I can see clearly now, the fuzz is gone

It's true: what you don't know won't hurt you. I had no idea just how much I adore a crystal-clear 1080i, in-living color television picture, and now, I don't know how I ever lived without it!

After much delay and debacle, our new Direct TV boxes are finally installed, complete with a high-def, DVR receiver in our living room to match our new Polaroid high-def TV. It has changed my television viewing experience.

Grainy? Uh-huh. Fuzzy? Nada. Splotchy? Nope. Those words don't exist in 1080i. What a beautiful thing technology can be.

But the road to perfection? Ugly...absolutely ugly.

It all started at 4:00 AM the day after Thanksgiving last year—aka Black Friday. If you can believe it, David and I bundled our then five-month-old into a snowsuit, strapped ourselves in the Sante Fe and drove 20 minutes to the Mount Vernon Wal-Mart to wait in line for an hour. It's a little nuts, yes, but we had our sights set on a hot deal: $800 for a 42-inch fancy flat-panel, high def TV.

Our previous unit was small-ish in size (30" maybe?) and no longer had a functioning remote control. David had been bugging me for years to get a new TV, so I told him if he was willing to get up at the crack of dawn and go with me to Wal-Mart, I would cave on the TV peer pressure. Plus, in addition to the $800 deal-of-the-century, we also qualified for 12 months same as cash (my personal pay-off favorite), which made the whole purchase seem much more palatable.

So we stood in line with numbing feet and were delighted when we were rewarded with an index card with a bar code on it (one of 10 cards handed out like ours). That allowed us to check out and pick up our groovy new TV on our way to the car.

Fast forward to this summer: in July our satellite cable contract ran out. Until a few days ago, we were Dish Network customers. Dish is cheap, but so was the service. So when we visited the State Fair in August, we sauntered over to the Direct TV booth to see what deal they could give us. They were definitely dealing, as we walked away with $23 off our bill for 12 months. Not too shabby!

Excited with our bargain TV and our bargain contract, we scheduled an installation. I already blogged about Install Day #1: the technicians arrived at 4:45 PM and left at 12:15 AM. Ridiculous.

They promised to come back in a few days, and never called to reschedule (as promised). I had to call in, then had to schedule Install Day #2 for Labor Day—a day I had hoped to do something fun as a family. Instead, we waited at home for the tech to show up (between 10 & Noon, supposedly), and got the call that he wouldn't be there until later in the day.

Install Day #2 didn't end until nearly 4:30 PM, after several promises of "almost done." Bye-bye Labor Day outing. Hope you liked the house arrest, McCallen Family.

Despite the rocky start, we are pumped about our pretty, pretty picture. It's so much fun to watch sports and sitcoms in razor-sharp resolution. What a difference!

I almost had to laugh today, though. I got my first Direct TV bill, and it was wrong (already!). They forgot to take off the $23. Go figure.