Cool, overcast, dreary, and a chance of rain. Yesterday was a mixed bag depending mostly on where you were. The morning at home was mostly light drizzle, but in the afternoon northwest of Houston, it stormed. Hail the size of grapes, and pouring rain. It chased me home and then petered out.
I spent the morning doing auction stuff, and the afternoon taking care of my client. That meant buying a replacement TV, and swapping it and another for two bad ones. The TCL 55 inch 4k TVs we decide to take a chance on have not held up well. They develop vertical and horizontal lines in the image and need to be replaced. Takes a couple of years, but all but one have failed, and I’m sure it will fail too. They were exceptionally cheap, and we bought the extended warranty from costco. It used to be provided by SquareTrade, but this newest one is provided by Allstate. The warranty process isn’t odious, and we’ve gotten a Costco gift card for the purchase price on the ones we’ve done so far.
Given that my time costs money, and the customer has to live with a failing TV for some period of time, I ended up buying Sony this time. We’ve shifted from the cheapest TVs to Sony Bravia, at more than double what a Roku or Hisense TV would cost, and about a third more than the Samsung or LG equivalents. The Bravia does have an exceptionally nice picture, and we’re hoping that because it’s not so cheap, it’ll do less spying than the Hisense or Roku TVs. It’s powered by google so still potential to spy. I don’t put them on the network, but someone in the household might at a later date. I also decline about 6 pages of stuff when I set them up. Of course I’m hoping that the Sony name still means something and that they haven’t been built to quite such a ‘value engineered’ standard as the Hisense… it would be nice to get a few more years of life out of them without issues than we’ve gotten from the TCL models.
If you don’t mind paying for the extended warranty, and replacing the TV after a couple of years, or that the TVs want to spy on you to subsidize the cost, there are some great looking TVs at crazy cheap prices. A 55″ Roku 4K TV was $289 at costco, and it wasn’t the cheapest on the shelf. For anything with a good brand name, or newer (bigger) sizes, inflation has been in full effect, with a roughly 30% increase in cost over the last time I priced TVs, which was about a year ago, iirc.
All you need to do is trade away a little piece of your privacy, and you can save some money while self medicating with the boob tube…
Today I’ll be doing some auction pickups, and maybe some other stuff like visiting my buddy at his gub store. We’ll see how the day goes, what the weather ends up being like, and if I hurt or not. This weather makes everything ache.
I’m thinking about heading to the BOL this weekend to do some of the stuff I didn’t do last week, and to weed the garden. We’ve got 18 potato mounds sprouted, the radishes and turnips might be ready to thin, and we’ll have to see how the peas are doing. My buddy says if they don’t start growing better, he’ll replant with a different variety. I could start another couple of rows of radishes, turnips, or beets, as you can keep planting them for a staggered harvest.
The grass probably needs cutting too.
D1 has GS camp, and D2 has a thing with friends, so I think I’d be alone at the BOL. Or I could stay home and work the list here. It’s a big list and needs to be started. Choices. Priorities. Gah.
Easier (but less effective) to just keep stacking. Don’t do what I’ve done, and just stack. Stay on top of the other things too. AND stack.
nick