New Toy

Tonight came the purpose for which I borrowed the Super Stud Finder in the first place -- I mounted a new LCD television on my living room wall.

It was a somewhat long process, though not especially difficult. In any case, it was a two person job, and fortunately I had a willing victi-- er, assistant.

It involved measuring the stuff out about a hundred times to make absolutely sure we were drilling into the center of the stud, doing it at the right height from the ground, doing it level, etc.

And then the fun really began. First, there was the process of mounting the front speakers to the wall -- they used to just sit on top of the TV.

Then there was an unexpected adjustment of components, due to one measurement I'd not thought to take into account -- the length of one of my sets of cables. It turned out that the super-cables I've been using to pass all my high def signals through was a little too short to make it from the inputs on the TV to the bottom shelf on my meager little entertainment rack, where the audio receiver sat.

And of course, there are about 147 different wires plugged that receiver, which I could figure out how to plug in again correctly, but I really didn't want to. So then began the tedious process of unplugging cables one at a time, passing them through the back of the shelves reconnecting them so that the receiver could sit on top and have enough slack.

The good news is, once all the work was done, the thing worked like a charm, and looks incredible.

But then, technically, the work isn't quite done. I now have an exposed rat's nest of cables on the ground that used to be completely hidden by my old TV. They're now begging for some kind of way to contain them.

There's reprogramming the universal remote to run everything correctly again.

And then there are the head games. Like getting use to walking into my living room from my back hallway and not having that split-second moment of "where did the TV go?" Or quieting that tiny but persistent voice in my head that thinks I might wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of my new TV crashing off the wall and landing on top of all my other components in a Gadgetgeddon. Or getting used to the fact that this thing must be straight on the wall because the level said so, even though it looks like it might be just a tiny bit cocked to the left.

But for a picture that looks like I could climb inside it, I'm sure I'll quickly learn to get over all that stuff.