What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part 1.

And now I'd better get to posting about our vacation, before I forget the details! I'm sure I'll need to split this up a bit, so I'll just start and see what feels like a good stopping point.

So we headed out on Saturday morning. To break up the drive to Myrtle Beach, our plan was to stop at a park in Jacksonville to stretch our legs, then get lunch somewhere and stop in Savannah to explore a bit and spend the night. Heather had found a park in Jacksonville that looked like fun with a playground and splash pad, so we headed there. And really the place was a bit more old and trashy than we expected, so we ended up not staying very long and I hardly even took any photos there. Pretty forgettable. We stopped for lunch on the north side of the city, and then it was on the road again.

( Clicky! )

No Beer and No TV Make Homer Something Something.

In other news, our tv crapped out last night. Now, we don't watch a whole lot of television, really. The girls typically watch a cartoon or something while they have breakfast, and in the evening some tv time (usually movies) are part of our daily routine with the kids, and then once we put them to bed Heather and I watch something for a bit before we head upstairs to bed. But since we watch so little tv, we only have the one set--which means now we have none! It really sorta messed up our routine last night, and I reckon it will tonight as well.

Not exactly sure what's wrong--Heather and I sat down to watch a show at our usual time Tuesday night, and after 5 minutes or so the tv shut itself off and then turned back on. Weird. A couple minutes later, same thing. And again. It got a bit frustrating, so we essentially gave up, though after a bit we speculated maybe one of the remotes had weak batteries and was sending bogus keypresses or something. The next morning Amy watched a show in the morning as usual, with no issues, so it seemed like just a one-time thing. But last night the girls were playing Wii before tv time, and it did the shut off/turn back on thing again. And then, when it came back on, it started saying Invalid Format for the video signal. I tried switching it to the DVD player and cable box and PC, and it didn't seem to recognize any input from any of those sources. Uh-oh. Plus I noticed that even going through the setup menus, everything seemed more sluggish than usual, and there was also a prominent flicker to the display. None of that seemed like a good thing!

I hit the Net for a little research, and power supply issues seem fairly common with this family of models, so that's my first suspect. But since it stopped recognizing the inputs I was also suspicious of the main board, and I would hate to order one board and then find out the other is the culprit. Plus, it's possible the power supply board went bad first and damaged the main board in turn. So I found replacements for both on eBay for a total of $115 or so, which is a lot cheaper than springing for a whole new set (which the wife assured me we can't afford right now anyway, though she always says that). The power supply will hopefully arrive tomorrow or Saturday, so I can pop that in and see if it helps. If that does the trick all by itself, maybe I can just return the new main board without even opening it. But if not, at least it will be on the way. Hopefully one or the other will work, though. Not that I would mind updating to a new set--but talking the wife into it might be more trouble than it's worth!