girls, toilet paper, and urine

My, how life gets complicated all of a sudden.

We woke up yesterday morning to find our house TP'd. The house, the trees, the bushes...decorated in toilet paper. The youngster's car...covered in toilet paper and icing...like cake icing, all up in the door handles and smeared across the body.

OK...ha ha...someone was having fun at the youngster's expense. No big deal.

He and I cleaned it up, since I was off for the day due to Marty's birthday. I helped with the toilet paper, but I told him the icing was all his. I wasn't getting into that mess.

When he finished with the icing, he remarked how it stunk. We thought it was just from sitting out the whole time....but no.

The youngster spent the vast majority of the rest of the day playing detective...trying to get whatever information he could from neighborhood kids. He had no idea who would do it or why. As far as he knew, he hadn't crossed anybody...until....

The unofficial kid/parent rumor mill has it this way. There's a girl (isn't it always a girl?) who was "going out" with a guy in the neighborhood. Apparently, she recently dumped him, because the girl now likes the youngster. She hasn't told the youngster this. I got that information from another parent. The youngster does know who did it. He doesn't know why. It was three boys. One he knows as a friend of a friend. then there's the dumpee...he doesn't know very well. the third...another friend of the dumpee...he doesn't know. He knows their names and can recognize them, but they aren't people he's ever socialized with. The nasty smell came from the fact that the friend of a friend took the opportunity to urinate on his car in the icing and toilet paper.

The girl in question told him who did it last night, but she failed to mention why. I overheard him asking her, "Why is it I think when I finally figure out why they did this, your name will be in there somewhere?"

The kid's getting smarter by the day.

addendum: The unofficial kid rumor mill had it wrong. It wasn't the girl after all. One of the kid's house was TP'd earlier in the evening and he thought the youngster did it, so this was retaliation. Unfortunately for us, we paid for someone else's deeds. The culprits were supposedly (again, all updated information comes via the same semi-reliable kid rumor mill that had it wrong before) friends of this kid's older brother. That kid has apologized to the youngster. He wasn't the urinator though. The urinator (the kid's sidekick in the deed) has yet to apologize.

the TV saga continues

So, we've painted...and the new piece of furniture the TV will sit on (it is an entertainment center, but there's no hole for the TV to sit in, so we won't be constrained in the future) is on order. It should be here by the end of the month.

In the meantime, we've switched to a cable package that has high definition channels, so we can see what all the hubub is about.

I don't watch that much TV, except for sports. The television is more the wife's and mom-in-law's (when she comes to town) domain. As such, I'm less excited about this whole TV ordeal than the wife is, but she's loving it. I, however, will admit - football in high def is awesome! I was skeptical about seeing a real difference, but there is one, and it's pretty cool. Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire was on the Family Channel last night) in high def is a different experience as well. Worth the price of admission? The jury's still out.

Now, if we could just have the weather remember that we live in Florida, and get the temperatures above freezing....maybe I'll get myself outside the freakin' house and doing things, so I don't become such an expert on how much better my TV picture is....

the anatomy of getting a new TV

Long ago in a lumberyard far away, the wife wanted an entertainment center...so we bought one. At the time we had a 30" television, or something like that, and this new 3 piece set of solid and fairly heavy wood took up an entire wall...with the TV in the middle. It was so big it affected the decision on which model of house we would build when we bought our current house. It had to have a wall that could fit the entertainment center.

Then, about the time we moved into our current abode, the TV died. John went to the then non-bankrupt Circuit City with a tape measure, and found the latest/greatest TV that would fit in the entertainment center. That was a 32" model by Panasonic. It had a flat screen and was HD capable, but wasn't one of the nice thin things they sell today. It also weighed a ton. We had to enlarge the hold in the back of the entertainment center to fit the thing in there...and we did.

Then, a few years later, we had the house painted. The room with the entertainment center turned yellow, or something between yellow and brown. I'm sure women could give that color a more descriptive name that might also be the name of a food or something, but I'm a guy, so it's somewhere between yellow and brown. Some of the area behind the entertainment center didn't get painted because between the weight of the entertainment center and the TV, it was just too heavy. yes, we could have moved the TV out and moved the entertainment center, but nobody could see back there, so what the hell.

All was well with the world...until....

The TV died.

So we need a new TV. Since we're getting a new TV, we decided to leap into the 21st century and get something new and cool. The problem is...of course it won't fit in the entertainment center...so it has to go. Once it goes, there's this huge white spot behind where it used to reside. It also has to go.

So now, to replace the TV, we have to replace the entertainment center, find a new spot for all the other stuff that used to live in it, paint the wall...and then replace the TV. The economy is loving me and my shrinking savings account.

an addendum....
The new TV has an internet cabability. Ooooohhhh cooool, you say. Well, it ain't all that. My neighbor, who's big into electronics and challenges, took it upon himself to take advantage of this capability. He came over and wired the TV into our router, so we had the internet. When I saw what that means, I was a little underwhelmed. I can look at you-tube videos, and if we set up a netflix account, I can strem movies into our house. OK, that's something, but I don't know that I'll do much of that. I can put a widget on my TV with the current weather through Yahoo....why? Long story short...we discovered when he connected the TV to the router, for some reason we lost our wireless capability. No internet/texting for the youngster's i-touch. No internet capability for the wife's laptop....or mine for that matter, which I use to VPN into work when I'm on call. No internet capability for the Wii. We;ll, through a series of troubleshooting steps, I figured out that it was the TV connection, and if I disconnected that, unplugged the router from the wall socket and plugged it back in, we got our wireless ability back....so we're up a laptop and i-touch, but for now, no streaming movies, which I don't really miss because I never could before.