Please welcome the newest member of our family

This is our new baby, Sammy. She is oh so cute, and boy does she make a lot of noise. She's very smart, too. And what a picture!



Sammy is very different than our previous model. She's smaller and less bulky, but she's also got about 10 bazillion options that could freak out even the nerdiest of TV nerds. Her book, it is 57 pages of operating instructions that are very complex. Her operation might take me months to learn. I do not do well with all the remote control options.

Sammy was born in Circuit City. She has many siblings at Best Buy, but they were not the best buy! So Circuit City Sammy came home with us, and the Boy and Girl lovingly carried her into the house with hardly any fighting. Then the Boy set her up so that all the other peripherals that work with her. Then he put in Pirates of the Caribbean and turned up her surround sound. My goodness, but she is a loud little girl.

Sammy cost more than I had hoped, but what I learned on this shopping excursion is that TV's come in two pricepoints: ridiculously overpriced flatpanels with wonderful pictures but are too huge to fit into normal rooms and crappy tube TVs in small sizes that are made for bedrooms and kitchens and sound tinny and look like shit. There is no real in-between. This is because in a couple of years, analog TVs are going to be obsolete as all the broadcasting will move to HDTV. So they're really not making much SDTV (standard definition, i.e. same old big tube) sets, and what they do make... they're really not anything you want.

We looked and looked and looked, and in our pricepoint (cheap) there was virtually nothing to buy. We knew what size we wanted, but most of the SDTVs are smaller these days, as they're being marketed as bedroom and kitchen models. For several hundred dollars more there were plenty of nice flat screen HDTV models, but nothing we could afford. So we compromised on Sammy. The kids kicked in their birthday money (what was left of it) because they fell in love with Sammy. She was like the puppy they must take home. So I paid for 2/3, and they paid for 1/3, and Sammy became a new member of our family. We love her.

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