This Transmission Has Been Unceremoniously Interrupted.

Yup. That it has. Even before it began!

>sigh<

Here's a sad, sad tale of woe. Fair warning. You may not want to read any further. Keep your eyes well away from all electronics!

Yesterday we had our quad-monthly visit from The Sears Guy, who not only pronounced our washing machine DOA (his arrival, that is), but (and I find this utterly amazing) he refused to charge us for the visit on the basis that our machine is so far gone. "Buy a new one, avoid the digital read-outs, make sure it's an up-right, and you'll be set; $400 is all it should set you back," he said in parting. Wow.

He was supposed to look at our broken dishwasher, too, but I didn't want to press our luck with the whole "no charge for a dead appliance" juju. I was pretty sure what he'd say. So it's hand-washing til we can scrape together enough to pay whatever the going rate of a basic dishwasher might be PLUS a washing machine for clothes.

When My Beloved got home, we were going to eat our dinner (the stove still works, though the toaster oven went to appliance heaven over a month ago) in front of the TV with a Dr Who episode. (Interruption: are you keeping an appliance count? Because that would make *3* dead appliances in this post. So far.) A friend of his at work lent him the DVD of the first series, starring William Hartnell.

We popped the DVD into the PlayStation (we have a combination DVD-VCR, but the DVD part is broken...) and got everything set up, hit "Play," and before we even got the FBI warnings: "TV system doesn't match."

I posted that here yesterday. First I had to pick my jaw up off of the basement floor.

Rick fiddled around with it, but after a bit he concluded that the disk was HD, and our TV (dated from 1994, perhaps earlier) was most DEFinitely NOT.

So we watched an episode of Brisco County, Jr. instead, because THOSE disks work just fine in our PlayStation.

Afterwards, just to see, just to make absolutely certain there was no fault with the disks, Rick tried playing the premier Dr Who episode (An Unearthly Child) in his laptop. No problems. No glitches. Absolutely no issues. Well, other than the fact that I was trying to head upstairs to bed.

I watched the entire episode standing up, punctuating every few scenes with: "I'm heading upstairs now. Let me know when we can rewatch this." >snerk< Like I'm superhuman enough to pull myself away from Dr Who!! (This illustrates one reason of several why we don't have cable/satellite.)

It was Rick's first experience with Hartnell: "Wow. Cranky." Heh. Wait'll he experiences the full bi-polarity Colin Baker.

Good thing we don't have a sonic screwdriver. That'd be on the fritz, too. Doesn't keep me from wanting one, 'specially now that I know they're so much more affordable than a washing machine...