was.
And then we saved a further $50 on the 43" TV anyway. That was a deal we could not pass up. Of course Shobhit still "jokingly" tried to see if they could offer any further discount, which I'm certain is exasperating to store staff, but whatever—that aside, it can't hurt to ask, I guess.
Not only that, but the old Samsung we'd been watching for the past three months was so dramatically smaller than the 50" TV from Alexia
or the 43" TV we brought home yesterday, reverting back again to 43" made the new TV seem plenty huge as it was. It fits perfectly atop the entertainment center, and we could finally plug in the sound bar again. All is well again in our living room.
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— पांच हजार आठ सौ उनतीस —
I had ridden my bike home, and Shobhit suggested I make chai to kill some time before going to the store so we wouldn't hit as much rush hour traffic. It must have been around 6:30 when we headed out to Costco.
When I went into the Broadway & Madison Whole Foods yesterday, the posted hours were until 9:00. I figured we had plenty of time. We drove there from Costco, only to find the store was already permanently closed! I really thought we'd find some amount of even more deeply discounted product, and perhaps we would have earlier in the day, I don't know. But that Whole Foods is now officially history.
We then went to the nearby QFC for a few more groceries and went home. Shobhit heated up some naan for the potato dish he already had prepared before we left, and I quite easily and pretty quickly set up the new TV. It did take some time, though, to figure out how to get this fucking floating display panel thing with weird AI search information on it to disappear from the screen—you can still see it in the upper left-hand corner of the screen in
the photo I took. It rather looks like a sticker, but it was a digital thing on the screen itself.
I had just subscribed to a month of Peacock, because a new season of
Poker Face is out. This also meant we could finally watch
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which was sort of
blandly fine (the best part being how insanely hot Leo Woodall is; Shobhit and I both very much enjoyed that). Anyway that fucking floating panel persisted through the entire movie, but I finally figured out how the hell to get rid of it shortly after the movie ended.
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[posted 2:04pm, only because I got distracted and spaced posting this for 90 minutes]
