Operation TV: Complete

Our television was finally on the brink of complete color wheel failure. So we broke down, ordered the part and fixed it.

It’s a safe bet that if it wasn’t for my Etsy shop, we wouldn’t have been able to fix the TV because I used the money I made from selling items to pay for the color wheel, a $100 part with $7 for shipping. It’s also a safe bet that if our TV died our main source of entertainment would die with it. Alas, we are addicted to the boob tube, albeit, not boobs… not that there’s anything wrong with them!

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’d know that we got rid of our cable television (we still have the internet, which thank God was fixed after the damn huge white semi-truck took out the overhead line!) This means that our channel lineup is whatever you get with bunny ears, which we literally have a pair on top of our TV. However, we watch a lot of movies, and occasionally play the Wii. I think my Mii will look sad, pathetic and drained of all energy if I put in the Wii Fit as it has been quite a few months since my last workout session. I’m almost afraid to try it for fear of what it says I weigh now!

So when the television screen started flickering a sequence of colors that would make you think you were tripping on something illegal, we decided it would be best to replace the part rather than wait for the glass color wheel to shatter into thousands of tiny pieces. I had just made a few sales in my Etsy shop so there was money in the account I use for that to pay for the part and so I got online and ordered it Monday evening. It arrived yesterday.

Performing the necessary surgery was really quite painless, as my partner began taking the back panel and parts that needed to be moved out of the way. When I read that it was like replacing an internal computer part I thought it would be similar, but it was exactly the same thing. Within half-an-hour the TV was up and running and looking as good as it did when we first bought it. My partner commented that the color wheel must have been bad for a while because not only did it start right up, it didn’t make a whirring sound like a hamster spinning in its wheel for a few seconds as if warming it up, a sound I’ve never heard due to my limited hearing.

And so with a fixed television, we watched our favorite evening game shows, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune then put in one of our Netflix movies, Avatar. We’d never seen the movie and I’m glad we waited until the color wheel was replaced. Of course, with it replaced and the shadows no longer green and magenta and the skin tones no longer looking like a poorly done Paint by Numbers kit, I’ve got a feeling we’ll be watching a few more movies in the near future.