Our Joyfully Frenetic Big-Screen Christmas
My sister Gretchen Duntemann Roper and her husband Bill Roper have been here for a few days, along with my high-school friend Pete Albrecht, of the Lane Tech Astronomical Society. We've only had this many people staying over Christmas one other time, and that was years ago in Arizona. We've had to relearn what it takes to stock the house for one long, low-key Christmas party, but it's all coming back to us now: Prodigious quantities of coffee and diet soda, flavored coffee creamers (including egg nog!), potato chips and crackers, plus buckets of Chicago's own Maurice Lenell Christmas cookies, which, miraculously, can be had here in Colorado at the Sav-On Pharmacies within Albertson's supermarkets.
We remembered that having a Honey Baked ham in the fridge at all times makes asynchronous meals a lot easier. We have the Lionel trains around the tree for the first time in almost eight years. Pete brought out his radio-controlled, smoking, sound-effects equipped Lionel Hudson, and we've managed tease Carol's 1952-vintage Lionel operating cars back into operation, dumping milk cans and barrels on command and with gusto. QBit has already chewed up two of the wooden barrels, and has been carrying the milk cans around in his mouth, generally dropping them down the stairs once he realizes that his teeth aren't getting any purchase. He seems indifferent to Pete's Hudson and to my own GG-1, but he goes half-nuts if we put my father's ancient, doddering 1928 American Flyer electric loco (above) on the track. It crawls slowly along with a sort of stuttering motion, its dying carbon brushes generating prodigious amounts of ozone. He must think it's a rat or something; he goes similarly nuts when I take out my radio-controlled rat and run it around the floor. (You all knew I had a radio-controlled rat, didn't you?)
It's been delightful pandemonium here. Carol and I haven't had this much fun in a very long time.
The Big Event this Christmas, however, was going shopping for big-screen TVs with Bill, who has had one for four years and is something of a guru on the topic. We've been talking about the acquisition for years now, ever since we built a niche in the wall of the great room beside the fireplace to accept one. Much online research and occasional wandering through Best Buy and Ultimate Electronics in previous months focused our attention on the 61" Samsung HL-R6178W. We already knew it was the best choice, and so what we did, pretty much, was walk into Ultimate Electronics (the only store in town with one in stock) and told the nice people there to wrap one up. The salesman seemed shellshocked at not having to actually sell us on the unit, so he tried to sell me on $200, nitrogen-injected video cables instead. Bill shook his head. "Get the cheapest ones. The nitrogen thing is bogus." I took my own turn at being shellshocked when the shipping scheduler told me the TV would be delivered the very next day.
And it was. Wow.
The thing is amazing. It's HD-ready, and Adelphia's two baitware free HD channels came in with astonishing clarityif clarity was what we really wanted when confronted with Orange County Choppers. I can actually read the chopper dude's tattoos! (I'm not sure that's really a plus, but we're talking resolution here, and I'll confess that I'd rather watch brain-dead bikers than the football game on the other HD channel.) The TV has an interpolator that increases resolution to near-HD levels on DVD movies, and while making supper we watched Men in Black looking better, perhaps, than it did in the movies. After supper, we hooked up my laptop to the VGA input connector on the back, and ran slideshows of digital camera photos, which showed up with a clarity that made me gasp. The 1024 X 768 Windows dekstop was completely readable and absolutely usable, all the way back on the living room couch. Carol commented that I'll be trying to figure out how to rotate the screen into portrait mode pretty soon. Michael Abrash commented once that a 21" monitor was like having Windows on your bedroom wall. No. This is having Windows on your bedroom wallor livingroom wall, as the case may be.
We're hanging out until this afternoon, when we'll all start working on our Polish vigilia, or vigil supper, replete with smoked Polish sausage, hand-made pierogis (not made by our hands, but by the hands of an expert Polish lady from Chicago, who sells them in Manitou Springs) and organic Albarello wine from Coturri. Later tonight we'll be over at St. Raphael's for Midnight Mass, and I
suspect we won't be up before 10:00 AM tomorrow.
Merry Christmas to everyoneby which I only mean, accept our wishes for all the best in your lives, and my admonition to Radical Hope. On Christmas Eve, it's easy to imagine that All Manner of Thing Will Be Well. The rest of the year it's a problembut we'll deal with the rest of the year as it happens.