The phone company I hate today is the one that rhymes with mint* and once when I tried to get online to PAY THE BILL, I didn’t have the right password (because someone around here — probably me — changed it for some godforsaken reason) and they insisted that the only way they could send me the password was to text it to the phone, which would’ve been just ducky if the phone in question was in my hand in the Landfill Chitchen here on the Planet Ann Arbor and not sitting over in Dakar with a dead battery. I mean, you guys, do you want yer money er not?!? We’re having a similar little password issue today but I won’t bore you with the details and anyway it is fixed. I think. No one is anywhere near Africa, at least. And we are done with mint as of today, so I don’t need the password any more. Last week, I hated the phone company that would rhyme with bat if you took out a certain symbol and pronounced it as it is spelled and not as individual letters. I won’t bore you with that little incident either.

But I’m not gonna write about phone companies today. I am gonna write about television sets! Specifically OLD TV sets. Good old Sony Trinitrons from the 1980s. Remember those? One of ours is *exactly* from 1980. I remember when we bought it. I remember when we hooked it up to our Apple II Plus as a monitor. The GG would run his probability machine on it and boys would stay up all night playing Space Eggs in my loverly but rickety old apartment on Seventh St. And then there was the time that I came home to the Landfill from somewhere and… No one was here… And… I heard a spooky little sneaking up on someone song doo doo doo doo doooooooo do do do do… The GG and the little mini Lizard Breath had been playing Sticky Bear ABC and had left for some mysterious errand or other and they had left it on the letter “G”, where a bear was sneaking up to steal grapes.

We used to actually watch TV sometimes. I was never above putting my kids in front of the TV now and then. I mean, I also read to them. (Read to your kid a half hour a day? Roight. Try to get my kids to let me stop after a measly half hour.) But there are times of the day when the chief cook and bottle washer needs to get down to business and if a snack and a little TV or a movie keeps people calm and happy for a while, so be it. Mouse would watch a video over and over and over until she knew it by heart and then she’d be done with it and on to the next thing. Later on I (very randomly) remember Clarissa Explains It All and a bunch of Nickelodeon stuff. We *all* (even the GG) knew the Anne of Green Gables videos by heart (and yes, we read ALL of the books too, probably a couple times through, so we know what liberties were taken by the BBC). And Free Willy too, one godforsaken spring break spent at the moldy old Houghton Lake cabin back in the day. Man, am I digressing. And using “man” a lot. What’s with me?

Anyway, at some point we kind of stopped watching TV pretty much altogether. Did the Internet take over or did life get too chaotic to adhere to some TV programming schedule. I dunno.

Today *someone* decided that it was time to get rid of those old Sony Trinitron monstrosities. In fact, he was about ready to load them up into the Ninja to haul over to Ann Arbor Recycle along with a bunch of other old luckyshuckial crap. Problem. We figured out that we would have to pay $100 to dump those old TVs. That would be okay except that they both still work! And they work pretty darn well. Believe me, I was really excited about the idea of dropping those things off today. But even I couldn’t justify spending $100 to get rid of two four working TV sets. So they are on Craigslist. Will anyone want them? I do not know. I would not.

We took some other stuff over to the recycle joint today. Printers and other crap. No TVs. I was taking a kind of Wall-E photo of old appliances and things over there when someone from the Volvo behind my little Ninja said something to me. I turned around and there was a big old golden retriever in the front seat of the Volvo and a beautiful woman and her husband, namely, the parents of The Beautiful Jess, one of my Lizard Breath’s best friends in life. They’ve been friends since middle school and still are now that they both live in San Francisco but that would be a whole ‘nother story and not necessarily mine to tell. I do wish I could get out to the left coast more often.

* I stole this big company rhyming theme from Nancy Nall, a Detroit-area journalist and blogger and friend of friends.

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