Shopping Spree
Kiara and I haven’t been grocery shopping in a while because we didn’t want to buy a bunch of food that we would eventually have to move to the new house. Now that we’re in the new house, we decided to stock up on food. We went to the local Safeway because it’s closest to the new house. In past years we’ve shopped at Albertson’s and King Soopers because they were the nearest places to get food. I’m fairly loyal to a company if they give good service at a reasonable price. However, the large grocery stores are all the same, and going to the one that is closest to the house just makes sense.
We got to Safeway around 8:00. Neither of us had spent more than 5 minutes in this particular store, so we decided to walk down each aisle in an effort to figure out the layout of the store. As we made our way through the store, we would pick up items that we needed. The whole process took much longer than I expected it to. We ended up leaving the store a little after 9:00, and got home about 9:30. The total bill came out to over $160. That is quite a bit higher than our standard grocery bill, but like I said, we hadn’t been to the store in weeks.
Once we were home, we had to put away everything that we bought. That took another 20 minutes, and I was getting frustrated with how long the whole process had taken. We had just gotten Dish Network installed, and I wanted to spend the evening setting up the TVs. Kiara went downstairs to spend some time with the cats while I tried to move the furniture in the bedroom to where we wanted it all to go. I got the dresser pretty close to where we wanted it, but I couldn’t move it in the small increments that I needed to get it against the wall. I finally tracked down Kiara and got her to help me shift the dresser into the right spot.
The small TV stand that we use has, for some unknown reason, has wheels on it. They weren’t a problem at the old house, but something about the carpet at the new house and the wheels made the stand very unstable. I had to take the TV off fo the stand, put it back on the bed, flip it over, and take the wheels off of the stand. That took about 10 minutes to do, but we finally go the TV back where it goes. Then I had to wire up the cables for the VCR, DVD player, the Dish Network box, the signal switch, and the RF modulator. That went pretty smoothly, and in the end, I ended up with a working TV!
It was around 11:00 by the time I got all of this done, so I called it a night. I really wanted to get the living room TV done as well, but that just didn’t happen. I’ll work on that tonight… I hope.
Digital TV
We’ve had crappy Adelphia analog cable for the past 7 years. It’s been ok, but not great. With the move, Adelphia isn’t an option, which is a good thing. We went with Dish Network over DirecTV because of price, and DirecTV doesn’t offer anything more than Dish Network. The signal is great, the sound is clear, and the picture quality is outstanding. We’ve only got the bedroom hooked up for now. The TV in there is an older one with only a single analog input. We have to run the clean digital signal through an RF modulator to convert it to the analog signal. I’m sure we’re losing some quality at that point, but it’s still pretty damn good.
I’m really looking forward to getting the main entertainment center setup, so I can use S-Video to connect the Dish Network receiver into the TV. We’ve got to see about investing in some surround-sound speakers. The house is wired for it, but the old owners took the speakers with them. I may do that today while out at lunch. If they’re not too expensive, I’ll pick some up. They need to be able to mount on the wall since the holes for the speaker wires are fairly high up on the wall. It shouldn’t be a problem.
